Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
Please make mod tools a top priority. It's absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.
Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.
Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
Just arrived on Lemmy through join-lemmy.org, and I could quickly find a server.
I first saw a post about lemmy.ml being out of capacity which lead me to join-lemmy.org
I guess most of refugee will do the same.
Still have to learn a lot, I still don't know what are instance hosting, i guess profiles and subtopics, therefore if i interact on a sub hosted on lemmy.ml i guess I would also use it.
Well, going to study this
Thanks for this platform, even though reddit death was a liltle hope for me to waste less time on my phone !
28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.
I don't know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you'd like to help us out, here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we're working on something worthwhile.
You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology ... eventually.
For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that's separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it's preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I'll make sure that's in there.
I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!
Just downloaded Jerboa last night so I have something to browse when I delete the reddit app during the black out. The collapse/expand tool is honestly something that would have made me avoid the app, so thank you for your service lmao.
I'm proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7
o7
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they're been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don't think we'll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
Just sent $44... My fav #.
The good news is we've seen this before with Mastodon.
Not only did we see an influx of monthly donations, we saw admins expand the needs of their servers in real-time with the help of the community.
After having witnessed that in the midst of the bird migration, I have no concerns with how Lemmy will handle the inevitable influx when it comes to uptime and finances.
I immediately started contributing to Fosstodon’s Patreon and I will be happy to do the same here!
I'm not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
Great idea! Surely you could just charge, oh I don't know, $20 million a year for it? That would easily cover operating costs and so much more!
We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
charge 10 doge per upvote
People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn't, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.
The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don't have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don't think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don't end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.
And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.