Hey folks!
I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.
Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.
However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.
Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.
I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.
If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.
Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!
That’s correct. People actively shilling for authoritarian regimes committing human rights atrocities, denying genocides, and aggressively silencing all dissent do not deserve it.
All they’d have to do is develop from behind the scenes and not actively contribute to one of the worst places on the platform, and I’d have no problem donating to them.
But they don’t, and so I don’t, and instead I get to listen to your whataboutism, literally the guy in the “and yet you participate in society” meme.
Lemmy dev here, for what its worth I stopped posting about politics years ago, and also dont do any moderation on lemmy.ml besides occasionally banning an obvious spam account. I simply dont have the time or interest anymore, and prefer to focus my time on development which benefits all Lemmy users.
Posting from alt account because these comments are not federating to my home instance.
If that were to become the enforced position of the entire dev team going forward, I promise that I will donate, and provide receipts.
That’s a perfectly sensible position, but the money doesn’t go just to you.
It also goes to lemmy.ml costs.
Only donations via Opencollective pay for lemmy.ml hosting. All other donation options are exclusively for developer salaries.
Hi Nutomic. I’m new to Lemmy. I was quite impressed with what you have built, and was looking forward to helping Lemmy grow. It must have taken a lot of your effort. I was really enthusiastic about the project and a few weeks back your appeal for funding would probably have had me donating something.
Unfortunately, I’ve already had some bad experiences on your instance. I probably would have stayed away from it had I known what it stood for, but - as someone pointed out - this is the oldest instance, has some of the largets forums, so naturally that’s where many people land first.
And it really is quite an image problem for Lemmy. Someone compared you to Elon tanking (sorry for the bad pun) Tesla sales. Sure, up to some point one can say, imperfect allies, separation of code and ideology, that kind of thing. But I think you see from the comments that for a lot of people it’s too much.
For me, the combination of your views and what’s represented by .ml fundamentally undermined my trust in Lemmy as a platform. I don’t have the means to validate claims of code or development processs being impartial. It could well be that you did a lot of excellent work and have superb integrity in separating your views from your contributions. I just honestly don’t trust that is the case.
This seems pretty political. Have you apologised for it?
That meme literally says ‘We should improve society somewhat’ and lemmy is a perfect example of something that is ‘improved somewhat’ when you compare it to literally any other social media driven solely by profit and algorithms that reward whatever content the owners want.
But the keyboard warriors now prefer lemmy die because comments of a dev who isn’t in control of the software said… Anyways I’m donating monthly now
Lemmy won’t die. They’ll have enough money to develop the software if they just take lemmy.ml offline, and then they’d get more donation money overnight.