- cross-posted to:
- main@lemmy.ca
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- main@lemmy.ca
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
Hello world,
as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won’t start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.
All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We’re currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it’s certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.
We’re looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.
You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
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No ads and no algorithm isn’t free.
Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy’s way. I’m a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.
While I understand the moral objections people have to supporting the developers, I do think its fair to highlight how they do not treat us.
We are not a product here to be exploited and advertised to. They also respect your choice to block ml and not to interact with them at all for the rest. I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO’s hot takes, but they dont share it for this exact reason. Instead they just design their entire product and business around it, which is the enshittification we all know and hate.
People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.
But to maintain that it means putting your money where your mouth. If not to them, to your own instance.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
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.
Lotta no’s based on people who can’t stand being in a room with other people just because of different political beliefs. I don’t follow .ml’s philosophy, and I don’t care. Take em, leave em. Whatever.
They aren’t why I’m not on Reddit.
Remember why you’re here. If you can’t handle discourse with people who see the world differently then go back to Mastodon and save us your intolerance. Discourse is the lifeblood of a site like this, different opinions are part of being human. Grow up.
but t-they support such and such genocide!!
Then protest them louder. Don’t bring the rest of us down over it, not that it isn’t mostly sensationalist to begin with.
Remember why you’re here. If you can’t handle discourse with people who see the world differently then go back to Mastodon and save us your intolerance
You’re asking people to “tolerate” support of human rights abuse by authoritarian governments like China and Russia…
Lots of people have problems with authoritarianism, especially now.
That’s not even getting into those two individuals personal views on things like LGBTQ. Which shouldn’t be surprising when given the stances on LGBTQ by the authoritarian governments they idolize.
And before anyone says “they don’t talk about that stuff, look at their profile!”…
Even if it wasn’t obvious they have alts already, here’s one of them admitting it:
https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005/18404597
Acting like directly giving money to them somehow doesn’t support them is ludacris.
If their political stances truly don’t matter to you. Are you ok buying a Tesla still because it’s an EV?
Lotta no’s based on people who can’t stand being in a room with other people just because of different political beliefs.
Start by tolerating that disagreement then?
I can stand being in the same room as people with shit opinions, even to a degree people who promote war crimes like these guys, but fuck if I am up for giving them a salary.
If you have to misrepresent people who disagree with you to make a point, it is not a good point sorry.
I would never donate so long as that donation supports lemmy.ml
Based on the general community sentiment I’ve seen and your reports of barely breaking even here, you can either break from the tankies or watch lemmy die without enough funds.
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.
So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy’s primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I’ve experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.
And it boils down to this:
The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.
Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.
Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.
Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication’s reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible… a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.
The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org’s case is this:
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Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev
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Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.
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Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.
If this doesn’t happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.
To be absolutely clear, on .ml hardly any mods do modding, almost all the removals and bans is by one of 2 admins, dessalines themselves or davel (and occasionally a 3rd admin cypherpunks)
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.
If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.
And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.
You seem to have a good grasp of the problem and have proposed a viable solution. Would you like a one month, one year, or permanent ban?
Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…
Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team
lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.
I do agree that Lemmy.ml should never be recommended as the “official” Lemmy instance, but (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lemmy devs don’t do that. They just say “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers“ which is fair to disclose (although maybe that could remove that. Idk). join-lemmy.org doesn’t handle or recommend Lemmy.ml specially.
I think usually it’s random users saying “join Lemmy.ml it’s the official instance” and we need to nip that in the bud… but it’s not Lemmy devs’ fault.
Nine times out of ten I hear people say “join Lemmy.World, it’s the catch-all and de facto default instance”. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen people recommend Lemmy.ml unless they’re already ideologically aligned with Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don’t join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons (edit: reasons I agree with and echo, to clarify).
I mean I’m pretty lefty and some of the .ml folk scare the lymph out of me.
ML isn’t “far left” it leans leftist, but that isn’t what’s scary about it.
ML is hyper authoritarian (support China, North Korea, Russia to varying degrees).
This is due to them being extremely Campist. Campist meaning they’ll support anyone who “opposes” US influence, no matter how horrible they are.
In my opinion true leftists shouldn’t be supporting American OR Russian/Chinese Imperialism. If you’re anti imperialist, it means being against all imperialism, not just one side’s imperialism.
Absolutely I 100% hard agree with this
Thank you for saying what needs to be said. Imperialism in all its forms is indefensible, yet I’ve never been able to understand the cognitive dissonance that can condemn Israel’s genocide while simultaneously trying to justify what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.
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.
rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement
What do you mean by that?
My read is that they’re recommending that
- Devs only work on development.
- A new, separate admin team be found (or formed) to handle administration for any instance that is dev-owned.
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.
And what happens if this separate admin team makes decisions which users disagree with? The same debate starts all over again?
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?
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No i will never donate , this format is just jerking off Linux enthusiast, and every time I say Linux in unusable I get negatively marked. Content on this is not so good.its many time repeat of Reddit. There is not a easy way or guide on how to use Lemmy and connect to all differn t forums within or even find them .
In total this format is useful but not encouraging. So no donations
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, pretty much everyone is also saying they aren’t going to donate for one or other reason.
Sorry you’re too stupid for linux.
Asshole
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lemmy’s centrists will let lemmy die because they have never forgiven communists for the fall of Berlin.
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Antifascism
Unfortunately .ml is Stalinist these days, not Maxist/Leninist
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism
Stalin differed from Marx and Lenin when it comes to Authoritarianism.
Stalin was a tzar,
Just like Hitler, Putin, and Xi
Your king fetish and your inability to reconcile it is part of why people don’t take you seriously
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Stalin was literally a fascist
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I know what the definition is. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist they shouldn’t be a fascist.
Yes we do
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Give up your admin/mod roles on .ml, be neutral developers, then I am happy to donate.
No such thing as neutral.
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).
How does one AVOID funding .ml?
lemmy.ml is already entirely funded, your donations go entirely to our salaries.
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.
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.
Almost true, being Communists has certainly influenced the reasons for Lemmy as a federated, anticapitalist alternative to Reddit to begin with.
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
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.
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Yes, .ml are tankies. They don’t have power outside their instance though. You are from lemmy.world. which means .ml mods can only ban you from participating in .ml communities (subreddits). Thy can also ban you so other users of .ml can’t see your content. But the rest of the instances will see it.
Blocking instances depends on what client you use. I use boost, and in boost you can block .ml communities from your feed. You can’t block content from .ml users though. I believe other clients allow you to block the users too.
I am not a tankie and reject that label.
Too fucking bad, tankie.
Oh no i’m so offended 😱😱😱
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?
Yeah, .ml is usually a giant circle jerk and often removes comments/posts that are critical of things like the CCP.
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.
Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.
I’m not donating a single bit of whatever currency to .ml. Pick one or the other: dev costs or your own personal soap box cost.
Currently donating $5 a month to lemmy.world. I’ll continue for the foreseeable future.
Why not get a Reddit membership at that point?
Because I want to support Lemmy
Giving money to .world is basically the opposite of supporting Lemmy.
