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.
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.
"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.
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.
Technically, "tankie" is better described as a person who supports red fascism
Anarcho-Communists are not Marxists, Marx firmly rejected Anarchism. I think you're confusing the Marxist conception of Communism with the Anarchist. For Marxists, the state is an instrument of class oppression, and to eliminate it, you must eliminate class. An important note, class is not hierarchy. There exists inter-class hierarchy, such as bourgeois and proletarian, but also intra-class hierarchy, such as managers and workers. A fully publicly owned and planned global economy is what Marxists envision as "Communism." Without any property distinctions, there is no class, and thus no need for special bodies of armed men to uphold property distinctions, no need for things like property rights, while things like administration remain.
This is because Marx's view of Socialism is as it emerges from Capitalism. As Capitalism advances, large industry emerges, and with it cooperative production and increasing complexity in fewer and fewer firms. Marx therefore saw the Proletariat, growing greater in number and the bourgeoisie lesser and lesser as competition dies out, as taking control and directing this new economy in its own interests. It isn't about reversing trends into decentralized communes, as in Marx's eyes, this retains class distinctions, as each commune only owns itself, and thus there is no mechanism for equal ownership across communes, and therefore a necessity for a "state" in each commune to protect these rights and competition between communes for production and trade.
For Anarchists, the state is about hierarchy. Tackling this is the primary objective. This is why when Anarchists judge Marxists on their ability to abolish what Anarchists percieve as the state, they find Marxists invariably fall flat. However, when Marxists are judged on their own merits and own goals, we find Marxists to be quite successful.
We can discuss more about your analysis of the USSR's form of Socialism, and how it's Marxist, but distinct from the Anarchist view, but the discrepancy I described is more important.
No true Scotsman
That's like saying "Marx was a free-market Capitalist" is a "No True Scotsman." Marx regularly got into conflicts with Anarchists like Bakunin, and spent great effort explaining why he disagreed with Anarchism.
Ok
No it absolutely is not.
Which part, the bit on the Marxists on Lemmy being aligned with Marxist orgs worldwide, or that "tankie" is just a pejorative for Marxists?
A tankie is an authoritarian who is cool with mass genocide and domestic persecution of certain groups so long as the autocrat says the right words
Those people don't really exist, just like the people who said that the "commies eat babies" back in the 1960s.
Go talk about tiananmen square or Mao in general in lemmygrad or hexbear. Come back with the results.
The square is quite lovely I wish to visit. Your argument is just as flawed as a teacher I had who said you could not even say the name of the square in china, you can, first they do have freedom of speech, though not interpreted as absolutly as the United States does, and second that is the place where all the government buildings are.
Second I will tell you I do not have a paste bin with every article that mentions it was not a massicure after the event, I will go and look for some. However if you are talking about the reaction being overwhelmingly negitive and feeling samey, it is because that is treated as a gotcha, dispite contemporary evidence showing it to be untrue, statements from the leader saying their goal was to have the streets run red with blood, and even the famous tank man picture, was of a PRC citizen stoping tanks leaving the square, because he felt the protesters where let off too easy, also he was able to walk up and open the hatch of the tank, that is unthinkable atleast in America where I live.
Look I get it, its a huge cultural naritive, its a touch stone for many in the west, like perl harbor, 9-11 the destruction of the maine. I am not even asking you to change your mind, or to say that it was all wonderful, however it is still important to recognize that there is no unbias sorce, and we do have to examin bias in the media we consume, and in the papers we read, and even on the internet. And while we can attempt to be objective, that does not eleminate bias nor the need to think about it. I am not sure how you learned media literacy in school, but when i learned it it was a very poor showing, one where some publications are ALWAYS trustworthy and some are NEVER trustworthy, and that leads us into an issue. for example my username is "Red Army Dog Cooper" named after my dog. I am obviously a communist, I will not hide that. However I am on .ml not because I am a communist, I chose it because it was the largest instance at the time I joined, and I did not ever change it because the only real alternives I saw that being beehaw, i did not like its locked down nature. I am not on .ML because I am a communist I am here because I am an early adopter and everyone seems to federate with it.
For a link, you can see here, there are more but this should show atleast part of the consensus the night after that it was not a massicre in the square. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
That sure is a whole lot of words to avoid talking about the substance of the matter
I have also been to Tiananmen Square (weird you wonβt write the name, though I never said you canβt say itβ¦so not sure what that rant was about). There was a huge armored vehicle driving around with a megaphone telling everybody to be calm and not make a scene and just have a good time.
Socialist countries are Norway and Denmark.
They're still capitalist but maybe few of the closest to being leftist in a global right wing hegemony
Actually, Norway and Denmark represent what's typically called a mixed economy.
All economies are mixed. The US has a Public Postal Service, and Cuba has small private ownership. When discussing Capitalism vs Socialism, what matters more is which form of ownership forms the principle aspect of the economy, ie has control of large firms, key industries, etc.
Didn't downvote you, and I do agree that "mixed economy" doesn't technically have a concrete meaning. I could've said "welfare state" as well. Here, "mixed" is generally understood to be somewhere near the middle-ish, however we define that. As you note, the US and Cuba lie on this spectrum but far to either side of it. So even though "all economies are mixed", the economies of the Nordic states are more mixed than most.
In general, I believe we agree that Norway and Denmark aren't "socialist".
Sure, that's fair. The reason I stress that analyzing which is principle is because that determines the trajectories and class character of the system as a whole, not which percentage of total public vs private exists. The Capitalist nature of the Nordic Countries explains why worker protections are shrinking over time, and why these countries depend on outsourced labor to exist in the first place.
Norway and Denmark are Social Democracies. Private Property is the basis of their economies, the large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly privately owned. Socialism would imply the opposite, Public Ownership of the overwhelming majority of large firms and key industries, at minimum.
Oh. What countries are socialist?
Cuba, the PRC, Vietnam, etc. All of those are countries where Public Ownership is the principle aspect of their economies. Socialism isn't the same as welfare Capitalism.
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.