Lemmy - Donate
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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.

Donate

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.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    5 hours ago

    I used to put up $50/mo to Hexbear, until they banned me for defending the DSA.

    So far, the politics on this community have been dogshit. But the moderation has been generally fair, friendly, and functional. To you, I say, Shut Up and Take My Money. Thanks for letting me continue my shitposting habits, even if we’ve agreed to disagree.

  • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pubEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    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.

  • Muyal_Hix@lemmy.world
    3·
    8 hours ago

    The comments are a full microcosm showcasing why Lemmy will stay underground and it will never overtake reddit

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
    18·
    15 hours ago

    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.

  • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world
    47·
    22 hours ago

    Comments are a hilarious minefield and a painful reminder of exactly how online leftists can never get shit done. We want FOSS federated social media platforms to escape the tech giants that would happily facilitate a fascist wave if it meant they can serve more targeted ads. But when that platform actually exists in a totally functional and apolitical way, we don’t want to support its development because the people willing to work full time on the project for poverty wages have bad political opinions. It’s so bad that we’d rather support Steve Huffman’s bot farm which is 1,000 times as politically influential as Lemmy will ever be at this rate.

  • yogurt@lemm.ee
    29·
    1 day ago

    If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that’s happening.

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
    53·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • EfreetSK@lemmy.world
    45·
    1 day ago

    I was thinking long and hard about this to form an opinion, but my answer is no.

    The final decission point was: I’m from Slovakia, it’s no secret that Russia would love to take us under their sphere of influence. You and your instance is not only supporting this, you’re actively propagating this. In fact, I’m pretty sure if Russian soldiers would be at my doorstep, threatening my family, you and your instance would be cheering. And when I would realize, that I actively supported this, that would break me.

    If you’re about to publish your work for free, I gladly use it as long as it’s run by good people like lemmy.world. This way you get no support from me. If I’d pay you, I don’t know what part of my support would end up in .ml instance which I see as a propaganda machine against countries like mine. And even if you say that none of my money would end up there, I kind of don’t want to support you as a human being. I won’t pay your salary so you have energy to do what you do on .ml instance.

    If Lemmy as a project dies, so be it. Foss world can always spark successful forks (see OpenElec vs LibreElec) and alternatives like PieFed already exist

  • orangeboats@lemmy.world
    55·
    1 day ago

    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.