For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them.

:(

I had such a hard time explaining to someone today that there is no universal set of Lemmy rules/politics and you can run your own instance with literally 0 rules

people have forgotten that things can exist outside of the few billionaire/trillionaire closed source walled gardens they've become so reliant on

On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn’t provide any sources. Such slander doesn’t deserve any response and is best left ignored.

• Previous discussion on the moderation policy on lemmy.ml including response from @dessalines@lemmy.ml : Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
• Accusation of a Mastodon user (probably the one they are referring to): https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
• Essays from @dessalines@lemmy.ml: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md

It's upsetting to see the shit-talking because I imagine reading that nonsense is emotionally draining, especially when you're already stressed out with a billion things to do. I've seen you guys active in the lemmy community for years and you've always been wonderful. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates the work you two have put in and are currently putting in. I'm really happy that your project is starting to catch on.

For us maintainers (dessalines and nutomic), it has resulted in an endless stream of questions and notifications, which is impossible to keep up with. Previously there were 5 - 10 Github notifications per day; now they have risen to over 100 daily.

That is what i was worried about, Feedback for developers probably correlates with the number of active users , more users mean more feedback (github issues and comments) and more stuff to read, I thought this might not be a problem because i looked at mastodon and didn't see a lot of issues getting opened in a day, but it's the comments that could be the real problem, unless you will improve your funding and start hiring more people (even temporarily hiring freelancers) things will probably get worst and you will lose a lot of good feedback.

We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.

looking at liberapay , patreon and opencollective my calculation says you are getting about 4465 dollars (2714+217.58*4.345+806) when this comment was written , that's about 0.15 dollar per active user (assuming about 28K monthly active users).

For comparison beehaw has about 3069 monthly active users and got this month (6/1/2023 -> 6/17/2023) about $3,461.60 ( 1.12 dollar per user, probably better then reddit for most of it's history).

So i am pretty sure the problem is with getting funding (most people are not aware of the option to donate, or/and are not convinced or incentived to do it). Lemmy should work on it's conversation rate.

If you are interested, i worked for a while on a guide to help fund open source and got some good feedback on it, maybe you will find it useful.

What is the best way to donate to lemmy? According to this article it's Liberapay. Is that true?

Just made a donation on Liberapay, thanks for everything that you've done!

This is extremely well written. Anyone that supports and wants to see this platform thrive should share this in response to the people spreading nonsense with the goal of seeing it fail and upholding the corporate status quo.

I hope this new influx of people will also bring in a nice influx of nerds who will make this platform better over time. :)

Thank you for doing this

God I appreciate these dudes. I don't envy them one bit right now...

It's not much but I upped my contributions a bit. Thank you for everything you've done for the open, non-corporate internet.

Gang, I'd never pay for reddit gold but I sure as h*ck will pay monthly to support lemmy. You all should too!