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?
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.
They should spend more time devving and less time mod actioning wrongthink
Agreed. I’d like to support continued development of Lemmy, but I’m hesitant to do so knowing that part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
If that’s true, that’s misappropriating the donations being that they’re billed as supporting development. Server maintenance and upkeep is important, but do not mislead your benefactors to do so, lest you destroy their trust and stop donating to your cause.
I would like it if both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml could confirm or put to rest if this is true.
Edit: a couple of users pointed out that lemmy.ml is used as a test bed for lemmy development. This is good info, and not something I, personally, was aware of.
The devs need an instance with real users and real load to test changes.
lemmy.ml is that test instance.
It’s a non-optional part of the dev pipeline, that’s why its upkeep is financed by dev donations, too.
So, it is true, and it isn’t misleading supporters, or misappropriating donations.
Sounds like that should be more of an incentive to make sure the instance isn’t shit then.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never before seen mention of this; this is the type of stuff that should be mentioned in blurbs like the one above. People who are not aware of lemmy.ml being a test server may find it off putting otherwise.
No, they don’t. In professional software development you have testing systems and production systems. You DONT test on production. You DON’T use testing as production.
They don’t need real users or real load. If they can’t generate/simulate testing loads. They aren’t serious developers worth funding.
If you have a current budget of $1000/month, per dev, you are forced to relax a little on best practices.
This isn’t a professional endeavour, and it won’t be until donations increase by a factor of 5+.
If you are a single hobbyist coder working from your bedroom at night in your spare time for a piece of software used by five people. Maybe.
If you’re developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, whom you are soliciting for donations. While telling them that sorry your donations must go towards funding an authoritarian echo chamber as a side hobby. Hell no, to put it politely.
What if you’re working full time, developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, but their donations only amount to a hobbyist contribution?
You are basically demanding enterprise quality from devs who get $1000/month for their 40h/week work.
That’s straight up ridiculous.
Or rather, unrealistic.
At this point, if the devs acted economically, they’d simply stop working on lemmy, take a software dev job, and earn 8x more money.
And you are somehow still criticizing them for not doing more, while they are making lemmy possible, for peanuts.
You know what? FUCK YOU!
Nothing like that. Demanding minimum competency. If they need Hardware or money for testing systems ask for that. Don’t tell us that we have to contribute to their hobby directly. Because otherwise we’ll tell them no.
Thanks!
Lemmy.ml is a test server, it’s needed for development
Donations pay their salaries, everything donated goes towards their living expenses in general. If they go to the movies, you are also paying for that. It’s the same as a company paying programming workers xyz wage, that’s the price of software labor, but it doesn’t mean all of that money directly goes to the bare necessities for maintaining dev work.
Yet said test server is a toxic cesspit of tankies who actively brigade and harass those who disagree with them : /
Nope you are free to defederate and block if you want to believe your fantasies
There are a lot of Marxists on servers run by Marxists. I wouldn’t call disagreements toxic or brigading being especially worse on Lemmy.ml than other instances.
No, it is notably worse on the tankie triad, I can disagree with someone from slrpnk and they wont send me death threads or mass downvote anything that critical of their views unlike many of Lemmy.ml’s userbase.
I haven’t really seen what you describe, I do think if you’re saying something extremely unpopular in an area getting downvoted is to be expected, though.
You’re willfully ignorant then, I’ve seen plenty of occasions of tankies dogpiling people who think Ukraine has a right to defend itself & Stalin deserves to be roasting in hell alongside Hitler & Kissinger.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
Consider the following:
This isn’t some scandal if you understand basic microeconomics. Inherently this is true unless nutomic or dessalines stop running lemmy.ml or find a way to run it off of dreams and unicorn farts. They’re not “misappropriating funds” or whatever; the nature of funds is that they’re fungible.
Edit: And it’s not like in light of increased donations, they’d be taking the Lemmy development funds and using them to buy a schwanky new servertron 3000 with kung-fu grip for .ml. .ml was already open-registration, so it’s not like it’s possible for them to misappropriate development funds to open the floodgates and let thousands of new users in who were previously locked out. We can monitor how many users .ml has, and we can audit the software it’s running.
It’s not a scandal that funds are used to run a test instance but it is problematic that the developers hold extreme political views and are very public about it.
That’s always going to limit who is willing to donate.
Exactly. Everyone in here is like “oh, .ml is their test instance - there’s nothing they can do about it!”
Like, you could make your test instance not a cesspool, and then people would be a lot more willing to support it.
you lost me at
because that’s crypto bro talk.
Fungibility is a basic term in economics to describe interchangeability. 💀 Fucking hell. I’m using it at all because I’m having to get basic enough to describe the microeconomics of how giving money to human beings is inherently donating to everything human beings do, not just specifically what it’s nominally being used for. That you’ve only ever heard it in terms of cryptocurrency isn’t my fault.