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 (β¬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 2000β¬ per month. This leaves only 1000β¬ 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 5000β¬ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500β¬ 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.
Donate
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 β¬100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
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.
Edit: I completely forgot that you could, in theory, try helping out on their GitHub if you have a background in CS. It won't pay for the developers' cost of living, but it could reduce the maintenance burden if you know what you're doing.
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 donβt 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.
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.
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.
Sure, but if this is basically paying them to make this their job, I donβt want their job to be modding/adminβing their instance. I donβt want to pay them to platform tankies and ban others in such a direct fashion.
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.
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.
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 @ruud@lemmy.world 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.
Would it be fair to describe it as "lemmy.ml is the beta test server, while there's an internal server for alpha testing"?
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.
lemmy.ml is already entirely funded, your donations go entirely to our salaries.
As much as I dislike a lot of .ml, it costs like β¬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 π¬. 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.
oh please, cry me a river
Good point, but I feel like thats saying your employer is funding anything you spend your money on.