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 @[email protected] 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.
Ah shit. I’m currently a starving musician. I’ll scrape you off some of the next gig.
I fkn love this community! Just set up yearly dono for 60
Thanks!
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
Love lemmy. Don’t love your instance admin/modding philosophy. I don’t want to donate money if you’re going to spend excessive work hours doing the latter. I’d like my donation to go towards making this incredible project survive and even thrive.
What does an average week look like for y’all when it comes to spending your time on this? I understand this may seem entitled or shitty, but frankly I think a number of us feel similarly about the matter.
Personally I dont do any moderation, other than banning an obvious spam account once in a while. I simply dont have time for it and leave it to other people.
Fair enough appreciate the response
this would better be asked on the original post by nutomic: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
nutomic previously also shared on matrix that he is not participating in moderation except for removing spam.
edit: commented this before refreshing, so i didn’t see nutomic already replied
Now I’m supporting lemmy and voyager development. Worth every penny.
Extremely based
For those with decision paralysis, Liberapay is a great choice. They’re a France-based non-profit which is itself run off of donations which it crowdfunds on its own platforn (pretty based tbh), and the site itself is FOSS.
Thanks for contributing! It’s sad to see so many people focus on unnecessary drama
How does one AVOID funding .ml?
Addressed this in an edited-in second paragraph. Answer is “unfortunately, you can’t” unless you wish to fork Lemmy. But as someone who’s sickened to my core by tankie ideas, I still think funding this piece of FOSS is by far the lesser evil, I think I make a compelling argument for it, and I do think the Lemmy team do good work on the software side.
If I can hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil, I need to follow that same principle when it’s not just my vote I’m casting but where I’m putting my time and money.
As far as I know their politics and views have had zero impact on the code.
Almost true, being Communists has certainly influenced the reasons for Lemmy as a federated, anticapitalist alternative to Reddit to begin with.
I don’t mind communists/socialists. I largely agree with them. I do mind tankies.
I am not a tankie and its annoying to be called like that all the time.
Did not call you specially a tankie. But ml has a lot of tankies.
“Tankie” is the same as “pinko” and “commie,” it’s just a pejorative for those who support Socialist countries. The major views of the Marxists on Lemmy are in line with the views of various Communist parties worldwide.
No it absolutely is not.
Socialist countries are Norway and Denmark.
Simply not true. “Tankie” is NOT the same as “Pinko” or “Commie.” There are 2 major strains of communist political thought. There’s authoritarian communism and anarchocommunism. Anarchocommunists are Marxist, authoritarian communists are Marxist-Leninist (or bolshevik, or Stalinist). I DO agree with you that the major views of Marxists on Lemmy are in line with the views of various communist parties worldwide, but I DO NOT agree that these communist parties that people like you are aligned with are either the totality of communist thought, or representative of how all communists think. When a communist like me calls a communist like you a tankie, it’s because when I look at the history of authoritarian communism, I notice a pattern of suffering and stratification amongst the populace. The USSR exploited labor and was, ultimately, a capitalist nationalist imperialist colonial state.
And before you go saying I support liberalism, I do not. There is not a binary between USSR style communism and American style capitalism. When you get down to it, they are in effect means to the same end. A system of enriching a central cabal of power authority at the cost of the average global citizen.
So in summary. “Tankie” is not a label that right wingers apply to discredit leftist thought. It’s a label left wingers use to discredit right wing thought masquerading as left wing thought.
Good point. Also worth remembering that for all the complaints about abuse of power by mods, not only is the federated nature of Lemmy intended to give an opportunity for people to move off of instances with policies they don’t like, but the open modlog also exists as a measure of full transparency.
Both great features implemented by these very developers.
Exactly, which is why spending time on instance drama is silly. Federation and defederation are tools, along with personal blocking, for a reason.
Sure, but if this is basically paying them to make this their job, I don’t want their job to be modding/admin’ing their instance. I don’t want to pay them to platform tankies and ban others in such a direct fashion.
As far as I know their politics and views have had zero impact on the code.
Adding to what Cowbee said, general anticapitalist politics were the motivation for their effort and the reason it is not a for-profit exploitative service. They don’t want or need to put in addictive features or ads to profit or appease venture capital, and that’s no coincidence, it’s a decision resulting from their political beliefs.
But yes, their more specific personal political views don’t really impact the code and haven’t prevented others from using it freely.
Entirely true, but as I said, it seems that a small proportion of whatever’s donated goes to the server costs of .ml since it’s run by Lemmy’s maintainers. It’s understandable and even a good thing to be put off by that.
That’s actually impossible. Politics is a question of systems engineering. Programming is a question of systems engineering. Creating propaganda is a matter of creating and disseminating information in a particular way. Coding is a matter of creating and disseminating information in a particular way. A person’s outlook will always influence the programs they design, the platforms they build, and the algorithms they tune.
As much as I dislike a lot of .ml, it costs like €30/month to run. Not much of your money would be going to it.
donating to lemmy helps every other instance much more than it helps .ml.
As someone else pointed out the donation would also fund .ml moderation time not only the development
My employer funds my shitposting here on Lemmy, the only difference is they aren’t aware of it.
As unpalatable what they do in their free time is, I think you have to draw the line somewhere on what you’re okay with supporting. I don’t think it’s okay, for example, for a delivery driver for a brewing company to be fired for drinking a different brand of beer, but it is okay for him to be fired for assaulting someone while on the company clock. Where this line is drawn is going to vary from person to person. I personally would be happier if they had a clearer separation of their personal and professional activities. I’m not sure if I will donate to them or not at this point. I have donated to my instance, which doesn’t appear to pass donations on to the developers, which means I will have to actively make a decision for where I stand on this 😬. It would be easier if their test bed didn’t also promote their unpalatable views.
Yeah idk where to draw like with ml and lemmygrad. To me these are clear net negative on humanity but Lemmy itself got enough traction from sane people to kinda counter balance that.
are clear net negative on humanity
oh please, cry me a river
Give your money to any other product or service
If they want money for Lemmy then they can step down or stop being shitty mode
lmao what does step down even mean anyone can fork it and start working on it
getting traction for a fork is never that simple. as of now there is not the kind of consensus that you look for at fork time that leadership needs to change. but the groundswell is growing
I’m mixed. On one hand, absolutely fuck .ml and tankies. On the other, these guys have done great work. The way it’s set up, Lemmy is not at all beholden to their ideology. We can take it over at any time, and any further work they do benefits all of us, and that can’t be taken away.
As a fellow developer, I truly believe Rust is the way to go for high pressure, high scaling software. I don’t think LW alone could run off of your average python. EVE Online is a great example of that. They pushed python forward to meet their high demand needs, and still had to incorporate a lot of C++. Reddit has had teams of engineers over decades, and in the long run I expect Lemmy to be more efficient. In my professional opinion, this kind of scaling can’t be reasonably done with any garbage collected language.
My other concern is with sanctions. Are these guys in Russia? Is it legal to donate to them? If you’re paying by check or credit card, those institutions will take care of following the law for you.
Overall, I’d encourage people to donate. Open software benefits everyone and any work they do for us is public and can never be taken back.
My other concern is with sanctions. Are these guys in Russia? Is it legal to donate to them? If you’re paying by check or credit card, those institutions will take care of following the law for you.
I’m 99.99% sure they’re not in Russia. I feel like I’ve read they’re in the Netherlands but that needs fact checking.
To my knowledge are the lemmy.world guys from the netherlands. At least the 2 admins. And the FediHosting Foundation lemmy.world (and e.g. mastodon.world, etc) belongs to is in the Netherlands.
No idea about dessalines though. but i don’t think russia either.
our foundation is in NL, because that’s where @[email protected] is located, but the active admin and infra team members are distributed across the world with members in Netherlands, Germany and USA currently.
Thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it.
As a developer, would you test on production though? I’m not a professional developer. However I’m quite familiar with it. Family developing and IT for massive companies. You don’t need real people to generate traffic. You just don’t. Lemmy.ml being the test server is a selfish bullshit excuse.
Not primarily, of course. You have a local and QA instance, but some things only come out at real scale or with real data. You can’t think of everything to have it added to testing. Having your own, real instance that gets to serve as beta and accessible telemetry really helps.
LW functions at the opposite end of the spectrum. They try to maintain the most stability, which also makes sense.
Absolutely, and generally; those come out under different hardware and software combinations on other people’s deployed systems. Not your dev system.
Yes LW operates at the opposite end of the spectrum. I’d donate to them if they need it. Because they’re professional. Whereas the devs of Lenny are unprofessional and dishonest. There’s no excuse for their behavior. If they can’t afford proper testing systems. Then ask for donations for that. Both hardware, software or funds. I’m sure it’d get thrown at them in spades. Or at least way better than demanding everyone swallow away poison pill at the same time. This oh you must accept funding Lemmy ml as an unprofessional contraversial Echo chamber/hobby. Won’t work for a lot of people for good reason.
lemmy.ml is not the primary test server.
there are multiple dedicated test instances that are used for development purposes.
testing on lemmy.ml is mostly happening for release candidates that require actual user activity to find remaining bugs, at the point where it’s getting close to a proper release.
Whether it’s the primary or not doesn’t really change things.
It could just as easily be rolled out to a select circle of instances that wish to help with the testing, as many other foss projects do. Funding them developing it is one thing. Funding such a bad echo chamber another. This ethical and image problem is what will stop adoption of the software, and is already driving plenty of people away. Or to mbin/kbin, pifed, miskey etc. There are plenty of people I would not recommend Lemmy to because of these issues. It is unfortunately however their repo and codebase to mismanage. And our money not to donate.
Would it be fair to describe it as “lemmy.ml is the beta test server, while there’s an internal server for alpha testing”?
lemmy.ml is already entirely funded, your donations go entirely to our salaries.
thanks to those who donate and keep this place running, cuz I can’t right now :)
I’m not donating a single bit of whatever currency to .ml. Pick one or the other: dev costs or your own personal soap box cost.
Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.
I was a paid patreon member which was supposed to give you access to the dev chat on discord, but despite asking a few times and paying for almost half a year, it just never happened. So I couldn’t take them seriously.
Since I blocked .ml I can’t leave a reply on the original message, and I’m not going to unblock them just because.
Donated, I’d rather be on a foss platform that can defederate/block bad faith interlocutors than a corpo platform that forces their anti user pro monetization shit on everyone who uses their platform.
Currently donating $5 a month to lemmy.world. I’ll continue for the foreseeable future.
ITT: anticommunism.
Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.
Give up your admin/mod roles on .ml, be neutral developers, then I am happy to donate.
No such thing as neutral.
They need an instance for test purposes or no development would be done. And they would run such instance as they see fit.
But do they need to moderate that instance?
Why would anyone apoint a moderator he does not agree with?
Because they’re begging for money all over Lemmy and getting laughed at for it because of .ml censorship policies?
They only made one post in .ml (I would assume ml users are fine with their policies). Everything else are reposts done by third parties.
And I’m sure the fact that all of the instance owners just happened to post within hours of each other is totally a coincidence, and has nothing to do with the devs reaching out to them and asking them to do so.
I would assume all of the instance owners are dependant on Lemmy development and therefore follow dev communication channels.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
Test instances shouldn’t be used to push a political narrative
Well, if the instance owner has a political narrative he would push it. Because he believes that it is a good thing. Test instance or not.
The only option I see is that someone else would offer them his instance (which has to be rather popular) for test purposes. But that would not do anything to .ml because then they would just pay for .ml from their pocket (which against comes from development funding).
And denying lemmy development funding would do nothing to .ml because .ml running costs are too small. So it would just continue to work on the latest version with developers hotfixing things only for their instance as they break.
