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?
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 €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
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Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.
Currently donating $5 a month to lemmy.world. I’ll continue for the foreseeable future.
I would never donate so long as that donation supports lemmy.ml
Based on the general community sentiment I’ve seen and your reports of barely breaking even here, you can either break from the tankies or watch lemmy die without enough funds.
Are you aware that the top and bottom part of the post are from completetly different people? The top part is from Lemmy.world’s admin, while the bottom part is from one of the Lemmy developers (and Lemmy.ml’s admin).
…are you under the impression that they’re unrelated?
As stated in the post, donating to lemmy.world infra costs always means that a portion of your donation goes to lemmy devs. Said devs have very explicitly stated that part of those donations finance lemmy.ml
it’s around 2.5% of our monthly expenses that go to the lemmy devs. 2% of the stated minimum donation goal would be the hosting costs for lemmy.ml. with the assumption that the lemmy donation goals is met, that would mean around 0.05% of the donations to lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation are used for lemmy.ml hosting costs.
this was already explained in a few other places in the comments here, but in the end, even if it wasn’t directly going to instance operating costs, if you pay people a salary and they then take it out of their own pockets there is no real difference, as the money would still end up in the same place.
Yes, correct, that’s why I’m not donating. I don’t want to be paying lemmy.ml.
A small amount of support is still explicit support.
as this has since been clarified by @nutomic@lemmy.ml, i have updated my comment above and can confirm that it is in fact 0% of lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation donations that go towards the lemmy.ml instance rather than 0.05%.
Sorry but gotta highlight the maths here
0.05%
You would have to give L.w $10,000 for L.ml to get $5
They probably got more value from your posts in this thread in an abstract sense
A small amount of support is still explicit support. I don’t support lemmy.ml, and I’m not going to donate any of my money to them.
If lemmy.world wants my money, they need to alter where their donations go 🤷♂️ I’m not going to rage on the topic or anything, but they’re not getting my money
Okay, but maybe think about what happens to all this if it doesn’t get funded. No one is forcing you to pay, it’s entirely your choice after all, just like it is to try and put people off.
Wanna go back to Reddit?
This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
Being Ukrainian it’s not possible for me to donate to supporters of russian genocidal imperialism.
ITT: anticommunism.
Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.
Lol no
Nah. If the project starves and shuts down I’ll just go without. I’ll never donate money to social media platforms
Can’t you lobby with the EU too to fund you because a market with european social media is needed against the dominating US social media? Will deffo donate!
Why would the EU fund developers who are openly supporting russian imperialist expansion and genocide?
Im not a lobbyist and have no idea how to even get started with that. Feel free to give it a try if you have any contacts in that area.
Give up your admin/mod roles on .ml, be neutral developers, then I am happy to donate.
They need an instance for test purposes or no development would be done. And they would run such instance as they see fit.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
Test instances shouldn’t be used to push a political narrative
Well, if the instance owner has a political narrative he would push it. Because he believes that it is a good thing. Test instance or not.
The only option I see is that someone else would offer them his instance (which has to be rather popular) for test purposes. But that would not do anything to .ml because then they would just pay for .ml from their pocket (which against comes from development funding).
And denying lemmy development funding would do nothing to .ml because .ml running costs are too small. So it would just continue to work on the latest version with developers hotfixing things only for their instance as they break.
But do they need to moderate that instance?
Why would anyone apoint a moderator he does not agree with?
Because they’re begging for money all over Lemmy and getting laughed at for it because of .ml censorship policies?
They only made one post in .ml (I would assume ml users are fine with their policies). Everything else are reposts done by third parties.
And I’m sure the fact that all of the instance owners just happened to post within hours of each other is totally a coincidence, and has nothing to do with the devs reaching out to them and asking them to do so.
I would assume all of the instance owners are dependant on Lemmy development and therefore follow dev communication channels.
No such thing as neutral.
More than happy to monetarily support this amazing open source project with monthly contributions! Thank you to all the devs involved in running this platform
I donate one euro a month to lemmy.world. It’s not a lot but I’m not rolling in cash and I feel like the service is worth paying something for, even if I can only contribute a nominal amount. But I feel like they should have an option to take an entire year’s worth of donations at once would be more efficient than a monthly withdrawal.
As it currently stands, a monthly bank transfer of 1 € is taken from my account and I feel like a significant portion of that is going to be taken by bank fees, whereas if they took a single annual transfer of 12 €, they would keep a much larger percentage of the money.
I’m skint sorry
Im okay, was gonna donate. But not if it supports lemmy.ml
I used to put up $50/mo to Hexbear, until they banned me for defending the DSA.
So far, the politics on this community have been dogshit. But the moderation has been generally fair, friendly, and functional. To you, I say, Shut Up and Take My Money. Thanks for letting me continue my shitposting habits, even if we’ve agreed to disagree.
