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!

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    145·
    18 hours ago

    The Nazis industrialized mass murder, and deliberately killed millions in the Holocaust. The Soviet prison system was in no way comparable to the Nazi concentration camps designed to murder and kill, this is Holocaust trivialization. Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.

    • illi@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 hours ago

      I didn’t quite intend to put gulags and concentration camps on the same level. But there are some similarities, like being used to disappear political or ideological oponents.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 hour ago

        Concentration camps were mass execution factories for Jewish people, LGBTQ, Communists, Socialists, disabled people, Slavs, and more.

        The prisons in the GULAG system were genuine prisons, and the political prisoners were largely Tsarists, Fascists, Nazi collaborators, war criminals, and more, and political prisoners were a minority of those imprisoned in the USSR.

        That’s like saying a fish and a tree have some similarities. It’s true, but at the same time fundamentally tries to draw far more similarities than actually existed.

        Further:

        Neither was much better than the other.

        This directly states that imprisoning fascists and executing millions of innocents are morally similar actions. This is Holocaust trivialization.