- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld@lemmy.world
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld@lemmy.world
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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.
Sent a bit. Thank you for Lemmy
Thanks for the reminder, sometimes I forget to support these important pieces of software.
I feel like us old people need to give a little extra to pay for the next generation of young tinkerers so things can continue to be free
Been donating monthly for a while now!
To those who don’t want to give because of the devs’ political views, I’d like to say this goes into improving the Lemmy software our communities here are based on, not making some political podium for the devs in particular.
There’s a lot of rubbish on Lemmy… because it’s the internet. Like the Great Garbage Patch of the Pacific, it collects; but I still like the Ocean. Some people look down particularly on .ml, but personally I think this is unjustified.
In fact, before joining Lemmy I heard some rumour of the controversy and went looking. I certainly disagree strongly with certain things I found, but my impression was of Dessalines and Nutomic treating the Internet as a forum for respectful debate and this Lemmy as a technology project not a personal political force - as many see Reddit as becoming. Well, that was my impression, so I was happy to join, and I’ve not been disappointed.
On this Lemmy software we have many communities, some which vehemently hate each other, but we’re all supported by this foundational software. If it’s too awful to you, you could of course use a different platform, and still federate with the Lemmy communities you love! But we’re still here.
Because, after all, in any real community there are people you don’t get on with, and part of life is about learning what it means to love each other and live together even so. And that goes for every software project too - somewhere, hiding in the dark recesses, is something quite unpalatable intrinsically linked in. If your ideology says you can’t use anything built with such problems, you’d better start building everything yourself.
So, you don’t have to support Lemmy. Even if you use it. You don’t have to agree with my take on it. But I’d like to encourage most of you to consider supporting Dessaline and Nutomic to continue this development work, and not just the bare minimum they need - let it overflow with blessing, since we have received such blessing from them!
…Or you can all send me angry replies for ranting too long on the Internet about something you disagree with ;-)
If I didn’t respond to anyone below, thank you. It means a lot, and makes the years of work I’ve spent on lemmy feel worthwhile and important.
❤️
I have a dollar or two to spare
Just donated! Best of lucks.
Thx!
Thanks!
From what I can see, what’s stopping a lot of people donating is the fact that donations cover .ml as well, I personally think this is a non-issue, because .ml doesn’t cost much to run (from what I can see).
Would it be possible to split donations for lemmy development, and donations for lemmy.ml?
Yes it would be possible. The question is if people would really be more willing to donate in that case, or if they would look for a different excuse instead.
There are obviously other good reasons for not donating or at least thinking hard about it first.
But removing one bad thing surely couldn’t hurt.
Lemmy.ml is the dev test instance, for one, and for two, the donations are to pay the devs wages, which allows them to dev Lemmy full time. You’re essentially saying you want to control what the devs of Lemmy can pay for with their salaries at that point.
What’s wrong with dev.lemmy.ml enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml?
That aside, I think that there would be enough people who would donate to .ml, I read somewhere that it was €30/month, which doesn’t seem like much.
We always put out calls before (major) releases, but very few ppl actually help test. This means a lot of bugs only get spotted when more eyes see them in production.
All of these issues are solved in the corporate world by paying quality assurance / testing teams, but open source projects don’t have those resources.
The fact that there aren’t a lot of users to give feedback. Lemmy.ml is like a public beta channel, in a way.
true, but if it gets more people to donate, I think it would help.
There’s also the fact that Nutomic is a known transphobe, and donating to lemmy’s development means supporting said transphobe. If we could get non-problematic devs, that would be ideal. But until then, the only real options are “use Reddit” or “support a tankie transphobe.” And neither is a great choice.
tAnKiE
You are on a “tankie” website made for and by tankies
I’m specifically not on a tankie website; I’m on an anarchist website that is federated with a tankie website. The largest reason most instances still federate with .ml is because it’s the only instance that the devs will use. So if you want to actively follow Lemmy’s development, (and despite the devs’ problematic attitudes, I think everyone here wants Lemmy to succeed), you need to federate with .ml.
You are sitting on lemmy complaining about lemmy devs being tankies so you won’t donate to them but you want them to succeed but you hate them but you love them
I love what they’ve made but their views are absolutely abhorrent. Having said that I am willing to donate as the project overall is a beautiful piece of software & I’ve donated a handful of times already but I will seethe that a single penny goes to keeping .ml online.
You can want a project to succeed, even if you don’t like the person in charge of the project.
piefed.social fedia.io joinmbin.org join.piefed.social
Sent a modest amount of XMR (do so from time to time). Thank you for all the work!
Youre welcome!
I’ve set up a recurring payment - thanks for the great work!
Thx!
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
Really wish Nutomic would apologize for it, it’s depressing.
Are we to assume you think this is an apology?
Page not found.
Just scroll down 👇
Exactly.
I will consider contributing financially to Dessalines but not nutomic so long as they spread and maintain reactionary positions against trans people. To be honest I’m even on the fence about Dessalines for maintaining a public relationship with nutomic in light of this.
“Give money to a transphobe so we can have open source Reddit” doesn’t have a great ring.
Nutomic is transphobe?
First I’ve heard of it, I’d like to find a source first though
I realize that it was a mistake to post that. The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time. So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future. In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
Do you also think that eg when corporations celebrate Black History Month that the bourgeoisie is also pro-Black? Capitalism has a vested interest in neutering and subsuming liberation movements so that they cannot pose a threat to capital itself, and also of course, as groups such as LGBTQ+ people become less socially stigmatised, it becomes worth it profit-wise to market towards these demographics specifically as the financial hit from bigots becomes less. We can see this reverse in real time in the US as it becomes more profitable to appeal to social reactionaries, showing that any appeals to “pride” were, as queer people have been saying all along, a marketing campaign and nothing deeper.
I don’t think this comment at all suffices. If you’re going to be a communist, then you need to put the effort in to engaging with all struggles for emancipation, and that includes trans people’s struggles. You shouldn’t “refrain from commenting on” liberation struggles; you should be supporting them.
I think it’s best that yes you are learning, but you shouldn’t refrain, you should be continuing your discussion so you can learn your blindspots and aim better.
If you asked me like ~4 years ago about some stuff like DID, I was insensitive and I have learned better. The continued conversation is what enabled me to continue progress in understanding.
I do hope you are learning better and this isn’t to brush it aside, but I always hope for betterment until proven wrong.
Did you also unban and apologize to the person that posted that DM?
Also, transgender people are people, not a topic. Imagine for example describing some sort of debate surrounding black people as “the black topic”.
Removed by mod
You’re getting caught in bad faiths arguments from the right. MtF athletes do not retain any exceptional advantage against cisgender ones.
I believe you when you say you support the LGBT cause, but then please educate yourself on the topic and stop defending this position.
I’ll check. Maybe I’m wrong! Afaik no hormonal treatment was needed for some sports so inherently it made me question it (but I might be wrong).
I’m not talking about exceptional advantages, just any, but alright.
But having my comment removed is just dumb. If I’m wrong, let the comment be there, the downvotes will show that I am wrong, and people can learn and discuss this way. Being censored for being potentially and unwillingly wrong when I’m open to discussion is just dumb.
No, this is transphobic. End of story.
Great arguments, thanks
Some sports are separated by sex for the reason that biological men are often advantaged as having overall more strength, being taller…
Yeah, no…
https://swimswam.com/ioc-releases-study-on-whether-trans-women-have-athletic-advantages/
The research showed that transgender female athletes had greater handgrip strength—an indicator of overall muscle strength—but lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared to cisgender women.
Does that sound like an overall advantage?
puts out paragraphs gatekeeping trans people out
keeps making a distinction between “biological men”, “MtF” and “F”
not a transphobe though I support youYou’re a transphobe and you aren’t allowed to disagree with trans people on whats transphobic and what isn’t. I’m cis though you can disagree with me, but the fact that you are disagreeing with a trans person makes it moot.
That’s just stupid. That’s the argument from authority reinvented.
Sure, they are more apt to say what is and what isn’t transphobic, but the debate doesn’t end there, and one isn’t always right because they are concerned.
And apparently I’m transphobic. I guess you can see things that I can’t, because I didn’t know this myself.
Having separate women’s teams at all was about access to organized sports activities because the existing men-only leagues banned them from participating. Rather than simply break down that barrier, legal and social compromises were made for women to participate but with the patriarchical addendum of only in separate leagues. Sometimes it was laws requiring women’s leagues to exist where men’s did. Sometimes it was women making their own leagues because they were excluded by men’s leagues.
The idea that women have separate leagues for “fairness” because they simply all wanted to be separate from men when competing is historical revisionism and a talking point largely concocted for the sole purposes of misogyny and transphobic exclusion, such as your comment.
concocted for the sole purposes of misogyny and transphobic exclusion, such as your comment.
Bold of you to assume this of me, when you don’t know me in any way. That wasn’t the purpose of my comment, I assure you.
I’ll do my research. In the meantime, stop making assumptions :)
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Nutomic has also stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards server costs for .ml… Yeah, no thanks. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled.
Donations are the Devs income stream, so they are in fact paying for .ml out of their own pocket. “funding development” doesn’t actually mean anything beyond “paying the developer’s wages” for Lemmy, so once you’ve paid them you don’t get a choice in how they spend their income.
this was a good way to find out my former liberapay had crapped out over a year ago. Renewed now, thanks for what you do
Doubled my monthly donation hopefully more people will do the same.
I’ve been hosting my own instance for two years now without hiccups.
Are any of the posted platforms better or worse to subscribe to? Patreon is easiest but if there are any percentages taken out etc etc I’ll switch it up
Both Liberapay and Ko-fi have no fees (besides payment processing). Liberapay has the additional advantage of being open source, and automatically splitting payments between Dessalines and me.
liberapay is probably the best. For payments processed there by stripe the fee avg is around 3.1%, and there’s no additional fee to the platform. Patreon ends up being like 15-20% iirc when you add up all fees. Unsure about opencollective or ko-fi
Jeez thats a huge cut from Patreon what the hell! Will definitely switch
ko-fi does not take a platform fee (unless they specifically enabled giving away 5% to ko-fi but I don’t think they did)
NB: also don’t beat yourself down if you cannot be contributing financially: there are many ways to contribute to the community by posting, commenting, reporting, moderating, and overall just being active and nice ;) your presence and participation here already means a lot!
Yep, instance admins and mods need your support also. It takes a lot of work to keep an instance free of trolls, and its a thankless job.
Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!