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!
Godwin’s Law in full effect all the way down. At record speed I might add.
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.
Are you telling me DeCeNtrAlIZaTiOn and FOsS are not enough to magically keep a project going?
Surprisedpikachu.png
Made a small donation. Every bit counts, I hope.
Dessalines and Nutomic are criminally underpaid. Lemmy development still has a long way to go and we could get there much faster if people donated more. But in typical Lemmy fashion, people would rather sit on their high horses and throw stones from their glass houses.
I started donating to the developers 2 days after I joined Lemmy and have given over $1k since then. I find the developers to be competent, mature, and reasonable. Similarly to many other contentious topics on this platform, the conversation regarding their perceived or imagined political beliefs is completely lacking in objectivity, logic, and nuance. Y’all actually be gossiping like teenage girls about these developers even while taking advantage of the fruits of their unpaid labor. I’ve seen all the evidence of their extremism and it’s quite underwhelming when you lay it all out.
And even if I did have major qualms about the devs, I would still argue that it’s much harder to justify using any products or services from large corporations like Amazon or Reddit than it is to monetarily support a FOSS project such as Lemmy. Out of everything I’ve spent money on in my lifetime, Lemmy is easily among the most morally justifiable expenses.
I eventually had to reduce my monthly contribution once sh.itjust.works started accepting donations, because I also feel strongly about supporting my own instance. It’s unfortunate that so many lemmings seemingly understand the fact that reddit has become an evil cancer and an alternative is sorely needed, but don’t seem to understand that creating such an alternative is a project that requires a massive amount of time and effort. Donating to your instance is great, but without continued development of the underlying software, it’s a futile effort. Even if you want to die on the hill of not donating to the big bad Lemmy devs, at least donate to PieFed or something! 2 patrons?!? As an early adopter userbase, we can and should be doing a lot more to support the fediverse monetarily, imo.
Thanks for your donations and your understanding. Its a bit annoying that people ascribe various beliefs to me personally based on nothing more than comments from random lemmy.ml users. But it seems there is nothing I can do to change that.
All you had to do was say sorry, mate
People tend to generalize and assume a lot without actually taking the time to verify their assumptions. It’s very frustrating when people demonize admins due to the bad behavior of a handful of users. Trying to win the approval of random goons is a waste of time anyway.
From my perspective you seem like a normal and good person and I think people will eventually come to see that as Lemmy grows up.
I hope youre right :)
So right now I’m not in a financial situation that I can even possibly think about donating.
My general issue with FOSS is the guilt trip I go on when devs plead for donations – that’s MY issue, not any of the dev teams – but it plays a part in not using FOSS as much as I would like. I don’t want to sell my soul, but that’s about all I have to give right now so free ad-supported services and software are where I tend to lean to these days.
However, I am trying to put as much focus on supporting less shitty humans and buy locally whenever I can now. I didn’t realize the views of the devs of Lemmy until a few days ago and I’m a little concerned to be even using Lemmy as a whole as it shows some level of tacit support for the devs and their beliefs. If they weren’t open about it, obviously this wouldn’t be an issue but since it’s out in public it’s an issue.
I swear I have a point to all this…
Is Lemmy funded just by direct contributions from users or do instances take extra money from their donations and funnel it down to the main project?
If anyone is familiar with the various 12 Step programs, this is pretty much how those main programs get funded. The local meetings take donations that pay for the rent and any other expenses and then donate left over funds to the main service organization while keeping a reserve for emergencies.
If I were in the position to donate, I would feel much better donating to Lemmy.ee rather than the main project considering their views on certain political issues. I would not be directly donating, but if the instance donated extra funds I might be ok with that. It just feels different for some reason.
You realize it’s the owner of .ee that made the post right. Since the instance is still running, still federated with the main one, and the post is still up, maybe that says something about how acceptable those politics are
It’s kind of clarifying to check the original post and the attitudes around there. I actually recommend it.
lemmy development mentioned
dessalines criticized
commies counter criticism
thread turns into a shitshow
aww yeah, it’s Lemmy time.
At least it’s nicer than the thread on lw :(
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’d like to join my voice with those saying it’s worth donating even if you disagree with the devs personally. My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform, and treating the Internet respectfully as a forum.
The Lemmy software supports so many communities to communicate, including the huge lemmy.world that famously hates .ml. Because the software is open, it can do that freely.
You who hate capitalism, do you donate your ad data to capitalists so they can grow sickeningly rich off your use of their software? Then you might at least let these devs live comfortably off your use of the software. And if you pay in ways you see, instead of ways you don’t, does that trouble you so much?
You don’t have to agree. And you can still use Lemmy freely! But since this software has been such a blessing to us wanting a non-reddit platform, I hope many will be happy to bless the devs back - and they’re only asking for a modest salary.
My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform
But… isn’t it impossible to donate solely to the software, when they also will use the funds to pay server costs for lemmy.ml? The referenced post did not exactly highlight that little tidbit of information… yet isn’t it true nonetheless?
Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere,
- it works out about 2% of your donation, if that
- the devs would be entitled to spend their salary on personal projects anyhow, it’s an effective salary not ngo funds
- .ml serves as a useful test server and public beta for the rest of Lemmy
- it’s effectively funding every instance, by providing the software - by that metric, the opposite .world gets the larger share
- because of the small scales, ordinarily there’s not a lot of sense to separate .ml funding because it’s so small. It’s not like the devs are being devious
To me, that stacks up fairly.
I’m just being pedantic, but also the problem seems easily solved by having someone else moderate that instance, while they focus on just the coding.
Of course they are 100% free to do as they choose and I would not dream of wanting them to do otherwise.
Then too, the people deciding whether to donate can do the same - and it seems that the rather unusual moderation practices of lemmy.ml are a sticking point for whether they want to contribute funds or not. The amount of those funds, whether the devs have the “right” to do so or not, that is all besides the point. Some people just don’t like to fund things like genocide, period.
But now we are veering into political territory that I know less about. Thank you for sharing those facts about the situation, as I continue to learn about it that is very helpful:-).
it’s worth donating even if you disagree with the devs personally. My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform, and treating the Internet respectfully
I want to underline this. And ask the reader to put themselves in the devs’ shoes for a moment.
Usually, when people have strong opinions, like extreme political views, they try to further their goal wherever they can. To abstain from that desire, and create tools which can be freely used, even by their political enemies, requires a considerable amount of decency and deserves our respect.
Either this, or they value FOSS so much (more), that they still keep Lemmy open for everyone.
In a way, they support people from the opposite side of the political spectrum, by providing them their platform freely. Isn’t that exemplary in putting the fedi spirit above political differences?
Okay, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two developers, with their decisions in moderating that one instance, have dragged down the reputation of the entire platform. They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.
And instead of questioning why that is and addressing it, they’re asking for more.
This doesn’t inspire trust in them. I trust their ideology not to mess with the platform, what I don’t trust is their competence if they can’t stop hemorrhaging donation money by refusing to deal with the biggest wart on the platform. They have all of these people saying they would donate if they would just deal with this conflict, but they won’t. How badly do they need the money to keep developing if they’re not willing to separate?
Here’s the better question: do they even want to keep developing if they had to separate from it?
More importantly, just from a straight development perspective, this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever. There have been a lot of really clumsy mistakes and lack of best practices.
What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?
If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now. I don’t think there are enough people around that can manage a fork of this platform as it exists, so we are tied to them. And I don’t think I like that. I would like to see this platform expand beyond them, but the current course doesn’t seem to indicate that will ever happen.
As Dessalines replied, your assertion of losing donations is wrong.
But yes indeed, their views, those of .ml, and how both handle them, are driving some donors away. You’re asking them to lay down their views, hide or change their opinions, separate from the vocal community on their server (noting that .world is just as vocal, self-righteous and self-assured), in order to develop the software that you use freely (well, that you might then donate to).
Honestly I feel that makes sense and nonsense at the same time. I can see it making sense in some circumstances; but personally I don’t think so in these. Maybe the rhetoric I see on .ml just doesn’t impact me the same as you?
But as an overarching argument that for the sake of Lemmy they should change… That just seems too much to ask, over the internet. Maybe to ask politely and accept a no. Maybe in person, one might argue and counsel strongly. But people are entitled to their opinions and the internet isn’t actually such a good place to change them.
So if the devs keep devving Lemmy, let them. They’re providing a good thing for us, and I hope more people donate.
As to the technical aspects, it just feels like an emotional outburst. FOSS projects’ maintenance is always hard, and there are always difficulties. We do our best. They are trying to. And if a community came along that loves Lemmy and wants to develop it, they could either contribute or fork. Perhaps their fork would last longer? Perhaps not. But for now this Lemmy is here, and is Free, so we are glad to use it.
They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.
Nope, not even the tiniest bit. We know how vital lemmy is, and want to secure its long-term future by being entirely sustained by donations. We never at any point reached that goal, and given that nutomic had a new baby, this is more important now than ever.
hemorrhaging donation money
I have no idea what this means. We’re paying our daily living expenses so we can comfortably work on lemmy without having to find other work. The costs are food and rent.
this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever.
I’d love to be able to grow our co-op, and add more developers! Donations make that possible too, especially if they exceed 2 average dev salaries (we’re a long way off from that).
What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?
It’s clear you’ve never tried, because we’ve never and would never reject code contributers for petty reasons like “not fitting in”. If ppl don’t want to work with communists, that’s on them. Personally I’d never reject someone for their ideology, especially if what they’re doing is FOSS, which serves the common good.
I would like to see this platform expand beyond them,
We don’t stop people from forking lemmy and never would, that’s entirely their right.
I have very short experience with Lemmy, having just moved here from Reddit. I joined one of the most popular forums on .ml unaware of the fame of this instance, and from my short experience “Treating the Internet respectfully” is the opposite of what is found there.
I am sorry for your bad experience on Lemmy. Most people fall into the same trap, and more often than not, leave altogether. I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy actively chiding me for having done so, due to them having come here, seen that, and immediately noped out.
It doesn’t help that Google points people to Lemmy.ml (DuckDuckGo properly points to Lemmy.World, as the most active instance, but lemmy.ml has an older history), which to a guest account shows only Local (rather than globally All) posts, which ofc are full of people making fun of the Western world and society - even to the point of saying that people who do such innocuous activities as having bank accounts should be killed (sadly, I’m not joking, although the people making such claims likely were… and yet… were they, were they REALLY?!).
Nobody likes to be made fun of, so it’s no surprise that the likes of Reddit’s r/RedditAlternatives is filled with such stories of people encountering such and never coming back. But I am glad that despite Lemmy.ml’s efforts to hide it, you managed to find the nicer portions of Lemmy where we can actually enjoy conversations.:-)
I signed up for a medium donation.
While I don’t agree with some things happening on .ml We should not discard imperfect allies. Thank you devs for the great work you’re doing.
Thank you!
ml arent allies at all and they wont see a stinking cent from me
Inherently incompatible ideologies =/= imperfect allies
Have you noticed that every other reddit alternative turned into right wing parapolitical forums? That’s so much worse.
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.
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.
But Cybertruck owners? Nah fuck 'em.
Tesla doesn’t open-source their plans so you can build your own, better version of the cybertruck.
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!
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.
If they weren’t tankies then I would
If the devs shit views destroy the project that’s their fault
As an Eastern European drone developer, I’m OK with donating even to people who might be called tankies …if what they do is building Lemmy. :)
(As a side note, “riseup.net” needs donations too. Anarchist-run e-mail service doesn’t come for free.)
Do you have an extra invite code for riseup.net? I’ve been wanting an account but I don’t know anyone with a code available.
