- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- asklemmy@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.
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:
Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev
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.
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.
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?
Thing is, you don’t have to federate with .ml. If you think .ml is badly moderated, you don’t have to be part. Tech devs are also entitled to have personal projects that they needn’t do very well; and if .ml serves well as a test server for the software, all the better.
I agree the controversy has driven people away. But maybe that controversy is part and parcel of Lemmy: you either let it be or hide it; is hiding it so much better?
People are being asked to give money to the mods of .ml in their role as devs. There’s even a statement at the start of the thread that says (paraphrased) “yes, some small percentage will go to .ml because it is the primary testbed”.
The issue isn’t federation. It’s being asked to give money to support a place that prescribes values that the donator disagrees with.
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.
deleted by creator
I agree with everything you said generally. But one thing I don’t see being mentioned much. That is kind of glaring. Is the fact that when you are developing software etc. You have testing systems and you have production systems. And they are two different systems. You never test on production. And you never use your test server as a production server. It’s a bad idea in general, and there’s no need to. And that really says it all.
The fact that they are using lemmy.ml as a testing and a production server. Isn’t it justifiable, and it isn’t acceptable. Despite the fact that I generally enjoy activity pub, the fediverse and of course use lemmy. Lemmy development will not see a single penny from myself. Nor should it see a single dime of donation from anyone until that’s no longer the case. Which isn’t even bringing up the Cesspool of an echo chamber this joke of a “test server” is
We have various test servers, but these are not enough to catch all the potential problems in a new release. Lemmy is very complex software, and a minor change can cause performance problems in an sql query and cause downtime for instances. Such problems are impossible to catch on test servers, at least with our very limited resources.
How would you do public testing without making it significantly more expensive?
Many larger foss projects roll out Point releases to a trusted circle of volunteer testers. I’m sure there’s plenty of people running many different sized instances who enjoy being on the latest greatest version of software. If I was currently running an instance. I would probably number myself among them. I do run many servers. Just not currently any for lemmy/mastodon Etc. However it’s pretty common/normal practice.
keep in mind they’re a team of just 2 people. It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team
They have 5 peoples in the admin team, 2 of them is the dev. If they stop moderating, it will still have 3 on the team. It’s VERY easy to separate themselves from moderating but they still chose to put their resource(time) into it.
That has to apply when deciding whether to support them as well, then.
Not to mention that the communities over there have moderators - the devs just insist on taking matters into their own hands, which is a significant part of what makes them so deeply unpopular. They’re choosing to mod like this, when they really don’t have to.
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.
Yeah you’re correct, they explicitly don’t want it considered the main instance.
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.
I’ve mostly seen it recommended by random reddit users, not lemmy users. And to be fair it has decreased as a recommendation as its traffic has also decreased relative to other instances, especially since the reddit exodus.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
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.
Thank you for being reasonable about this.
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.
And what happens if this separate admin team makes decisions which users disagree with? The same debate starts all over again?
It literally recommends lemmy.ml within the first 3 listings in most cases or even worse, Hexbear
The code doesn’t do any preferential treatment for any instances. You can easily see they are not favored over the others with any statistically significant number of refreshes. That’s the beauty of OSS. You don’t need to speculate conspiracy theories.
The beauty works with software because you can review the code and then compile from source. From there you know without a shred of doubt that the compiled version on your local machine is doing what you saw it would do in the code
That’s not the case with a live website like join-lemmy, sure, the GitHub code checks out, but what guarantee do we have that the code shown on GitHub is what was deployed to the web server without modification? What guarantee is there they aren’t running a modified lemmy.ml backend?
There isn’t any guarantee except trust and I don’t have any trust with Nutomic or dessalines.
Could you share a screenshot? I see it defaults to a random order of listings.
Here’s from all topics - English - random
3 out of 5 refreshes and one of the top 3 is always hex, grad or .ml, that’s sus AF
Can you confirm that you are looking at all topics and not the politics option on refresh? I noticed a bug where if you select politics then go back to all topics and then refresh the page it goes back to politics.
There seems to be a bug where the category type doesn’t update in the URL when you go back to all topics after selecting a specific category
Yea, I closed the page entirely when I switched topics, because I did the politics one closed it to make the post and reopened the link to go back for the all topics one
Okay, because looking at all topics+English+random appears truly random on my device (no weight) and hexbear/grad are rarely first. Which is why I was thinking it’s possible that your sort reverted to politics due to that bug I found
It’s particularly bad when you select politics and English, the below were after 4 refreshes with that, choosing all topics and English was more fair, because of the fact theres 600+ instances for it to randomize through, but even then .ml, hex or grad showed up within the top 3 somewhat frequently as if they’re weighted higher.
Yeah, i don’t think anyone who sees the logo of lemmygrad will be like “ooh totally normal instance and a good starting point”. Anyone who knows the concept of tankies quite literally can see the tank in the logo and even people who don’t know the concept will understand the logo as having something to do with communist authoritarianism. Again, there is a god damn tank in the logo.
Interesting, although selecting a politics based server is also an interesting choice for signup lol. Do you have any coding experience? You could try making a PR, the Lemmy devs have seemed quite open to help on the site in the past.
One was already done, and they said they would adjust it so that it would remove instances that were greater than a certain percentage of the Lemmy user base at large. But it only removed .world, even .ee is still listed and they’re the next biggest. Iirc they even said they would remove .ml, they didn’t.
Frankly, I don’t trust them, the only thing I could trust is an independently run join-lemmy, because the devs of Lemmy has shown, repeatedly, they are unable to separate their personal politics from their work
the code is excluding instances with a monthly active user share of 30% or higher: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/5471b9cc7423fc51af3d72a464f740a1ee887489/src/shared/components/instances.tsx#L451-L456. .ee is currently at around 14%. the intention behind this is to reduce centralization, not punish specific instances.
Ah, ig the numbers I was remembering was a tad off, still though, if join-lemmy is supposed to be the landing site for forwarding potential new users to then there should not be extreme or controversial instances like .ml, hex or grad either
There seems to be precedent, HC is curiously missing from the line up, if there’s no intent to “punish a specific instance” nor any formal “no instances that are controversial or extreme” rule then HC should be there as well, listed under “Politics” at the very least
If you have the receipts, I’ll gladly make a pr for this! Lemmy devs are pretty receptive to issues and PRs in my experience
I took a look through my archives, and I unfortunately don’t. It’s likely that that happened before I started really screenshotting a lot of what they say and do. You could probably take a look through the Issues on GitHub though
Oh forsure where will they test new festures with testeds then lmao You paying for it?