- 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?
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.
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
instance categorization requires someone to PR that to the joinlemmy-site repository, as those tags are not automatic.
HC is in fact present on https://join-lemmy.org/instances, but as there is no explicit tag it won’t show up if you search by tag.
there are a few instances excluded, you can find the list here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/5471b9cc7423fc51af3d72a464f740a1ee887489/recommended-instances.json#L16-L28
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