In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
More customization for site owners. I have an independent instance and there’s a lot of things on there that are confusing for people unfamiliar with the fefiverse or lemmy. It would also be nice to remove the donation beg at the top. I know Lemmy needs funding, but it makes it look like I’m asking for donations.
The easiest solution would be to mention in the sidebar or in a welcome post that donations are not for you, but for the developers of the software. Also the frontend supports custom css so you can change the entire design. It is also possible to use a different frontend or write your own, as its all open source.
To be honest its quite bold of you asking to remove the donation buttons. Working on Lemmy has been our fulltime job for the past years, and we rely on user donations to pay for food and rent. Yet you are getting the results of our work entirely for free. Having some donation links is a very small price for that.
I didn’t even notice which one they were talking about until I saw it was the heart icon
Indeed it is a big ask, however, It would be something I’d be willing to pay for. Many foss projects make money from paying customers as well as donations. I also mention and explain what lemmy is and encourage people to check it out in the getting started area of the site.
How much would you be willing to pay for this? Im not sure if its worth the effort because its not clear if anyone else besides you would be interested, and it would require a bunch of work to setup. It would require an automated way to check donation status, and a way to build and distribute these private releases. Feel free to respond via private message.
I guess I wasn’t thinking about how much work it would actually be in order to enforce it. I doubt I could afford the cost. Maybe if it was coupled with a managed services type of deal and you had enough subsrcibers it could be enough to hire another staff member? It seems like adding “premium” features could alieanate the userbase unless it’s just cosmetic changes. I put my foot in my mouth bringing it up, sorry.
No worries that’s what the AMA is for. I thought about managed hosting before, but it would likely involve mainly support and sysadmin work, while my passion is programming.
You could always outsource and automate the basic troubleshooting aspects. Running updates accross multiple customers would be a breeze. I beleive I’ve seen one managed services company that will set up an instance and manage it for around $20/mo.
That would mean hiring someone, which requires initial funding like a bank loan. It is also necessary to get the funding and skill to setup a website, automate the hosting and most importantly run a marketing campaign. Otherwise no one will know about the service nor use it. So it requires setting up a whole business, do you know how to do that?
I always bootstrap business ideas without spending any or little money to start. Making a small thing on github that says “managed service, please contact for pricing” channel that through a virtual assistant to weed out the time wasters. If you get a lot of demand, then you scale up and flesh out complete automation.
Are you sure the donation beg isn’t customizable? I don’t see it on Lemmy.ml
It’s the little heart on the top on desktop.
It would also be nice to remove the join lemmy link on the bottom as well as a few other tweaks.