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Lemmy needs more donations (join-lemmy.org)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Hello world,

as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won't start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.

All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We're currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it's certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.

We're looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.

You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

edit, as this was frequently brought up:

Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?

It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.

lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.

[source]

For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it's not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.

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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago

I used to put up $50/mo to Hexbear, until they banned me for defending the DSA.

So far, the politics on this community have been dogshit. But the moderation has been generally fair, friendly, and functional. To you, I say, Shut Up and Take My Money. Thanks for letting me continue my shitposting habits, even if we've agreed to disagree.

[-] MolecularCactus1324@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

That’s what’s so rich. Used to donate to the Lemmy devs and then got censored on .ml for not bootlicking the CCP. Lemmy devs have a PR problem, maybe that’s why they’re struggling.

I still contribute to world and voyager.

[-] NotForYourStereo@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago

Nah.

ml can shit itself and rot. So can the rest of Lemmy if that's not a price that's worth being paid.

[-] Dadifer@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago

Is it possible donate to Lemmy development without contributing to Lemmy.ml?

[-] Deestan@lemmy.world 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

The donation pays salary for devs and (barely) not site maintenance, but the devs are also basically lemmy.ml, so the distinction may not feel useful.

[-] Dadifer@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

So can I contribute to lemmy.world?

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

Sure. And then they can contribute it to .ml, because that's who is providing the labor to keep the site up.

[-] Dadifer@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

Oh wow, I see.

[-] Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Lotta no's based on people who can't stand being in a room with other people just because of different political beliefs. I don't follow .ml's philosophy, and I don't care. Take em, leave em. Whatever.

They aren't why I'm not on Reddit.

Remember why you're here. If you can't handle discourse with people who see the world differently then go back to Mastodon and save us your intolerance. Discourse is the lifeblood of a site like this, different opinions are part of being human. Grow up.

but t-they support such and such genocide!!

Then protest them louder. Don't bring the rest of us down over it, not that it isn't mostly sensationalist to begin with.

[-] Deestan@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago

Lotta no’s based on people who can’t stand being in a room with other people just because of different political beliefs.

Start by tolerating that disagreement then?

I can stand being in the same room as people with shit opinions, even to a degree people who promote war crimes like these guys, but fuck if I am up for giving them a salary.

If you have to misrepresent people who disagree with you to make a point, it is not a good point sorry.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

They aren’t why I’m not on Reddit.

Some people would rather eat the fascist AI slop for free than to pay a softdev who says "Trans Rights".

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

The devs have posted anti-trans stuff, actually.

[-] cm0002@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

https://lemmy.world/post/29072279

[-] Deestan@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

These money will go to two people who created and actively maintain and promote an instance pretending the brutal murder of Ukranians is not happening but also necessary, and deleting and banning contrary opinions.

No.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago

Damn. This guy's right. I'm going back to Reddit and Facebook, safe in the knowledge I'll never be exposed to a Russian bot or paid influencer.

[-] Muyal@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

The comments are a full microcosm showcasing why Lemmy will stay underground and it will never overtake reddit

[-] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 50 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Comments are a hilarious minefield and a painful reminder of exactly how online leftists can never get shit done. We want FOSS federated social media platforms to escape the tech giants that would happily facilitate a fascist wave if it meant they can serve more targeted ads. But when that platform actually exists in a totally functional and apolitical way, we don't want to support its development because the people willing to work full time on the project for poverty wages have bad political opinions. It's so bad that we'd rather support Steve Huffman's bot farm which is 1,000 times as politically influential as Lemmy will ever be at this rate.

[-] cm0002@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

It's not what they personally believe that most have issues with, it's how they leverage what's widely seen as the "official" developer instance. Whether they like it or not or what they say it is or not, it is recognized as such and as the "public face" it should be governed in an unbiased way, or all politics on it should be banished from it.

If they were running a personal instance for their personal politics that didn't have official Lemmy development and support comms, there would be a LOT more people donating for Lemmy's development

[-] goodeye8@fedia.io 2 points 15 hours ago

We want FOSS federated social media and people have jumped ship to Lemmy because it was the most developed at that point. But I will keep reminding people that Lemmy isn't the only option we have. I jumped from Lemmy to Mbin because I can no longer tolerate how Lemmy devs act and IMO anyone feeling the same way should also jump ship. Lemmy devs don't own the activitypub and Mbin can federate with Lemmy communities. You can continue using the fediverse as you've been using it on Lemmy, until hopefully in the future communities also start migrating to Mbin (and all the tankies can stay in Lemmy). If you don't like the state of Lemmy, be the change you want to see.

Also worth pointing out that this kind of drama won't happen with Mbin because the project is community maintained not individually maintained.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Mbin is in PHP. It's doomed. Weakly typed, garbage collection, effectively deprecated language. There's no way it'll ever scale as well as Lemmy.

It's not only the tech I have an issue with, it's also the fragmentation. Just like we didn't need a dozen and half Lemmy clients, most of which would die, it'd be incredibly helpful for more people to be putting effort towards Lemmy. If Lemmy devs refuse to accept PRs, they can even decide to fork. Part of the reason I'm okay with all this is that the current Lemmy devs really don't have all that much control over it. The biggest pull that they have is that they'll continue to give us their work. If they prevent as much work as they accomplish, then their influence can disappear overnight.

Rust is a better language. It's better tech. It'll scale better. It's a growing language instead of a dying one. For those less in the know, it's roughly the difference between using C++ and, well, PHP. Except Rust is straight up better than C++, so much so that the US government has projects to migrate shit from C++ to Rust.

[-] goodeye8@fedia.io 1 points 1 hour ago

PHP is hardly doomed. It's still getting new releases (last one being 19 days ago) and it's still relatively popular for web development, which means it's going to be support for quite a while. The rest what you've said about PHP is more or less just your opinion. As for Rust, Rust is a good language but Rust isn't very popular at this moment and it's even less popular when it comes to web development because most of the things that make Rust great are things that are simply not that important for web development. Most web development languages are performant enough, rust being even more performant isn't going to be noticed. And because social media sites aren't exactly security-critical Rust being memory safe won't play a big role. The only clear benefit Rust has over PHP is being strongly typed.

But there's a very obvious benefit to PHP. You simply develop faster. If you had 2 identical web projects, one in PHP and one in Rust, and you were equally skilled in both languages you'd finish the PHP project faster because PHP is literally designed for web development. Speed is a much bigger factor when developing a Reddit style content aggregator site.

As for the second point. You have an issue with fragmentation, but your solution to Lemmy devs refusing to cooperate is fragmentation? People forking Lemmy will also lead to fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, but eventually people will gravitate towards one solution and fragmentation gets solved. It there's very little different between the fragmentation happening between Lemmy forks or Lemmy and Mbin. IMO fragmentation is inevitable and I would rather see it happen right now rather than sit through N different Lemmy dramas until everyone gets so fed up with Lemmy devs that Lemmy gets forked and the fork becomes more popular than Lemmy.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago

Trying to piece things together it sounds like the beef is with lemmy.ml maintainers and not Lemmy in general. This is what federation's all about: You like the product but don't like how it's being used, so you switch to using instances that are used the way you like and support those instances in kind, all while blocking and/or criticizing the instances you don't like without risking having your access revoked.

[-] Allero@lemmy.today 4 points 20 hours ago

The problem is, Lemmy developers are lemmy.ml maintainers. You can't have one without the other.

[-] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 19 hours ago

Yes, but the issue is that the lemmy.ml maintainers are the Lemmy developers. The people who created the software, and continue maintaining it, are the same people who created the instance.

It's the well-known question of if you can, or should, separate the art from the artist. By funding, in its current state, the development of Lemmy, you're supporting the people running an instance you disagree with. Unless you're willing to take up the work to fork and continue development yourself, you can't detach them, you either support both or none.

[-] Shardikprime@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Lemmy Apolitical?

LMAO 🤣

[-] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The platform itself is apolitical. It can be forked and used for any purpose by other creators. Any instance of a different political persuasion can be spun up and maintained separately, as many defederated instances have. This is a result of the project the 2 devs are paid to produce.

[-] yogurt@lemm.ee 29 points 1 day ago

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that's happening.

[-] EfreetSK@lemmy.world 45 points 1 day ago

I was thinking long and hard about this to form an opinion, but my answer is no.

The final decission point was: I'm from Slovakia, it's no secret that Russia would love to take us under their sphere of influence. You and your instance is not only supporting this, you're actively propagating this. In fact, I'm pretty sure if Russian soldiers would be at my doorstep, threatening my family, you and your instance would be cheering. And when I would realize, that I actively supported this, that would break me.

If you're about to publish your work for free, I gladly use it as long as it's run by good people like lemmy.world. This way you get no support from me. If I'd pay you, I don't know what part of my support would end up in .ml instance which I see as a propaganda machine against countries like mine. And even if you say that none of my money would end up there, I kind of don't want to support you as a human being. I won't pay your salary so you have energy to do what you do on .ml instance.

If Lemmy as a project dies, so be it. Foss world can always spark successful forks (see OpenElec vs LibreElec) and alternatives like PieFed already exist

[-] orangeboats@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago

ITT: a mighty showcase of the divide-and-conquer strategy by psyops.

Instead of realizing that our goal as an alternative community to Reddit is first and foremost to... well duh, to build a community and keep it thriving, people here are infighting, preferring to subdivide themselves into tankies and non-tankies.

If Lemmy eventually fails and no other project with a similar feature-set can show up in time, we end up killing the existing momentum.

If that happens, all of you shall remember this very moment, and bravo to the psyops people (be it from the government or corporate) because you won yet again.

Donated. Though because I am living in a third world country it's just a measly ~25 dollars.