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!
deleted by creator
Drag would propose that most of Dessalines’ “development” wages are probably being spent on hours moderating .ml, and that’s at least a grand per month.
Your estimate is wrong, have a look at all the code he writes: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Adessalines+is%3Aclosed
The most recent merge request is just him updating the version numbers in all the captcha-related .tomls, lol
Note that lemmy.ml hosting is only financed via Opencollective. All donations through other platforms go exclusively to developer salaries.
I’m a (small) monthly supporter already! I wish lemmy had a way to give people a little checkbox in their profile for supporters.
or they could work to project completion and not add new features.
I started using Lemmy like 2 years ago, stopped for a long time, and came back a few months ago. I’m sure something has changed in that time, but I don’t know what.
It could be because Lemmy is written in Rust, which is kind of notorious for how difficult it is to be productive in it. Or maybe it’s that there aren’t enough developers, or there isn’t enough funding.
In any case, my motivation to help fund this project is not helped by the insufferable cuntery of the tankies in the .ml communities. Knowing that the core devs are also tankies makes me want to see it fail. Fuck those people.
You can read the release announcements to see what changed. Be warned its a lot.
Made a small donation. Every bit counts, I hope.
This fuckin spam everywhere today holy shit
Godwin’s Law in full effect all the way down. At record speed I might add.
At the end of the day, even hardcore users are not willing to fork it over. Why? Because of all the content that is accessible without having to pay. People have gotten used to not paying for stuff like this over the years, what was going to make them start now? Development will always cost time and it will past a certain point always cost money. So many things cost money that if a site on its baby legs like Lemmy starts asking for more, you think its gonna get it? I doubt it and that sucks, but that just proves that you need that mainstream financial backing in order to host all the users and the content and it costs money, lots of it. And with hardcore users who are here before the mainstream, well, they aren’t the casuals who sink money into it, just plain and simple.
I came here because reddit is turning into a corporate shithole. Users getting banned because of Luigi apologia and so on and so on. Was really relieved that we did in fact have a great, open source alternative to reddit.
My problem is the lead developers of this platform. They do not see the issues with their political bias being woven into their platform (and their transphobia), it will face the exact same shit thats happening to reddit today.
I can’t pay money to people who deny the pain of trans people. I just can’t. And if the lead developers of Lemmy run out of funds, well then I guess they’ll have to just take a good look in the mirror if they don’t see the reason why Lemmy failed. For now I’m gonna use lemmy if I can, but you can’t expect people from reddit to come here and support you guys when their is really hateful shit being spewed by those people (tankies).
They do not see the issues with their political bias being woven into their platform
What the fuck are you talking about? Their ideology is not part of the project in the slightest. Which is why every other instance works perfectly even if they don’t agree politically with the dev team
For now I’m gonna use lemmy if I can, but you can’t expect people from reddit to come here and support you guys
That’s because you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Go back to Reddit with such shitty takes where you move away from massive corporations only to leech off small projects supported by small donors and real people.
You’re literally just another one of those people complaining about the lack of alternatives in tech while also being unwilling to support the products you’re currently using and talking shit about…
Cool off.
Why? So more users like you can come to this platform and use it while shitting all over it by contributing nothing to it?
As I already said, go back to Reddit
Absorb the criticism
Just doubled my monthly contribution! Thanks for the reminder.
Thank you!
I know you’re incredibly busy. If you write 1 sentence of feedback for my Lemmy client I’ll double my contribution again.
https://blorpblorp.xyz/This is who you’re replying to
It looks good! Why dont you add it to the app list on join-lemmy.org?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/shared/components/app-definitions.ts
I had made the suggestion to them that they could start offering some kind of managed hosting services for people running instances. I have a couple of instances running with a hosting provider. If I could have them running with the support of the devs then that would be awesome.
Working on Lemmy is already a fulltime job. Providing a managed hosting service would add another significant workload and leave much less time for the main development work.
That makes sense. You could always set up a simple print to order site and slap the Lemmy mouse on a bunch of stuff. I’d definitely buy something.
Do you know a good site for that?
It could be fun to have a community design competition and have those designs available as well.
Good idea, thanks for the suggestion!
The devs also say that they would gladly accept any development help as well, if you’re either unwilling or unable to financially contribute.
This needs to be more highlighted than just donations.
Not trying to call out politics. But I rather find a way to contribute open source than watch my money keep the lights on very specific servers.
I’ve been around for long enough, time for me to donate.
Sure the two top admins have some shitty opinions, but they still are the main people who have put this software out. The two have been tirelessly working on it for years and years, and have made code that helps everyone, whether you share their opinions or not.
You are paying for their programming, not their opinions. I dont think its a big deal if they have flaws or opinions i dont agree with.
So they dont like trans people. How does that even matter? Any trans person can use the platform anyway. The code doesnt have any opinions, its just code, and that code can be used to support trans people. The little opinions of the devs have no effect on this.
I cant believe how spoiled some people are here. We have a platform, free of ads, quality mobile apps, lots of instances, quite a lot of users. And its not owned by big tech. We own it.
Focus on the pluses here. I dont think another Lemmy will come along anytime soon. Alternatives are not even close in quality.
But Cybertruck owners? Nah fuck 'em.
Tesla doesn’t open-source their plans so you can build your own, better version of the cybertruck.
Alternatives are not even close in quality.
Yes and we can go donate to those alternatives instead and help build them up.
Completely divorced of their political views, I don’t think I want to donate to them simply because I don’t believe they’re doing a good job managing the platform. Donations aren’t just down, they lost those donations. And when confronted with this fact, and told that they should probably change some things if they want to keep getting donations, they’ve staunchly refused.
This does not inspire faith in the development team.
Meanwhile let me seems to be too guarded or too complicated for anybody else to join the team and assist. It’s still just these two. If the platform is growing, it cannot just be these two.
Well, we will see. It would be stupid if Lemmy died because the users couldnt accept the opinions of two little devs, but sure, it may happen.
Then a lot of users will go back to big tech, and the ad business will profit once again. Because we couldnt accept that two devs on planet earth had opinions we didnt like.
Two people.
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.)
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.
I’m not sure why a mobile app should be considered a prerequisite? Some people access solely by desktop, others by tablet, personally I access nearly 100% by Firefox on Android, so I’m mobile but not app, and I know I’m not the only one.
Anyways, the connection between apps and platform is rather fluid - e.g. at one point many of the apps used by “Lemmy” were intended to work for Reddit, but then they ceased working for Reddit (which is just one of many reasons prompting many of us to come to the Fediverse over the years), and now they work for “Lemmy”. Some also work for Mbin and PieFed too, like Interstellar, and an unofficial fork of Thunder is being tested right now. Though PieFed’s API is still in development, so not many apps currently support it, that’s true.
I’ve never used Sync, so I’m not positive, but I do know that PieFed has many features that people say that Sync has. But I’ve mainly only used a web browser to access PieFed (and tested it in Interstellar). Also, is Sync still being developed actively? (Or perhaps I am thinking of Connect.) The world of apps is constantly changing, and ones that aren’t maintained may one day stop working for Lemmy too, as the communication with the backend changes.
Regarding “political views”, um I’m pretty sure it’s a bit more than something like whether to promote trains or cars, it’s EXTREMIST viewpoints like whether genocide is okay or not (the answer, it seems, depends on who’s doing it, for some reason?).
In any case, it’s awesome to have alternatives. Even assuming total goodwill towards every dev of every platform, it’s good to not have all the hopes and dreams of the entire Fediverse placed into one platform. Like one thing I absolutely adore about PieFed is how it can add new features, which even Reddit was refusing to do near the end. They kept focusing exclusively on their profits, whereas PieFed keeps focusing on improving the end user experience, and I love that! 💘
Yep piefed seems cool, and it should develop faster than Lemmy since its easier language to be quick in too.
Will check it out, just for fun. I prefer apps on my phone but of course everyone is different. Sometimes the web version is so good that the app is just a wrapper around a web browser anyway.
FWIW, I freaked out once over something relatively minor across the Lemmy-modality, and the dev (one of the two, can’t remember which) was just a calm, gem of a person upon my temporary paranoia.
Man, I was… blown away.
(thought I was going to be banned to hell, yadda-yadda)
Support sent.
Thanks!
thanks for the post sir, happy to throw a few money units in
It’s so sad that liberals will literally cozy up to fascists and monetarily support them however they can… But a FOSS project run by commies gets them clutching their pearls super hard
Imo, it’s people just rationalizing not wanting to give $5 away. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with deciding you don’t want to donate, that’s your choice, but be honest with yourself. If they weren’t commies, people would be finding some other excuse to not donate.
Just had a whole argument about this on that lemmyworld post that’s at the top about boycotting ml cuz someone brought up how they can’t donate if the developers are gonna use some of that money on ml server cost. They can’t see the bigger picture. Instead they wanna cry over how their $5 or whatever donation is gonna be used. Pathetic.
i reported a fundraising website for the ukrainian neonazi and murderer sternenko and thats still up, but talking politics online is just inexcusable
What’s better is that’s also the user who either watches new on ml like a hawk or has a bot that just scrapes content to pull off ml comms to put on world comms.
