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 @nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
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All this is very confusing to me. I had to look up what tankies are and if these giuys are tankies then they can go fuck themselves. I came here from reddit and now I am thinking I might have made a mistake. I don’t know enough aboput this federated stuff to understand it. I have no idea how to block .ml nor do I know who these people are who run it. I do know that I had a very close Ukrainian friend as a child and although he is dead now I still see the Ukrainian people are brothers and sisters. I am not sure I want to give any of my money to an intance that actively shits out fucking ork propaganda. I need some educating here.
Fuck the lemmy.ml devs. I’m not going to donate to a group of people who have clearly targeted me over and over again across multiple accounts with petty bans for gently questioning their authoritarian orthodoxy.
Donate to forks like piefed or mbin. Let .ml reap what it sows.
I just logged into Liberapay, and then I saw their profile pictures. Remembered I can’t donate to tankies (inb4: I didn’t say communists) any more I could maga supporters. or IDF apologists
Hey but they’re not that bad! Nutomic responded in this thread:
I certainly dont praise or support civilians being displaced from their homes.
Isn’t it wonderfully vague?
You know who expressed the same sadness about displaced people? guess(I can’t find a source/misremembered? my bad)You can remove all ambiguity by saying who is the unequivocal aggressor responsible for the gruesome death of thousands of young men and civilians in Ukraine.
How’s the denazification going, guys?
Watch out one of the devs here will gaslight you to beg for more donations.
Toss a coin to your lemmy maintainer, oh valley of shitposts
Just donated a tenner, keep rocking. Also, fuck spez.
Thanks!
Ah shit. I’m currently a starving musician. I’ll scrape you off some of the next gig.
Before you do learn of their political stances and take a look at the federations they manage. Then think hard about what the company people keep says about them
But you have no problem whatsoever in using the services these horrible people provide you? Why are you here?
The irony of somebody went from a DE instance advocating for painting everyone with the same brush.
The purity testing and holier-than-thou attacks going on in these fundraising threads are truly counterproductive. We’re not strong enough as an ecosystem and community yet to be able to afford this luxury. If this is coming from the left, I think you should consider the larger goal here.
I have personal friends in Ukraine who were displaced from their home by the invaders. I cannot morally justify giving any kind of benefit to the people who would praise or support their actions.
Lemmy is just a thing, it can cease to exist for all I care.
I certainly dont praise or support civilians being displaced from their homes. Maybe there are some users who make such insensitive comments, but it doesnt mean that I agree with them.
You seem to be just putting up a face to beg for your donations while you descide what opinions you allow in your fed.
Company. You. Keep. Theres a reason the tankie triad is mostly defederated. And it’s not cause it’s too good to be true.
That sentiment hardly shines through when the flagship instance, intentionally or not, has been allowed to become a haven for tankies and Putinist agitators.
But, it’s counter-productive to donate money to Ukraine to aid in their defense against the Russian Invasion of their country, and then support an instance that is actively spreading Russian propaganda against Ukraine. Seems like you have to make a choice there, and I choose to side with the people being wronged.
But is not donating going to change anything?
sorry to put this down on your comment
those aunts and uncles and brothers and daughters that you’re all so mad at and won’t ever talk to again. that all won’t matter soon.
those people next door who fly a flag that rustles your jimmies. or the bumper stickers about who to encourage. that all won’t matter soon.
those co-workers you can’t stand who drive you crazy and won’t let you eat lunch alone. or the managers that bug you to shit. that all won’t matter soon.
what WILL matter is that you know each other. it’ll gauge how you should barter with them.
none of this shit is going to matter in a little while. mark my words.
What are you saying, there’s going to be the rapture?
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.
We dont use discord at all, the chats are on Matrix and accessible for free. I see the membership descriptions on Patreon are wrong, will get those fixed shortly.
Just threw in a couple bucks! Loving Lemmy, it lacks the stench of capitalism that reddit fell victim to. Thank you to everyone who makes this place work!
Thanks, and youre welcome!
I’ve made my donation today for the first time.
I find it helpful that we have been keeping people full time, funded by donations. I would hope this model grows, expanding into for example specific features getting their own bucket of money, as we can voice our support for things that can get lost in a backlog.
I’m not sure I’ve seen how to contribute the old way, by donating time and performing tasks. Not my case, but how would someone get started on that?
if people want to contribute code, they can check out the various repositories in the LemmyNet GitHub org to see which issues are looking for someone to pick them up.
the main repositories, by language, are:
- Rust
- lemmy - backend of the application
- activitypub-federation-rust - federation library
- lemmy-ui-leptos - work in progress rewrite of lemmy-ui in Rust
- TypeScript/Inferno
- lemmy-ui - the default lemmy web interface
- Kotlin
- jerboa - the official Android app
additionally, there is a range of open source alternative web interfaces and apps that wouldn’t mind contributions. some of them are listed here: https://github.com/dbeley/awesome-lemmy?tab=readme-ov-file#alternative-front-ends
- Rust
I’m not sure I’ve seen how to contribute the old way, by donating time and performing tasks. Not my case, but how would someone get started on that?
Good point, it’s a bit hidden away: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/01-overview.html
- (Formally) Reporting issues
- Translating
- Programming and Design
- Donating
No ads and no algorithm isn’t free.
Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy’s way. I’m a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.
I welcome ads. I welcome as many ads as the site manager feels won’t bleed members. Algorithms too, but good luck keeping members if that happens.
I do not want to give money to where it supports regimes that hate, but that is entirely my choice and I get that. You’re free to classify that separately and I fully support you doing what’s best for you.
ethical ads are virtually non-existent. when limiting ads to ethical ads it’s unlikely you’re getting even remotely close to bringing in the necessary funds.
people promoting ads are typically those who expect others to suffer while they themselves are using ad blockers. there are some people who honestly turn off ad blockers, but i wouldn’t recommend anyone to do that for any site, as i don’t consider the majority of ads ethical and it’s also often used as a malware/phishing/scam distribution mechanism.
this is also a vicious cycle of more people blocking ads -> ads getting worse to offset the lost ad revenue -> more people blocking ads. this is what lead to the internet today, where the majority of the internet is basically unusable if you don’t use ublock origin or a comparable solution.
No, there was no such cycle to get is here. Still only about 1/3 block (some) ads, and that is a rather new development over the last few years. Just 5 years ago it were only about half that. Ads were already everywhere at that point and 1/6 can definitely not explain any sort of cycle.
Instead, people just want to make more money. More ads and more aggressive ads = more money. Very simple. Ad blocker usage then skyrockets as a result of this.
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.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
I still stand by what I said. Not a single fraction of any currency either directly or indirectly to that instance.
Lemmy.ml monthly server costs: like 30$/mo
Cost to develop a Reddit: like 30M/yr
Price Lemmy devs are doing it for: 3000$/mo
Meh, you can block the instance and still see the value in the project. I’d rather have both than neither.
I did. I can’t force the instance I am on to de-federate and I can’t ban all users. I also don’t agree with this campaign of those users to start the Reddit refugees and exiles there. You’re making all of Lemmy appear like they support that specific view of politics.
That’s how I use them but i am not giving a dime to those who want to kill me and constantly spew russian peopaganda. They can beg putin for funds.
Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.
Am I wrong or is the same person making fun of the ridiculous censorship rules on Reddit while enforcing similar ridiculous censorship rules on their own .ml instance?
I feel that’s missing the forest for the trees in regards to what we’re discussing, though. Enforcing rules is one thing; actively enforcing the suppression of any dissent of opinion is censorship, full stop. It isn’t “curating” communities when you are aggressively enforcing all those communities stay in lockstep to your political views.
But yes, federation helps to mitigate the completeness of that censorship. However, the original devs of Lemmy itself created the .ml instance, so it’s kind of an ironic situation, which is why I bothered replying in the first place to the original comment.
Yeah, .ml is usually a giant circle jerk and often removes comments/posts that are critical of things like the CCP.
Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
I got banned on ml for arguing that it was obvious that trump was worse than the Democrats
So use a different instance? You dont seen to have a problem freeloading at least?
Obviously I did? What is even the point of your comment and the insult of calling me a freeloader, when the vast majority of Lemmy users are literally freeloading on public instances? Unless you’re triggered by us correctly calling out .ml and its censoring bullshit?
If you are ok with freeloading , how do you reconcile that with dictating where people spend their income?
Come on be consistent.
Stop using Lemmy and go back to stormfront. Or at least shut up on where devs spend their income.
Where the fuck did I dictate to people on where to spend money? Please, find my quote and repeat it.
The context here is me and the original commenter discussing the irony of someone slamming another website for censoring when their instance does the exact same thing.
Either admit being a freeloader here or pay up and let people spend their money were they wish such as running an instance you don’t agree with politically . If you don’t like it go back to reddit. Bitching about an instance you can just defederate,block or ignore and not donating with that as an excuse is pathetic.
You’re putting words in my mouth, dude. I was calling out the irony of their hypocrisy. I didn’t say anything about not donating. But, whatever, you’re obviously arguing in bad faith, so I’m done here.
Stop using Lemmy and go back to stormfront.
Ah, yes. The old “everyone that disagrees with me is a Nazi” strategy. That’ll definitely convince them to agree with you! /s
I’m telling them to fuck off. They should agree with me because that what I would have done if I was a reactionary bootlicker. I don’t understand why you would use Lemmy and did not want to support the devs without dictating were they spend their “salaries”
You are wrong.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
Not judging and correct me if I got it wrong. You like Lemmy and want to support it but you personally don’t like the developers of Lemmy?
I don’t like what they’re doing, they are actively using their positions and instances position of influence to push harmful propaganda, misinformation, censor opinions critical of it and all the while turning a blind/lenient eye to what their users do if they consider them to be ideologically aligned with them.
If they actually surrendered .ml admin duties to a more balanced team that actually allowed non-Tankie mods to well mod, I would reconsider donating.
While I consider their “ideology” to be harmful, if they stopped trying to “infuse” Lemmy with it and separated their work from their personal politics it would satisfy a lot of concerns
Yikes, this is big for me. I love Lemmy but I have strong aversions against funding bad politics, even if they aren’t politicians.
What kind of views and ideologies are they pushing? Also are they a couple or something?
Putn is right, ukranians are nazis so all crimes against them are in dact blessings. Baltics are next and all need to die for being under german occupation in the past. Don’t you dare critisize agent kresnov! Etc etc. vile crimes against humanity shit, homophobia and anti lgbtq propaganda.
People who want russia to dominate the world.
Are you saying the developers of Lemmy are of these opinions?! If so, that’s absolutely horrible. I want to support the development of Lemmy, but I want to do the opposite of supporting people like that! I want to take money from people like that!
Feel free to check “MeanwhileOnGrad” yourself.
Just linkifying this for mobile users: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
That’s a lie you are free to run your own instance
Became a free member on patreon when i first joined lemmy. Completely forgot to actually up the tier. Recurring donations are now on, thanks for the reminder!
I was a paid 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.
