- cross-posted to:
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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.
Edit: Liberapay is the preferable donation option, as it has very low fees and is also open source.
What if I’m so propagandized by American technofascist social media that I am incapable of believing Marxists would be able to make and maintain a project of this size? How do I donate to the real devs? (/j)
Real question: assuming I’m basically broke, which is more helpful to y’all: a yearly dono of $100 or a weekly pledge of $2?
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.
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
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 should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
From the post
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work.
So @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml are the developers
You can see from their usernames, they are primarily associated with lemmy.ml, which they are the admins of
Nutomic and Dessalines, and lemmy.ml
I personally block hexbear, and de facto ignore lemmy.ml because I find it to be a hive of vitriol and unproductive toxic behaviour, but I still signed up to donate because imho, lemmy’s open and decentralized nature make it fundamentally valuable and a worthwhile piece of societal infrastructure.
But please don’t abuse our trust.
I love lemmy the project. But there has too much political arguments in some communities and they will hate you if you aren’t 100% agree with them. Even the post and the group/community are not political, comments will turn it to political. I am kind of tired(although I know some ppl are thrilled with political arguments). There is not much the devs can do, but the content does affect the user experience quite a lot.
Nevertheless, thanks for all the hard work, nutomic and dessalines. I will donate.
Fully agree that theres too much politics. Like you say too often about attacking some kind of enemy rather trying to understand other perspectives. For better or for worse, those seem to be the types of people more likely to use a new platform like Lemmy. Hopefully in the future they will also get tired of this stuff.
Unfortunately Reddit and their mods/admins behaviour over the years show that the opposite will happen. When the Lemmy mods are already so militantly anti-open discussion and authoritarian, they’re not going to soften up - they’ll go even further towards the dictatorship they clearly desire.
I’d love to donate or even start contributing towards the code myself, but the current environment that is being fostered on the big “default” communities and instances is like Reddit on steroids, just speedrunning to the end game of mass bans and mod abuse - and I don’t envision myself wanting to be a part of that for too long. I wiped and deleted by 15+ year old reddit account because of what it had turned into.
I don’t know the solution, but something needs to be done at a system level to give users a way to remove mods and change how communities are managed.
I feel sorry for your situation. But at least in lemmy the dev are willing to try to resolve this problem. Low chance is still better than zero chance.
Here is an wild idea. Since a few communities are so divided and clearly they only have a good time when they talk to ppl exactly like them. Flame war happens when two groups of hardcore opposed users argue. Since normal users won’t have all days to argue with either side, if one side leaves, the wars is ended.
So instead of banning users by admin or blocking one users each time by users. Can we have allow users to create their own public group (or a gang)? Users can join any groups. Instead of blocking one user, users can simply block the whole group. Posts and comments will be hided if blocking.
Advantages:
- No banning is needed means admin’s time and gang members’ time can be saved.
- finally no one disagree with those gangs members anymore, so I guess they’re happy
- instead of using time from admin and uninvolved users, users who frequently involved controversial topics everywhere should spend their own time to create a group for staying in their comfort zone.
- uninvolved users don’t have to read all those flame war
Disadvantages:
- those gangs become more extreme cuz they miss the opportunity to understand each other
- dev have to do more work
- server may have more load
- some users might say those gangs should host their own instances
Ps: I don’t use the term community because our board is also called community. I don’t want to mix them up. May be i should call it users group, but I am too lazy. I do agree better word should be used.
Just did the $5 donation on patreon. It’s on a lot but I hope it helps, I might not agree with everything the founders believe in but I really appreciate this open sourced community and the ideas and conversations I’ve had on it. It’s definitely worth supporting
Thank you, all donations help :)
Have you considered applying for a FUTO grant?
I actually got in contact with them yesterday, will probably have a meeting soon to discuss how we can work together with them.
lemmy.ml is run by the developers?
Yes, it’s the “original” instance
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).
If I didn’t respond to anyone below, thank you. It means a lot, and makes the years of work I’ve spent on lemmy feel worthwhile and important.
I wanted to say specifically thank you for Jerboa. I only have a phone, so it makes using Lemmy painless.
I don’t really mind which way I donate but I want to ensure I donate by giving the most money to lemmy and not to whatever platform is hosting it.
While I am not particularly interested in setting up crypto, aside from that which platform would you prefer I donated from?
Liberapay is the best option, because it doesnt take any fees beyond payment processing, and its also open source. Thanks for donating!
NB: also don’t beat yourself down if you cannot be contributing financially: there are many ways to contribute to the community by posting, commenting, reporting, moderating, and overall just being active and nice ;) your presence and participation here already means a lot!
Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!
Yep, instance admins and mods need your support also. It takes a lot of work to keep an instance free of trolls, and its a thankless job.
Lemmy default UI should seriously consider a daily donation goal, similar to old Reddit. Implement a backend API to fetch the daily amount needed and the current amount donated, and stick it on the right hand side by all the trending communities. As a stats nerd, this would seriously motivate me to donate more.
Donation nags to users were added in a recent update. I think it shows up in a year from the last popup, so about 11 months away
The timing is randomized for each user, but everyone see it within a year after the update. Main problem is that Google and Apple are very strict about donations inside apps, so we cant show it to mobile users.
This just changed with Apple this week and you can now directly list donation options in app btw
Do you have a link with more details? This is what Ive been told:
a little more then 24h into the campaign.
patreon increased from $871 to $1,138 (+30%).
liberapay rose from $301 to $393.66 (+30%).
I think it could have been improved further , the text could be a bit longer (I talked to Nutomic and few suggestion were kinda shortened too much IMO). but i think we can overall call the campaign a success. I realize we can tweak and experiment with this for far too long and without A/B testing we could be “fooled by randomness” and make the wrong choices. but we could measure how many people leave the page of the text before we expect them to finish reading to get a indication if it is too small or big. information beats speculation.
Anyway this text is now “field tested” and should probably be used more with maybe minor tweaks (link to it from the website donate page and the pop up).
Is there any evidence the pop up asking for donation is working as intended? , adding randomness to this could make it too hard to debug.
I think what it does prove beyond all doubt if the pop up is working is that the pop up text is not enough. People want a clear and persuasive rational. underestimation potential donors ability to read a short text could be a costly mistake. a quick googling indicates a optimal length of about 1,000 to 2,500 words while the current text stands at about 500 words.
Thanks for the analysis. In addition to the monthly donations there have also been many one-time donations. I agree that it makes sense to update the donation dialog and popup with adapted text from this post, will do that shortly.
Best of luck raising funds! 👍 Pinned for extra visibility.
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.
Chipping in a bit (30CAD quarterly). I really owe it to your and dessalines’ work, having been here for over 2 years now.
