- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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 @[email protected] 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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Being Ukrainian it’s not possible for me to donate to supporters of russian genocidal imperialism.
I hope both of them meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
I am personally hoping that the core software will be forked while retaining the Lemmy name. Change it to Lemmy-TSF (tankie scum free). I would donate monthly to a development team that doesn’t include genocide supporters.
For those with decision paralysis, Liberapay is a great choice. They’re a France-based non-profit which is itself run off of donations which it crowdfunds on its own platforn (pretty based tbh), and the site itself is FOSS.
Of some note unfortunately is that donations for development also go to the maintainer-run instance .ml – whose tankie position is to expressly deny genocides like the Holodomor and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs by China – but the costs of development versus the costs of just running the server are completely disproportionate in favor of development. With that in mind, being ideologically purist here enables much greater evils, and I think Lemmy has easily given me more than this value: donated $20 (edit: upped to $30 for drama reasons).
Thanks for contributing! It’s sad to see so many people focus on unnecessary drama
Why not just use Reddit then instead of focusing on some drama about the CEO and how they handle moderation?
We’re not under the administrative control of any of Lemmy’s developers as far as I’m aware, unless you’re suggesting that Lemmy’s federation is a facade and every instance’s administration is secretly a tankie puppet government who are just really, really, imperceptibly subtle about it.
How does one AVOID funding .ml?
Addressed this in an edited-in second paragraph. Answer is “unfortunately, you can’t” unless you wish to fork Lemmy. But as someone who’s sickened to my core by tankie ideas, I still think funding this piece of FOSS is by far the lesser evil, I think I make a compelling argument for it, and I do think the Lemmy team do good work on the software side.
If I can hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil, I need to follow that same principle when it’s not just my vote I’m casting but where I’m putting my time and money.
Edit: I completely forgot that you could, in theory, try helping out on their GitHub if you have a background in CS. It won’t pay for the developers’ cost of living, but it could reduce the maintenance burden if you know what you’re doing.
As far as I know their politics and views have had zero impact on the code.
Entirely true, but as I said, it seems that a small proportion of whatever’s donated goes to the server costs of .ml since it’s run by Lemmy’s maintainers. It’s understandable and even a good thing to be put off by that.
Almost true, being Communists has certainly influenced the reasons for Lemmy as a federated, anticapitalist alternative to Reddit to begin with.
Good point. Also worth remembering that for all the complaints about abuse of power by mods, not only is the federated nature of Lemmy intended to give an opportunity for people to move off of instances with policies they don’t like, but the open modlog also exists as a measure of full transparency.
Both great features implemented by these very developers.
Exactly, which is why spending time on instance drama is silly. Federation and defederation are tools, along with personal blocking, for a reason.
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“Tankie” is the same as “pinko” and “commie,” it’s just a pejorative for those who support Socialist countries. The major views of the Marxists on Lemmy are in line with the views of various Communist parties worldwide.
Simply not true. “Tankie” is NOT the same as “Pinko” or “Commie.” There are 2 major strains of communist political thought. There’s authoritarian communism and anarchocommunism. Anarchocommunists are Marxist, authoritarian communists are Marxist-Leninist (or bolshevik, or Stalinist). I DO agree with you that the major views of Marxists on Lemmy are in line with the views of various communist parties worldwide, but I DO NOT agree that these communist parties that people like you are aligned with are either the totality of communist thought, or representative of how all communists think. When a communist like me calls a communist like you a tankie, it’s because when I look at the history of authoritarian communism, I notice a pattern of suffering and stratification amongst the populace. The USSR exploited labor and was, ultimately, a capitalist nationalist imperialist colonial state.
And before you go saying I support liberalism, I do not. There is not a binary between USSR style communism and American style capitalism. When you get down to it, they are in effect means to the same end. A system of enriching a central cabal of power authority at the cost of the average global citizen.
So in summary. “Tankie” is not a label that right wingers apply to discredit leftist thought. It’s a label left wingers use to discredit right wing thought masquerading as left wing thought.
Socialist countries are Norway and Denmark.
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I am not a tankie and its annoying to be called like that all the time.
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That’s actually impossible. Politics is a question of systems engineering. Programming is a question of systems engineering. Creating propaganda is a matter of creating and disseminating information in a particular way. Coding is a matter of creating and disseminating information in a particular way. A person’s outlook will always influence the programs they design, the platforms they build, and the algorithms they tune.
As far as I know their politics and views have had zero impact on the code.
Adding to what Cowbee said, general anticapitalist politics were the motivation for their effort and the reason it is not a for-profit exploitative service. They don’t want or need to put in addictive features or ads to profit or appease venture capital, and that’s no coincidence, it’s a decision resulting from their political beliefs.
But yes, their more specific personal political views don’t really impact the code and haven’t prevented others from using it freely.
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Give your money to any other product or service
If they want money for Lemmy then they can step down or stop being shitty mode
lmao what does step down even mean anyone can fork it and start working on it
getting traction for a fork is never that simple. as of now there is not the kind of consensus that you look for at fork time that leadership needs to change. but the groundswell is growing
I’m mixed. On one hand, absolutely fuck .ml and tankies. On the other, these guys have done great work. The way it’s set up, Lemmy is not at all beholden to their ideology. We can take it over at any time, and any further work they do benefits all of us, and that can’t be taken away.
As a fellow developer, I truly believe Rust is the way to go for high pressure, high scaling software. I don’t think LW alone could run off of your average python. EVE Online is a great example of that. They pushed python forward to meet their high demand needs, and still had to incorporate a lot of C++. Reddit has had teams of engineers over decades, and in the long run I expect Lemmy to be more efficient. In my professional opinion, this kind of scaling can’t be reasonably done with any garbage collected language.
My other concern is with sanctions. Are these guys in Russia? Is it legal to donate to them? If you’re paying by check or credit card, those institutions will take care of following the law for you.
Overall, I’d encourage people to donate. Open software benefits everyone and any work they do for us is public and can never be taken back.
My other concern is with sanctions. Are these guys in Russia? Is it legal to donate to them? If you’re paying by check or credit card, those institutions will take care of following the law for you.
I’m 99.99% sure they’re not in Russia. I feel like I’ve read they’re in the Netherlands but that needs fact checking.
To my knowledge are the lemmy.world guys from the netherlands. At least the 2 admins. And the FediHosting Foundation lemmy.world (and e.g. mastodon.world, etc) belongs to is in the Netherlands.
No idea about dessalines though. but i don’t think russia either.
our foundation is in NL, because that’s where @[email protected] is located, but the active admin and infra team members are distributed across the world with members in Netherlands, Germany and USA currently.
Thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it.
As a developer, would you test on production though? I’m not a professional developer. However I’m quite familiar with it. Family developing and IT for massive companies. You don’t need real people to generate traffic. You just don’t. Lemmy.ml being the test server is a selfish bullshit excuse.
lemmy.ml is not the primary test server.
there are multiple dedicated test instances that are used for development purposes.
testing on lemmy.ml is mostly happening for release candidates that require actual user activity to find remaining bugs, at the point where it’s getting close to a proper release.
Whether it’s the primary or not doesn’t really change things.
It could just as easily be rolled out to a select circle of instances that wish to help with the testing, as many other foss projects do. Funding them developing it is one thing. Funding such a bad echo chamber another. This ethical and image problem is what will stop adoption of the software, and is already driving plenty of people away. Or to mbin/kbin, pifed, miskey etc. There are plenty of people I would not recommend Lemmy to because of these issues. It is unfortunately however their repo and codebase to mismanage. And our money not to donate.
Would it be fair to describe it as “lemmy.ml is the beta test server, while there’s an internal server for alpha testing”?
Not primarily, of course. You have a local and QA instance, but some things only come out at real scale or with real data. You can’t think of everything to have it added to testing. Having your own, real instance that gets to serve as beta and accessible telemetry really helps.
LW functions at the opposite end of the spectrum. They try to maintain the most stability, which also makes sense.
Absolutely, and generally; those come out under different hardware and software combinations on other people’s deployed systems. Not your dev system.
Yes LW operates at the opposite end of the spectrum. I’d donate to them if they need it. Because they’re professional. Whereas the devs of Lenny are unprofessional and dishonest. There’s no excuse for their behavior. If they can’t afford proper testing systems. Then ask for donations for that. Both hardware, software or funds. I’m sure it’d get thrown at them in spades. Or at least way better than demanding everyone swallow away poison pill at the same time. This oh you must accept funding Lemmy ml as an unprofessional contraversial Echo chamber/hobby. Won’t work for a lot of people for good reason.
As much as I dislike a lot of .ml, it costs like €30/month to run. Not much of your money would be going to it.
donating to lemmy helps every other instance much more than it helps .ml.
As someone else pointed out the donation would also fund .ml moderation time not only the development
Good point, but I feel like thats saying your employer is funding anything you spend your money on.
My employer funds my shitposting here on Lemmy, the only difference is they aren’t aware of it.
As unpalatable what they do in their free time is, I think you have to draw the line somewhere on what you’re okay with supporting. I don’t think it’s okay, for example, for a delivery driver for a brewing company to be fired for drinking a different brand of beer, but it is okay for him to be fired for assaulting someone while on the company clock. Where this line is drawn is going to vary from person to person. I personally would be happier if they had a clearer separation of their personal and professional activities. I’m not sure if I will donate to them or not at this point. I have donated to my instance, which doesn’t appear to pass donations on to the developers, which means I will have to actively make a decision for where I stand on this 😬. It would be easier if their test bed didn’t also promote their unpalatable views.
Yeah idk where to draw like with ml and lemmygrad. To me these are clear net negative on humanity but Lemmy itself got enough traction from sane people to kinda counter balance that.
are clear net negative on humanity
oh please, cry me a river
lemmy.ml is already entirely funded, your donations go entirely to our salaries.
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.
Ah shit. I’m currently a starving musician. I’ll scrape you off some of the next gig.
All this is very confusing to me. I had to look up what tankies are and if these giuys are tankies then they can go fuck themselves. I came here from reddit and now I am thinking I might have made a mistake. I don’t know enough aboput this federated stuff to understand it. I have no idea how to block .ml nor do I know who these people are who run it. I do know that I had a very close Ukrainian friend as a child and although he is dead now I still see the Ukrainian people are brothers and sisters. I am not sure I want to give any of my money to an intance that actively shits out fucking ork propaganda. I need some educating here.
These money will go to two people who created and actively maintain and promote an instance pretending the brutal murder of Ukranians is not happening but also necessary, and deleting and banning contrary opinions.
No.
Just threw in a couple bucks! Loving Lemmy, it lacks the stench of capitalism that reddit fell victim to. Thank you to everyone who makes this place work!
ITT: a mighty showcase of the divide-and-conquer strategy by psyops.
Instead of realizing that our goal as an alternative community to Reddit is first and foremost to… well duh, to build a community and keep it thriving, people here are infighting, preferring to subdivide themselves into tankies and non-tankies.
If Lemmy eventually fails and no other project with a similar feature-set can show up in time, we end up killing the existing momentum.
If that happens, all of you shall remember this very moment, and bravo to the psyops people (be it from the government or corporate) because you won yet again.
Donated. Though because I am living in a third world country it’s just a measly ~25 dollars.
I donated! Great job, and I really appreciate your work.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy
They should spend more time devving and less time mod actioning wrongthink
Agreed. I’d like to support continued development of Lemmy, but I’m hesitant to do so knowing that part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep.
part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep
If that’s true, that’s misappropriating the donations being that they’re billed as supporting development. Server maintenance and upkeep is important, but do not mislead your benefactors to do so, lest you destroy their trust and stop donating to your cause.
I would like it if both @[email protected] and @[email protected] could confirm or put to rest if this is true.
Edit: a couple of users pointed out that lemmy.ml is used as a test bed for lemmy development. This is good info, and not something I, personally, was aware of.
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Lemmy.ml is a test server, it’s needed for development
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Donations pay their salaries, everything donated goes towards their living expenses in general. If they go to the movies, you are also paying for that. It’s the same as a company paying programming workers xyz wage, that’s the price of software labor, but it doesn’t mean all of that money directly goes to the bare necessities for maintaining dev work.
Yet said test server is a toxic cesspit of tankies who actively brigade and harass those who disagree with them : /
Nope you are free to defederate and block if you want to believe your fantasies
There are a lot of Marxists on servers run by Marxists. I wouldn’t call disagreements toxic or brigading being especially worse on Lemmy.ml than other instances.
Yeah a lot of shitheads there , maybe go back to reddit?
No, it is notably worse on the tankie triad, I can disagree with someone from slrpnk and they wont send me death threads or mass downvote anything that critical of their views unlike many of Lemmy.ml’s userbase.
I haven’t really seen what you describe, I do think if you’re saying something extremely unpopular in an area getting downvoted is to be expected, though.
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The devs need an instance with real users and real load to test changes.
lemmy.ml is that test instance.
It’s a non-optional part of the dev pipeline, that’s why its upkeep is financed by dev donations, too.
So, it is true, and it isn’t misleading supporters, or misappropriating donations.Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never before seen mention of this; this is the type of stuff that should be mentioned in blurbs like the one above. People who are not aware of lemmy.ml being a test server may find it off putting otherwise.
No, they don’t. In professional software development you have testing systems and production systems. You DONT test on production. You DON’T use testing as production.
They don’t need real users or real load. If they can’t generate/simulate testing loads. They aren’t serious developers worth funding.
If you have a current budget of $1000/month, per dev, you are forced to relax a little on best practices.
This isn’t a professional endeavour, and it won’t be until donations increase by a factor of 5+.If you are a single hobbyist coder working from your bedroom at night in your spare time for a piece of software used by five people. Maybe.
If you’re developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, whom you are soliciting for donations. While telling them that sorry your donations must go towards funding an authoritarian echo chamber as a side hobby. Hell no, to put it politely.
What if you’re working full time, developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, but their donations only amount to a hobbyist contribution?
You are basically demanding enterprise quality from devs who get $1000/month for their 40h/week work.That’s straight up ridiculous.
Or rather, unrealistic.
At this point, if the devs acted economically, they’d simply stop working on lemmy, take a software dev job, and earn 8x more money.
And you are somehow still criticizing them for not doing more, while they are making lemmy possible, for peanuts.You know what? FUCK YOU!
Sounds like that should be more of an incentive to make sure the instance isn’t shit then.
Consider the following:
- nutomic and dessalines are human beings with finite monetary resources.
- These monetary resources are fungible.
- nutomic and dessalines pay money to run lemmy.ml.
- Thus, some of their finite monetary resources go to running lemmy.ml.
- Much of their finite monetary resources go to keeping themselves sheltered, alive, and presumably accommodated with some basic first-world niceties.
- They raise donations to spend time developing Lemmy because otherwise they would have to be employed either at all or more than they already are so they could continue to be sheltered and alive.
- Consequently, if the devs have literally any expenses that aren’t staying alive for the express purpose of developing Lemmy, you’re financing those too.
This isn’t some scandal if you understand basic microeconomics. Inherently this is true unless nutomic or dessalines stop running lemmy.ml or find a way to run it off of dreams and unicorn farts. They’re not “misappropriating funds” or whatever; the nature of funds is that they’re fungible.
Edit: And it’s not like in light of increased donations, they’d be taking the Lemmy development funds and using them to buy a schwanky new servertron 3000 with kung-fu grip for .ml. .ml was already open-registration, so it’s not like it’s possible for them to misappropriate development funds to open the floodgates and let thousands of new users in who were previously locked out. We can monitor how many users .ml has, and we can audit the software it’s running.
It’s not a scandal that funds are used to run a test instance but it is problematic that the developers hold extreme political views and are very public about it.
That’s always going to limit who is willing to donate.
Exactly. Everyone in here is like “oh, .ml is their test instance - there’s nothing they can do about it!”
Like, you could make your test instance not a cesspool, and then people would be a lot more willing to support it.
Couldn’t they have a designated instance for testing and then have users volunteer to join? Thereby, using the instance solely for testing purposes and to get feedback ?
It could even be a limited amount of users so the server costs wouldn’t be so high. I don’t see why something like this isn’t already in place.
Also, have they laid out the costs? Are they being transparent about how much goes to X and how much goes to Y? Id think that would be best practice.
If i were donating, I’d want to know exactly what my donation is going to. If it’s just going to their ‘living costs’ essentially paying their salary, then that needs to be stated plainly. Not lumped into ‘development’…
Also, what doesn’t make sense to me is why would ppl donate when most instances are so restrictive leading to excessive bans and barrier to entry? It would be like im paying to NOT be able to use a service and am limited.
I don’t get that
That would be the normal way of operating. You don’t test on production. It’s unheard of. It’s a bad idea. But coming from leninists, it’s very on brand.
Guaranteed they’re just using the excuse of a test instance to push their idealogy.
you lost me at
These monetary resources are fungible
because that’s crypto bro talk.
because that’s crypto bro talk.
Fungibility is a basic term in economics to describe interchangeability. 💀 Fucking hell. I’m using it at all because I’m having to get basic enough to describe the microeconomics of how giving money to human beings is inherently donating to everything human beings do, not just specifically what it’s nominally being used for. That you’ve only ever heard it in terms of cryptocurrency isn’t my fault.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
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.
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
Am I wrong or is the same person making fun of the ridiculous censorship rules on Reddit while enforcing similar ridiculous censorship rules on their own .ml instance?
Done, sponsor level on Patreon.
I’ve made my donation today for the first time.
I find it helpful that we have been keeping people full time, funded by donations. I would hope this model grows, expanding into for example specific features getting their own bucket of money, as we can voice our support for things that can get lost in a backlog.
I’m not sure I’ve seen how to contribute the old way, by donating time and performing tasks. Not my case, but how would someone get started on that?
Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.
