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.
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Update: For those of you who want to support Lemmy development without financing the hosting of lemmy.ml, know that the hosting is paid exclusively through OpenCollective. You can see the payment details at this link. This means donations through all other platforms (Liberapay, Ko-fi, Patreon, Crypto) are exclusively for Lemmy development, and not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.
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I advise you to consider the weekly pledge over the one time donation. It would be a better course of action as it might help them plan ahead.
Also, I’m a caveman, so I would advise against following my advice
The real devs are locked into a server room with appropriate supplies of food and caffeine. So dont worry about them.
Yearly or weekly doesnt make a big difference so whatever works for you. Depending on the platform small donations may have higher fees though.
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
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As far as I understand it, the development team of Lemmy is bigger than that, but nutomic and dessalines as the founders and paid to develop lemmy full-time of course are the most important ones.
@sleeplessone@lemmy.ml is a maintainer of lemmy I think and
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca is a maintainer of lemmy backend?
Not sure about the status of flamingos and phiresky who also contribute to the codebase and were part of the recent AMA
Flamingos is a much loved admin of feddit.uk ☺️
Nutomic and Dessalines, and lemmy.ml
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
But I want to support lemmy.ml
Then you can donate via Opencollective. But honestly it doesnt matter, because lemmy.ml hosting is already covered, and is very cheap compared to developer salaries.
I appreciate the transparency! :)
This update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
To those who don’t want to give because of the devs’ political views, I’d like to say this goes into improving the Lemmy software our communities here are based on, not making some political podium for the devs in particular.
There’s a lot of rubbish on Lemmy… because it’s the internet. Like the Great Garbage Patch of the Pacific, it collects; but I still like the Ocean. Some people look down particularly on .ml, but personally I think this is unjustified.
In fact, before joining Lemmy I heard some rumour of the controversy and went looking. I certainly disagree strongly with certain things I found, but my impression was of Dessalines and Nutomic treating the Internet as a forum for respectful debate and this Lemmy as a technology project not a personal political force - as many see Reddit as becoming. Well, that was my impression, so I was happy to join, and I’ve not been disappointed.
On this Lemmy software we have many communities, some which vehemently hate each other, but we’re all supported by this foundational software. If it’s too awful to you, you could of course use a different platform, and still federate with the Lemmy communities you love! But we’re still here.
Because, after all, in any real community there are people you don’t get on with, and part of life is about learning what it means to love each other and live together even so. And that goes for every software project too - somewhere, hiding in the dark recesses, is something quite unpalatable intrinsically linked in. If your ideology says you can’t use anything built with such problems, you’d better start building everything yourself.
So, you don’t have to support Lemmy. Even if you use it. You don’t have to agree with my take on it. But I’d like to encourage most of you to consider supporting Dessaline and Nutomic to continue this development work, and not just the bare minimum they need - let it overflow with blessing, since we have received such blessing from them!
…Or you can all send me angry replies for ranting too long on the Internet about something you disagree with ;-)
Thank you :)
Absolutely agree! :) thank you very much for stating this.
Ok so personally I really wouldn’t mind having some non-tracking ads in a banner somewhere to at least support a bit (perhaps on an opt-in system). This’d allow me to support lemmy just a little bit every time I use it.
I can see how that would feel good, but unless they were selling ads directly to friendly companies (and even disregarding the fact that it seems unlikely there would be many/any given their anticapitalist bent), this would make the project almost no money, while annoying users and opening them up to a lot of criticisms and a lot of overhead work building it and keeping that system running. Plus the vast majority of instances would probably not willingly run ads to benefit the devs, either due to not wanting ads or political disagreements with the devs, so it’d be only lemmy.ml and some micro instances. A nominal donation of $1/month from users like you, who may not want to spend much but does want to support in some way, would make them more money than a years worth of browsing
Also at least 99% of Lemmy users run adblockers, so no one would want to advertise in the first place lol.
I think we’d all prefer you just post and spread the community that way.
Sent a bit. Thank you for Lemmy
I gladly doubled my monthly contribution. Thank you so much for working on Lemmy! I had no idea you worked on it full-time. That’s insane! It is the first fediverse software I ever used, and it opened my eyes to a whole other side of the internet I didn’t know existed.
Thanks! Yep its been a lot of years of work to get it to this level, but it still astonishes me that a handful of ppl can best reddit / twitter when we put our minds to it.
Quality over quantity I think. From what I’ve seen, the average Lemmy user is significantly more insightful and respectful than the average across other social media platforms. From the development side, you two are free to focus only on what genuinely improves the user experience, without having to worry about investors or some board forcing you to worsen the user experience because profits.
Donated via LiberaPay for 1 year.
SCAM!
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I thought he was a bot. I was wrong.
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The internet has made people truly paranoid lol.
We’re currently living in the Grift Age of civilization.
You thought Lemmy’s co-founder and main developer is a bot? Lmao
Despite my best efforts I do act like a dumbass at times.
Welcome to the club. And it’s very much not limited only to internet forums.
no
You’re correct.
Featured, best of luck to the donation drive. The lemmy developers do good work and deserve good pay
I just noticed that featuring will only pin to “All” and not “Local”. It is helpful to cross-post to a local community to pin it more visibly.
Good point, thanks
Has nutomic ever apologized for his transphobia? That behavior should never be rewarded
lemmy.ml is run by the developers?
Yes, it’s the “original” instance
Kinda but the overlap between lemmy ml admin/mod team and lemmy developers is not 100%
Are any of the posted platforms better or worse to subscribe to? Patreon is easiest but if there are any percentages taken out etc etc I’ll switch it up
liberapay is probably the best. For payments processed there by stripe the fee avg is around 3.1%, and there’s no additional fee to the platform. Patreon ends up being like 15-20% iirc when you add up all fees. Unsure about opencollective or ko-fi
Jeez thats a huge cut from Patreon what the hell! Will definitely switch
Both Liberapay and Ko-fi have no fees (besides payment processing). Liberapay has the additional advantage of being open source, and automatically splitting payments between Dessalines and me.
ko-fi does not take a platform fee (unless they specifically enabled giving away 5% to ko-fi but I don’t think they did)
this was a good way to find out my former liberapay had crapped out over a year ago
Thanks for the work that you are doing.
Signed up on Patreon.
PSA: Patreon takes a large cut from the donations last I checked. I call it convenience tax. Basically the same convenience but no cut you can use liberapay. They’re the cemocratic version so to speak.
But thanks for participating. I appreciate fellow dobators.
not really related, but is this https://weblate.join-lemmy.org/projects/lemmy/lemmy/ the official way to translate the project? i dont donate due to my financial status, but i often do translation for opensource stuff.
Yes thats right. Translations are also a good way to contribute.
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Thanks :)
Literally all we need is everyone to kick in a couple bucks a month and I think everything would be in great shape. I think the user base is like 65k+ users currently?
Around 50k, it went back down from the recent high of 57k.
This is really interesting. Thanks for this link (and for all the work you do on Lemmy in general).
