Hey folks!

I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.

Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.

However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.

Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.

I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.

If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.

Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576

Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    10 hours ago

    What?

    PieFed, Mbin, nodebb, flarum - this is a partial listing of the software that does similar to Lemmy, and there’s more besides them even (okay so development on Sublinks seems to be exceedingly slow these days, but the code is still there if anyone wants to contribute…).

    And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the likes of Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops (okay tbf this one isn’t federating yet iirc, but it planned to?), all of which share people’s thoughts and words in a social media atmosphere.

    Lemmy isn’t the sole competitor to Reddit by any stretch. Heck, a year ago Lemmy.World put out a post (I can find it if you really need me to?) all but outright announcing their intention to switch to Sublinks when it became ready. And at the time that had like 80% of all Lemmy MAUs (monthly active users).

    Lemmy is not what makes this place special. The people here are what make this place special. If the people move, then what makes it special will go with them. I personally migrated to PieFed 7 months ago (before it was fully ready), and now that PieFed has surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (e.g. we just added polls and post flairs), I am certain that I am not the only one willing to do so.:-)

    You are paying for their programming, not their opinions.

    Also, I was going to respond to your original comment but suppose I’ll combine it here: you do not seem to be aware that donations also go to support the server costs of Lemmy.ml. Thus, you are in fact paying for their opinions to be spread - they seem to not be offering the choice for others to receive only the code support but not Lemmy.ml?

    Check out PieFed - whether you stay with it or not is immaterial, I’m saying that you’ll be impressed as fuck with what you see. The sign-up wizard alone will probably make you fall absolutely in love with it. And if not, then the LONG list of features definitely will - e.g. categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable. Then, even if you decide to keep using your Lemmy account, you’ll at least know what is going on with PieFed, which is amazing:-). (The Interstellar app supports PieFed officially, with that coming for Thunder as well.)

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I was talking about reddit alternatives with quality mobile apps, not fediverse apps in general.

      In that category i didnt know any besides Lemmy, but ok, piefed is worth checking out. But which mobile app has the quality of Sync?

      And yes, im aware that some part of the donations may go to the Lemmy.ml instance but I also believe that developers need to have a decent salary. So its not strange that 1000 dollars per month is not nearly enough to live on. But people just ignore that and focus on not supporting lemmy.ml because they dont like the political views of the developers.

      But yeah I will check out piefed. Its good with more alternatives, specially written in easy languages like python, since rust is very difficult to contribute to. However, large python codebases tend to be very buggy due to lack of types, but maybe they use the optional type system. Its also slow, but doesnt matter so much when most of the cpu usage is the database.