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.
Those people don’t really exist, just like the people who said that the “commies eat babies” back in the 1960s.
Go talk about tiananmen square or Mao in general in lemmygrad or hexbear. Come back with the results.
The square is quite lovely I wish to visit. Your argument is just as flawed as a teacher I had who said you could not even say the name of the square in china, you can, first they do have freedom of speech, though not interpreted as absolutly as the United States does, and second that is the place where all the government buildings are.
Second I will tell you I do not have a paste bin with every article that mentions it was not a massicure after the event, I will go and look for some. However if you are talking about the reaction being overwhelmingly negitive and feeling samey, it is because that is treated as a gotcha, dispite contemporary evidence showing it to be untrue, statements from the leader saying their goal was to have the streets run red with blood, and even the famous tank man picture, was of a PRC citizen stoping tanks leaving the square, because he felt the protesters where let off too easy, also he was able to walk up and open the hatch of the tank, that is unthinkable atleast in America where I live.
Look I get it, its a huge cultural naritive, its a touch stone for many in the west, like perl harbor, 9-11 the destruction of the maine. I am not even asking you to change your mind, or to say that it was all wonderful, however it is still important to recognize that there is no unbias sorce, and we do have to examin bias in the media we consume, and in the papers we read, and even on the internet. And while we can attempt to be objective, that does not eleminate bias nor the need to think about it. I am not sure how you learned media literacy in school, but when i learned it it was a very poor showing, one where some publications are ALWAYS trustworthy and some are NEVER trustworthy, and that leads us into an issue. for example my username is “Red Army Dog Cooper” named after my dog. I am obviously a communist, I will not hide that. However I am on .ml not because I am a communist, I chose it because it was the largest instance at the time I joined, and I did not ever change it because the only real alternives I saw that being beehaw, i did not like its locked down nature. I am not on .ML because I am a communist I am here because I am an early adopter and everyone seems to federate with it.
For a link, you can see here, there are more but this should show atleast part of the consensus the night after that it was not a massicre in the square. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
That sure is a whole lot of words to avoid talking about the substance of the matter
I have also been to Tiananmen Square (weird you won’t write the name, though I never said you can’t say it…so not sure what that rant was about). There was a huge armored vehicle driving around with a megaphone telling everybody to be calm and not make a scene and just have a good time.