this post was submitted on 04 May 2025

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Please consider supporting Lemmy development (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by sunaurus@lemm.ee to c/meta@lemm.ee

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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!

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 52 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I've been around for long enough, time for me to donate.

Sure the two top admins have some shitty opinions, but they still are the main people who have put this software out. The two have been tirelessly working on it for years and years, and have made code that helps everyone, whether you share their opinions or not.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

You are paying for their programming, not their opinions. I dont think its a big deal if they have flaws or opinions i dont agree with.

So they dont like trans people. How does that even matter? Any trans person can use the platform anyway. The code doesnt have any opinions, its just code, and that code can be used to support trans people. The little opinions of the devs have no effect on this.

I cant believe how spoiled some people are here. We have a platform, free of ads, quality mobile apps, lots of instances, quite a lot of users. And its not owned by big tech. We own it.

Focus on the pluses here. I dont think another Lemmy will come along anytime soon. Alternatives are not even close in quality.

[–] doctortran@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Alternatives are not even close in quality.

Yes and we can go donate to those alternatives instead and help build them up.

Completely divorced of their political views, I don't think I want to donate to them simply because I don't believe they're doing a good job managing the platform. Donations aren't just down, they lost those donations. And when confronted with this fact, and told that they should probably change some things if they want to keep getting donations, they've staunchly refused.

This does not inspire faith in the development team.

Meanwhile lemmy's development is either too guarded or too complicated for anybody else to join the team and assist. It's still just these two. If the platform is growing, it cannot just be these two.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Well, we will see. It would be stupid if Lemmy died because the users couldnt accept the opinions of two little devs, but sure, it may happen.

Then a lot of users will go back to big tech, and the ad business will profit once again. Because we couldnt accept that two devs on planet earth had opinions we didnt like.

Two people.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What?

PieFed, Mbin, nodebb, flarum - this is a partial listing of the software that does similar to Lemmy, and there's more besides them even (okay so development on Sublinks seems to be exceedingly slow these days, but the code is still there if anyone wants to contribute...).

And this doesn't even begin to touch on the likes of Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops (okay tbf this one isn't federating yet iirc, but it planned to?), all of which share people's thoughts and words in a social media atmosphere.

Lemmy isn't the sole competitor to Reddit by any stretch. Heck, a year ago Lemmy.World put out a post (I can find it if you really need me to?) all but outright announcing their intention to switch to Sublinks when it became ready. And at the time that had like 80% of all Lemmy MAUs (monthly active users).

Lemmy is not what makes this place special. The people here are what make this place special. If the people move, then what makes it special will go with them. I personally migrated to PieFed 7 months ago (before it was fully ready), and now that PieFed has surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (e.g. we just added polls and post flairs), I am certain that I am not the only one willing to do so.:-)

You are paying for their programming, not their opinions.

Also, I was going to respond to your original comment but suppose I'll combine it here: you do not seem to be aware that donations also go to support the server costs of Lemmy.ml. Thus, you are in fact paying for their opinions to be spread - they seem to not be offering the choice for others to receive only the code support but not Lemmy.ml?

Check out PieFed - whether you stay with it or not is immaterial, I'm saying that you'll be impressed as fuck with what you see. The sign-up wizard alone will probably make you fall absolutely in love with it. And if not, then the LONG list of features definitely will - e.g. categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable. Then, even if you decide to keep using your Lemmy account, you'll at least know what is going on with PieFed, which is amazing:-). (The Interstellar app supports PieFed officially, with that coming for Thunder as well.)

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 7 minutes ago* (last edited 6 minutes ago)

I was talking about reddit alternatives with quality mobile apps, not fediverse apps in general.

In that category i didnt know any besides Lemmy, but ok, piefed is worth checking out. But which mobile app has the quality of Sync?

And yes, im aware that some part of the donations may go to the Lemmy.ml instance but I also believe that developers need to have a decent salary. So its not strange that 1000 dollars per month is not nearly enough to live on. But people just ignore that and focus on not supporting lemmy.ml because they dont like the political views of the developers.

But yeah I will check out piefed. Its good with more alternatives, specially written in easy languages like python, since rust is very difficult to contribute to. However, large python codebases tend to be very buggy due to lack of types, but maybe they use the optional type system. Its also slow, but doesnt matter so much when most of the cpu usage is the database.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But Cybertruck owners? Nah fuck 'em.

[–] kernelle@0d.gs 1 points 2 days ago

Tesla doesn't open-source their plans so you can build your own, better version of the cybertruck.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 6 points 3 days ago

FWIW, I freaked out once over something relatively minor across the Lemmy-modality, and the dev (one of the two, can't remember which) was just a calm, gem of a person upon my temporary paranoia.

Man, I was... blown away.
(thought I was going to be banned to hell, yadda-yadda)