- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [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.
In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.
The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.
So lets assume they dont moderate in a “tanky way” but instead in a “free speech absolutist way”. Then they’ll be criticized for giving nazis a platform. Lets assume instead they will moderate in a “European centrist way”. Then by American standards they’ll be criticized for being far left still. If they moderate in an “American centrist way”, they’ll be criticized as Trump apologist and far right supporters.
It is impossible to moderate in a politically “impartial” way, except to not moderate at all and create a complete cesspool.
Even if they don’t run an instance themselves but instead choose to cooperate with an instance for the testing, that in itself will be an endorsement and scrutinized.
That’s a far better situation than supporting genocidal dictatorships. I don’t think that’s a hard standard to hold
Thank you for being reasonable about this.
It is not impossible, it’s just difficult. You do not have to keep everyone satisfied, only enough of them. All you’re doing here is making arguments for why they shouldn’t change because they will never get 100% approval rating. That’s just idiotic. No one is expecting perfect, they just expect better.
More importantly, neutrality in moderation is generally seen as more acceptable than swinging fully towards one direction. People will complain that you are allowing x or y, but you get much further by permitting that balance to exist naturally and moderating it at its most extremes, then you do buy stamping out one and promoting the other, which is absolutely what they do on .ml
Whoever said that you had to be a free speech absolutist, either? You can believe in free speech and also not be okay with Nazis on your platform.
It’s really not that hard, many internet forums have been doing this for decades. It’s kind of telling, frankly, how the very notion of it seems to elude some people around here.
All of which ignores the point the top comment made: that they shouldn’t be moderating at all. Let whoever they choose moderate that instance, and separate from it entirely. Focus only on development.
But the fact they’re apparently more concerned about the content on that instance than getting donations to support development of the platform is very telling, too.
What do you mean by that?
My read is that they’re recommending that
I agree with this. The act of administering a dev-operated instance with live accounts + users while working on the dev team presents a conflict of interest which is a deal-breaker for too many donors.
So, rather than simply asking the community for more donations (which is understandable but doesn’t address the root of the problem), it would be best to incorporate the feedback of the community and do away with the conflict of interest. IMO, another way to resolve this COI would be to disable live accounts for anyone who isn’t a developer in the “test” environment.
I’ve seen a defense presented in this thread along the lines of “we should be allowed to admin .ml because it’s a test instance” — but again, due to the fact that there are live accounts for live users (outside of the dev team) in the “test” environment, this is a distinction without a difference.
I mean you realize the entire reason they created this whole thing is so they could have their little fiefdoms from which to dole out their petty little grievances because people on reddit were mean to them, right?
It’s actually a bit hilarious that people on this thread keep giving half hearted defenses here, and noted transphobe Nutomic keeps popping in and being like “actually no, we really are just assholes.”
Your reading is correct, and in my experience, it makes both the mods and devs happier when their roles are entirely separated. It insulates the dev team from getting distracted and having their time consumed by the social dynamics of site drama, and it keeps the mod team from getting bogged down in technical issues, allowing them to focus on the audience, not the technology.
And what happens if this separate admin team makes decisions which users disagree with? The same debate starts all over again?
That’s fine as long as the new admin team is not paid for their time by peoples donations. That’s what people are objecting to and stopping them from donating
None of the admin work on lemmy.ml is paid, its all volunteer based.
You would at least have plausible deniability. The bigger issue is that a lot of the modding being done is by administrators and not by moderators. Some are. But some of the most egregious stuff is being done by administrators.
PR 101. If you want to be an official project supported by many and used by many. Don’t have your flagship deployment hard attached to a controversial subject. Which you should know damn well it is. Second don’t have it administered with a Vanguard mindset. It drives people off. Look I’d be happy to discuss failings and successes of different ml regimes as well as Western capitalist and Democratic socialists. Realistically that can’t be done on your instance. Typically any inkling of discussing failures gets outright denied and usually bans are applied.
Go ahead, Rebrand as lemmy.org. Go ahead and have ml communities. They can even be Echo Chambers still too. Even Lemmy.world has ml communities. The reason that I respect @[email protected] and the world team. And would happily donate to them if they needed it. Despite possibly not agreeing politically as an anarchist. Is there administration. It’s thoughtful, deliberative, and sparing. Not vanguardist and cliquish. And it’s no coincidence the administrative flaws are shared with political ideology flaws.
This is it. Right now. This is your golden moment. You’re the lead developer for one of the most popular software platforms on a rapidly growing Federated system. You’re blowing up. You’re trying to go bigger. It’s a position that is yours to lose. And it’s your right and duty to choose. Do you want to be a footnote, or do you want to be a whole chapter? Do you want to be a possible big mover and shaker in Foss? Or is it ml Club forever, and long live the vanguard?
Being inclusive is hard, tolerance is hard, that’s why both are so valued. Believe me I know, I’m not perfect. Any deployment that is going to be seen as a flagship should also strive for that if they want support from disparate groups. And that’s just how it is. There is no debate or discussion to have on the topic.
So you are not donating anyway? It seems to me like there is a vocal minority of users who make any type of excuse for the fact that they are unwilling to donate. Instead of being honest about that, you demand from us to make more and more changes, which will piss off other users and will likely not lead to any actual increase in donations.
Let’s distinguish between the means and the ends. An admin policy is the result of the means by which administrators are selected.
The sticking point for many donors is a question of the means: they are unhappy that a conflict-of-interest exists in the current selection of administrators for a dev-owned instance. This is orthogonal to the subject of administrators’ concrete policies.
Which begs the question: do the devs acknowledge that the COI exists? If so, then is the team willing to incorporate the community’s feedback by closing the COI?
Maybe the team has a compelling reason to hold onto the existing COI (nuance exists); but it cannot be denied that the COI (1) exists and (2) is reducing the devs’ ability to raise community funding. Whether this is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing is a matter of personal judgment. But the facts are what they are.
Side note: if there’s some set of admin policies that the dev team wants to see enacted in .ml, then they could easily select 3rd-party admins that they trust to enforce a policy that aligns with their own values without reproducing the COI that currently exists. Then, if there’s any conflict over those particular policies, that would be an entirely separate discussion.
So you would be fine if lemmy.ml was run exactly like it is now, but without Dessalines or me taking direct actions as admins?
Lemmy the software’s reputation has become conflated with the reputation of lemmy.ml, which promotes an authoritarian center-left viewpoint that regularly denies documented genocides. This is unpalatable to many end-users.
As such, unless the two are separated clearly and lemmy the organization disavows its involvement lemmy.ml, the overall reputation of the software will degrade, resulting in less use, less money for the developers, and the eventual collapse of the lemmy infrastructure.
Voat is an example of a great software package that became completely tainted by the (developer moderated) site to the point where you can’t mention it in polite discourse any more. Not exactly the same circumstance, and in that case it was taken over by right-wing racists, but the dynamics are very similar.
It has only been conflated because beehaw and then .world MADE the accusation aganst .ml and then decided to conflate it to the program as a whole, don’t act like this is a natural conflation
the conflation existed before .world even existed. it’s the general sentiment i see across mastodon starting around 3 years ago that lemmy, not just lemmy.ml, is a tankie cesspit.