PieFedLemmy needs more donations
Nutomic@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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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.
I'm putting in a dollar a week for the second year now and i plan on keeping it up. If only 1500 people did what I do, we're completely fine.
If you host an instance, please give a dollar a week. If you spend more than 10 hrs on lemmy per week, please give a dollar. Its not that hard. Think what stuff you pay more for and spend less time o, have less fun on and learn less from.
I also think that big instances should be funneling a portion of their donations to the devs. I send more than I get, which is my choice.
Democracy requires participation.
Thanks for the reminder!
Donated on Liberapay.
As others have said, this is financing software development, not a political campaign. I first learned of the fediverse when Reddit removed 3rd party apps, and I felt like my eyes were opened. This is what I want the internet to be, decentralized and running on open source software, and I'm sure I'm far from being alone in this, so thanks to the devs for that.
Also Jerboa is great!
Jerboa is the best, it's how I browse Lemmy exclusively.
Donated with renewal! Thank you all for the hard work 😁
Same! Keep up the good work!
Wouldn't have an alternative to Reddit without it—so, by all means
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.
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
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! :)
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
From the post
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
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 update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
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.
It absolutely is. You also inspire people to get into foss and take up the good fight. Thanks for doing this.
Underrated point. I started out with all the usual bloatware and, at best, a rudamentary feeling why that might be bad. I ditched Windows by now and are activly trying to get rid of Google and their likes, replacing more and more apps with foss alternatives. Trying to pull my family in too. That simply not would have happend without beeing exposed to this by Lemmy.
Thats me a year ago. Now i run pretty much 100% foss, have converted some family, run a foss it business and help activists stay safe on electronic devices. I'm not joking. Lemmy was a big part in that.
If I remember correctly, I got exposed to this because of the GNU + Linux interjection copypasta, which made me know about GNU
❤️
I wanted to say specifically thank you for Jerboa. I only have a phone, so it makes using Lemmy painless.
This motivated me to donate 3 € per month. Not a big one but I am doing my part! I could also make a post at !meta@sopuli.xyz about the subject.
Thank you!
Chipping in a bit (30CAD quarterly). I really owe it to your and dessalines' work, having been here for over 2 years now.
I have a dollar or two to spare
Just donated! Best of lucks.
Thx!
Thanks!
Best of luck with this. Would you guys find it helpful if you had more GH contributors?
You mean more people making pull requests? Of course, code contributions are always welcome.
Absolutely, lemmy could use so much more dev help.
I wish you wouldn't use GitHub but an open source forge, though.
I personally wouldn't be against migrating our issue tracker off github in the future, especially once the federated alternatives become more mature. The other code contributers would also need to agree though.
We also have the code mirrored in several places off github.
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Thank you!
Best of luck raising funds! 👍 Pinned for extra visibility.
Donated , kudos for XMR option
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!
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.
Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!
Been donating monthly for a while now!
Donated via LiberaPay for 1 year.
I've set up a recurring payment - thanks for the great work!
Thx!
Have you considered applying for a FUTO grant?
https://futo.org/grants/
I actually got in contact with them yesterday, will probably have a meeting soon to discuss how we can work together with them.
Thanks for the reminder, sometimes I forget to support these important pieces of software.
I feel like us old people need to give a little extra to pay for the next generation of young tinkerers so things can continue to be free
Sent a modest amount of XMR (do so from time to time). Thank you for all the work!
Youre welcome!
This worked on me, I just became a contributor
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.
Sent a bit. Thank you for Lemmy
Doubled my monthly donation hopefully more people will do the same.
I've been hosting my own instance for two years now without hiccups.
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.
I’ve been considering donating for a while (I already donate to my instance) so I’ve set that up now. ~$5 a month isn’t much but I hope if a few more people do it too it will start to add up.
Sent something on your ETH address, check it on mainnet :))), and fiat on Ko-Fi too :))
Thanks :)
Donated what I could on a hard month (something something insurance company something something half of my salary), but with heart. If the fundraiser persist, I'll be glad to donate more next month!
Made a yearly donation. Might not be a lot, but I hope others do the same. Keep up the good work ❤️
Thx!
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 :)
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.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
This is really interesting. Thanks for this link (and for all the work you do on Lemmy in general).
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:
1) No banning is needed means admin's time and gang members' time can be saved.
2) finally no one disagree with those gangs members anymore, so I guess they're happy
3) 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.
4) uninvolved users don't have to read all those flame war
Disadvantages:
1) those gangs become more extreme cuz they miss the opportunity to understand each other
2) dev have to do more work
3) server may have more load
4) 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.
Maybe just start an instance where politics are banned?
Doesn’t solve the problem of “default” communities with shitty mods.
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.
Wouldn't be many users, but would having a separate version on F-Droid be a way to be able to reach some of them?
Maybe, but thats up to the individual app developers.
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:
https://github.com/mlemgroup/mlem/issues/1962
https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/nonprofits/
And like the Vivaldi browser you can get a permanent badge on your name and avatar picture if you donate. im a sucker for those things.
and different color depending the amount donated.
Signal does that too
I signed up for a medium donation.
While I don't agree with some things happening on .ml We should not discard imperfect allies.
Thank you devs for the great work you're doing.
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.
Do you have a preference as to which platform the donation is done through?
Liberapay is preferable as it has low fees and is also open source.
Thank you, Liberapay it is. Keep up the good work!
Best of luck!
Thanks!
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.
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.
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!
Just started a small monthly donation. I’ll up it, if I use lemmy more, but I appreciate its existence. Thank you Devs for your contribution.
Youre welcome!
From what I can see, what's stopping a lot of people donating is the fact that donations cover .ml as well, I personally think this is a non-issue, because .ml doesn't cost much to run (from what I can see).
Would it be possible to split donations for lemmy development, and donations for lemmy.ml?
Yes it would be possible. The question is if people would really be more willing to donate in that case, or if they would look for a different excuse instead.
There are obviously other good reasons for not donating or at least thinking hard about it first.
But removing one bad thing surely couldn't hurt.
Actually lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
If that is the case you should make it clear in the description what exactly is being funded on each platform.
I already updated the description on Opencollective to mention this. Other platforms only cover developer salaries like the descriptions say.
Took me a moment to understand the point. But I agree, from a transparency view alone. The users of .ml should be funding .ml, not the people trying to keep lemmy as a project alive. Generally, large insrances should be funding the project, not the project those instances imo.
Lemmy.ml is the dev test instance, for one, and for two, the donations are to pay the devs wages, which allows them to dev Lemmy full time. You're essentially saying you want to control what the devs of Lemmy can pay for with their salaries at that point.
What's wrong with dev.lemmy.ml enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml?
That aside, I think that there would be enough people who would donate to .ml, I read somewhere that it was €30/month, which doesn't seem like much.
We always put out calls before (major) releases, but very few ppl actually help test. This means a lot of bugs only get spotted when more eyes see them in production.
All of these issues are solved in the corporate world by paying quality assurance / testing teams, but open source projects don't have those resources.
Where are those posted? I think I always miss them, happy to help with testing before major releases
In the matrix dev chats, but we could also post them elsewhere.
The fact that there aren't a lot of users to give feedback. Lemmy.ml is like a public beta channel, in a way.
true, but if it gets more people to donate, I think it would help.
Maybe, but that would be incredibly hard to enforce. The fees for upkeep on Lemmy.ml are very small, it isn't what's at risk, what's at risk is having full time devs for maintenance and new features. Lemmy.ml would stay even if the devs need to switch to part time dev work.
There’s also the fact that Nutomic is a known transphobe, and donating to lemmy’s development means supporting said transphobe. If we could get non-problematic devs, that would be ideal. But until then, the only real options are “use Reddit” or “support a tankie transphobe.” And neither is a great choice.
piefed.social fedia.io joinmbin.org join.piefed.social
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%
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
Really wish Nutomic would apologize for it, it's depressing.
https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005/18404108
Can you please just apologize to those who were offended and promise to be more sensitive moving forward? That's the sure-fire way to defuse the allegations accusing you of being a transphobe and put everybody at ease.
Refraining to comment further on the topic is smart until you learn more about the dynamics at hand. Transgender individuals face an unprecedented amount of discrimination and vitriol.
If anything, the bourgeoisie are generally polarizing people against each other, particularly pitting people against others who are different or who are in vulnerable positions.
Are we to assume you think this is an apology?
Page not found.
Just scroll down 👇
There is nothing to scroll, it just says
Nutomic is transphobe?
First I've heard of it, I'd like to find a source first though
Exactly.
I will consider contributing financially to Dessalines but not nutomic so long as they spread and maintain reactionary positions against trans people. To be honest I'm even on the fence about Dessalines for maintaining a public relationship with nutomic in light of this.
"Give money to a transphobe so we can have open source Reddit" doesn't have a great ring.
Nutomic has also stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards server costs for .ml… Yeah, no thanks. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled.
So when are you donating?
Refusing to make someone's financial situation easier until they stop being transphobic is not a convincing argument against transphobia. Think about how your actions affect your side's reputation from the other side's perspective.
Oh no wont someone please consider trans peoples reputation from a transphobic perspective?
I don't give a fuck about convincing transphobes, I believe they should all be thrown off a cliff along with every other kind of bigot. Obviously, I will not pay a transphobe if I can avoid it.
Rejecting someone that aligns with oppression is a great way to build against oppression, actually. Do you think Jewish Germans should have donated to the Nazis to build up "good faith" with them? Surely if they just acted like, "good Jews" they would have been spared, right?
This logic is typical status quo liberalism that tells you to tut-tut every oppressed group for not fighting back "the right way". Of course, liberals have never succeeded using the methods they suggest, so this really amounts to telling the oppressed to shut up and die. This talking point is promulgated so that you and others will refuse to work in solidarity with the oppressed. Don't let yourself be manipulated this way.
Prove that this is not false equivalence fallacy. Maybe there's additional info about Nutomic that I'm missing.
Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.
Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. "Don't blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don't complain about your life, at least you're not [oppressed group]" These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.
The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.
I need additional information, probably about Nutomic's behavior, to see how it's related to what you're talking about.
How long has it been since you've thought of the Zootopia Abortion Comic?
Anyway, I'll happily keep paying the devs.
maybe give incentives like upvote award feature for the respective instance that has been donated to.
that way people would be more willing to get something out of it in a more tangible way
What do you mean by "upvote award feature"?
awards that cosmetically work like upvotes in a sense.
reddit has them, but they link that to nothing or ad free features.
Bound to donations I dont see why this would be a bad idea. Gives a strong sense of community, especially if theres for example special ones bound to each instance
I see, or simpler yet a special badge which is shown next to donor's username. Definitely worth considering. Thanks for the suggestion!
may I use this moment to ask you if this is intended (see spoiler formatted section in the post)
EDIT maybe its the photon frontend, I'll crosspost there too
Upvotes are mechanical, maybe there's a better comparison. I left reddit before they added awards, but I assume the idea is that someone donates and is then able to add a decorative award to their favorite posts they see, maybe limited to giving one award per day?
It's fun, but on the other hand when I occasionally visit reddit, some posts look like a slot machine with a hundred awards, and even if they don't mechanically push a post higher, it feels a bit pay-to-win for me, because someone with lots of money can put attention-grabbing awards on posts they like. So I'm not sure where I sit on on those kinds of features, because I do believe that it's helpful to reward people who have donated, so long as they don't get an advantage in the community for it.
well it would be tied to financing this platform in my suggestion, so I dont see the issue if the upvotes are the only metric for post ranking and on the other hand awards being only cosmetic
u can always ublock them away if you personally have spite against the look of some icon. but yea there surely is a wrong way to implement such features.. as u mentioned a prime contentder for a service gone shady/shill
That might affect whether or not the income is taxable.
For someone like me who wants to see Lemmy be a place that's owned by users, run by users, and moderated sensibly, what should I do? I have a problem with supporting the lemmy.ml instance.
Lemmy instances are already owned and run by their different instance admins and moderators. Regardless of how you feel about Lemmy.ml, development for Lemmy supports all who use different instances.
The alternatives are doing the dev work yourself, or finding a different platform to use.
Further, as @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml said, the Lemmy.ml costs are very low, it's the actual life costs that allow development of much-asked for features and maintenance to continue.
“You have to donate to tankie transphobes to support the Reddit alternative” isn’t a great look though. And nutomic has stated that donations for Lemmy development *also* go towards supporting the .ml servers. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled, no matter how you look at it.
I've vocally criticized Nutomic's transphobia, but I have no issue with them being Communists. Further, I already answered the bit about funding Lemmy.ml, let me copy and paste the relevant section:
The donations pay the devs salaries. Donations pay for their video games, food, etc. What the devs do with their salaries allows them to continue developing Lemmy full time, how they choose to spend their salaries is on them.
There are other options... Lemmy development could stop and plenty of people would keep using it in its current atate. Maybe it'd even continue to grow.
Or maybe the developers quit and another team steps in? Open source projects are never fully tied to a single developer team.
The low server cost doesn't change anything for me. I'm just a person who won't donate if any amount goes towards keeping that place running under the current admins.
Then teams can fork it if they want, it's FOSS. Lemmy is adopted because the devs are competent, and a lot of us came here specifically *because* there are Communists here.
Yes, I agree. Maybe that will happen, or maybe it won't.
Experience has shown that when others try, they stumble significantly.
The lemmy.ml instance costs like 30$/month to run. Your donation isn't going to that; your donation is going to develop Lemmy itself
If they do not treat lemmy.ml server donations separately from lemmy development donations, that *is a problem*.
Lemmy.ml is how they test new features, it's a tool necessary for development. You can block Lemmy.ml or use an instance defederated from it if you wish, but it's necessary as far as development is concerned.
I don't want to block lemmy.ml, it's not like I hate that instance or anything. But I don't see why I should finance this server - it's definitely not just a development server. I would like to finance development of lemmy without that money going into that server.
By donating you are not financing the lemmy.ml server, because that is already long covered with a much lower donation level. Everything above that is exclusively for developer salaries.
They need users to test, and let people in to do so. The fact that the people here use the server is a necessary function for getting feedback and results from testing. Plus, the server costs are cheap, it's the life costs that you would really be supporting.
Nah
Some fraction of my donation would go towards the $30. Any amount of money going from me to .ml, be it $10 or $.00001, is too much.
I know $30 is "not much", but the amount doesn't change my principles.
lemmy.ml hosting is exclusively paid via Opencollective. All other donation options go directly into developer salaries, so not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.
Don't discard imperfect allies.
If the development of Lemmy stops, all of this goes away and people end up back on Reddit or conventional social media.
www.lemm.ee has been the only place I've enjoyed using lemmy
Keep using it and support whatever replacement comes by if they fail to find because of the Deb's shitty behavior
.world and .ee must be benefitting financially from your work; are they helping at all?
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They do, but also donations are still entirely optional. We're a soup kitchen providing a free meal; if people don't want to eat the soup, or eat it but don't want to (or aren't able) to support the kitchen, that's not a problem.
i guess i just don't like the fact that i've paid more than five-star-restaurant for my soup when there are clearly other groups that can afford more and there's leverage that can be used to everyone's mutual benefit.
There are donors from both of their communities
Afaik they also donate a bit, but they also dont have a lot of money to spare after server costs.
Are they in the same situation as you?
What do you mean? They are also free and if anything running lemmy cost them!?
They've developed mobile apps; got Google to prioritize search results for them; and their user bases are motivated & organized enough to share & curate lists of other lemmy users.
They've gone well beyond what other instances do and that usually suggests that someone's getting paid to make it all happen.
Do you have citations for any of this?
They work with Google etc?
these come from observations at the time of the reddit blackout diaspora and from watching lemmings accidentally share this information with everyone on lemmy; i'm not willing to be sealioned to look it up for you.
So you have no evidence of this. Ok
My question was certainly not in bad faith since I have never heard anyone say anything like this
I'm sure dessalines and nutomic are also being financed by CCP and FSB to develop a platform for spreading propaganda to the West.
\s perhaps
Exactly, this is how I retired at 26
Do you really think the people that setup instances make a lot of money?
Sent my money in. Thanks for what you do with the software, brother.
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 think we'd all prefer you just post and spread the community that way.
Please stop accepting crypto"currencies"—multi-level marketing pyramid schemes—and I donate.
If the Lemmy admins adhered to everyone's request to "stop doing X and I'll donate", they would end up with zero more donations because people will always give another reason for not donating
I know. But I am not everyone, and this request is not unique. Wikimedia stopped accepting crypto"currencies" as well by community vote.
I've donated plenty to Lemmy with crypto, and the article you linked addressed none of the reasons I use it (privacy, anyone?). So while it's cool you're passionately against crypto, I think Lemmy is getting more out of it than it's lost
FIAT stanning never went this hard.
False dilemma. Being against wasteful greed-incentivizing MLM pyramid schemes doesn't mean not objecting to the flaws of contemporary finance as well.
Crypto is far less wasteful than the fiat banking fraud scheme.
Whataboutism fallacy. It's not because serial killer A murdered less than serial killer B, that A should be forgiven.
- -
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Yet you claim that only A should be allowed. What a farce.
Faulty generalization That some scammers or greedy people in rich countries are promoting it like a ponzi scheme to benefit themselves doesn't mean every person use it in the same way. Some people use it for its savings in a highly devaluating currency (my use case), others for money laundering, or to send money to Palestine, or to flee a collapsing country because of war and avoiding their money being seized by the policy at the borders, for ransomware, or creating circular economies in poor countries, to donate to human rights activists in dictatorships, to buy drugs, etc, etc these are just some of the dozens of verified uses cases. That's what happens when a technology is free and permissionless, it's not good or bad by itself, it's as good or as bad as the person that uses it. AI is being used to scam people and to detect cancer more precisely than the best experts. That's and inherent feature of free software. Lemmy is a perfect example, would you promote not using it because there is an instance used for child porn?
It would've been a faulty generalization if, like knives or Lemmy, most use cases were benign. Unfortunately crypto"currencies" are predominantly speculative and malignant to society.
You know that what you said is pure speculation based on personal experience, random publications, ideology or mainstream and social media, which is the only way you can reach that conclusion, unless you have peer-review publications with the statistics of worldwide usage. If you lived in Africa you would say that Bitcoin is godsend, as you can hear it from many africans
“[…] As already mentioned, imposing technology doesn't work; struggling people know their needs far better than anyone. On the contrary, it seems that the “developing” countries should be telling us what do:
All without blockchain. Who would've thunk? For first world countries we sure think third-rate. […]” —*Crypto Cult Science*
– – – – –
Simply copy-pasting from my own website because of POSSE: "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere."
https://nitter.poast.org/DSBatten/status/1923416925004091826#m
SCAM!
Edit: Not a scam. The mods responded to me. I apologize, I'm paranoid.
no
You're correct.
???? what platform do you think *lemmy*.world runs?
I thought he was a bot. I was wrong.
It happens :p
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.
Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything... It reminds me of the vegan fuss era.
You still use lemmy's backend and have a safe frontend space to stay. That's kinda hypocrite to use a service that is "anti-lgtb" and still make a fuss about it. If lemmy really was about racial or sexual discrimination you would already know it.
It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use... Uuhhhg it's kinda getting out of hand !
What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators. If you're a just a dumb leech, use a service that somehow "discriminates" you, don't donate, but PLEASE ! Leave.
Because the group (collectively) have a history of being systematically killed and lynched for their sexuality, not to mention the rest of the suppression and oppression. So politics and attacks are taken seriously.
It's pretty reasonable to create a community where they feel comfortable and kick out all the unconstructive trolling and arguments that people can find in a million other places. Lemmy.ml kicks out racists and other reactionary wastes, so you're in a comparable safe space right now. Do you enjoy the lack of Nazi scum and rabid anti-socialist trolls? I do!
Many of those comrades have already done this, judging by their comments on various instances.
Just gauging the sentiment towards lemmy.ml, even in the fediverse there needs to be a safe space for people. It's sad to say, but merely jumping ship from reddit doesn't ensure that comrades will be safe online. .world and .ee users seem to be reddit-esque but just in a different ilk. I regularly see users from those communities targeting .ml users and since the reddit exodus it's only gotten worse. Stay strong comrades.
It's no secret that most people on Lemmy came from reddit at some point, and people left reddit for different reasons. The first big waves of users were from piracy subreddits, /r/GenZedong's quarantine (went to Lemmygrad, which became the biggest federated instance at the time) and /r/ChapoTrapHouse (succeeded by Hexbear, the largest instance at the time). So because these groups were large, whole and somewhat outliers to reddit overall, there was only some broader reddit culture carried across.
The next big waves were with the API fiasco and Luigi censorship, which largely went to general-purpose instances like .world and .ee for various reasons. Their move was most likely about disdain with the admins' choices or being forced off the platform, not any opposition to reddit culture in general, so the shift toward reddit-esque community was immediately clear. And while Lemmy has a few design decisions that materially disincentive things like karma-farming, it will take a while, and most likely effort, if we want to counter or improve that culture.
Yeah, makes sense. I was part of the reddit exodus with the api stuff. Although, I'm not someone that would be part of the typical reddit culture. Or at least the die-hard libs types. I always was on the fringes of reddit, and in the last few years I stayed away more often than not. There are a few forums and "smol web" places I visit. Even frequent irc occasionally. So, I've been out of the loop when it comes to the general reddit mentality. It sucks that those types have to take the piss out of .ml users so frequently though, it's gotten pretty annoying lately with people saying stuff like "of course, it's a .ml user" like we're some type of pariahs.
I get that... And that's a very serious issue and concern for whatever group you're defending ! But com'on we are on lemmy here, not on some obscure, harsh dictatorship killing people. Some of the admin may have said something inappropriate (that's arguable...) But that doesn't take away that we all can thrive here as a community, what ever your color, sexual orientation, religion...
Without the lemmy devs and others, there wouldn't even be any Lemmy at ALL. Seeing how it goes, this is going to ruine everything for everyone...
Lemmy's backend allows to create every safe space and community you want and people will still go one and argue against a personal opinion that didn't killed a fly...
What ever. This kind of mentality is going to ruin the fun for everyone...
Go Vegan :)
If you sincerely can't keep track of an acronym like LGBTQIA2S, I totally understand. I find it helpful to use people with minority "Sexual Orientations and Gender Identites" (SOGI). You could say
Or
Or
It's not a super widespread abbreviation, so I'd recommend spelling it initially as I did in my first paragraph. I don't think it's best practice to say "SOGIs" Because everyone has a SOGI and typically we're trying to talk specifically about those that face(d) disenfranchisement and bigoted violence.
If you're not sincerely struggling with the acronym, and enjoy trivializing people for fun, I hope you think of me everything you stub your toe.