The developers of Lemmy are currently under-funded and are asking for donations.
Community funding of projects like Lemmy offers an alternative to the commercial system in which projects are funded by investors looking to make a profit in the long run.
Unfortunately, community funding is not easy. Sometimes it might be because many of the users are unable and/or unwilling to donate, but sometimes it might also be that it is not clear that donations are needed, or users may underestimate the impact of their “small” donation. I am glad that the developers are explicitly asking for help at this point, and hope that they find support to continue.
Cross-posting and pinning this here to help them spread their call for help. I recommend placing comments directly to the original post so that it is visible to them.
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.
Please show me where I behaved as a jerk on lemmy.ml.
I’m not digging through months of comments and posts to dig things up. It’s so beyond a waste of time I can spend doing something fun that it just ain’t happening.
Both you and dessalines do a shit ton of work on lemmy, and that’s awesome. But you both also turn into absolute jerks when anyone doesn’t toe the tankie line. Dessalines more than you, and you’ve never been a jerk to me personally. I can’t remember which of you it was that I saw most recently calling people children, but it was one of the two of you.
And that’s okay, it’s y’alls instance. If I don’t like it, I don’t have to engage with either of you.
But, please, don’t pretend that it isn’t a very bad habit that exists. Hell, it isn’t all the time anyway, so it falls within the range that anyone can be a jerk and it just be bad days, or whatever, but it’s still not something I’m going to be willing to donate to when my sheets entire yearly budget for that kind of thing is in low double digits to begin with.
So you expect me to dig through months of history to dig up this alleged comment where Dessalines acted as a jerk? Or blindly take your word for it? Besides, if the last time this happened was months ago it hardly seems worth mentioning. Everyone can have a bad day and say something wrong, its not the end of the world.