TBH i think you’re overthinking it, funding software development and running businesses like open source software development is often driven by self interest (even if it’s not easy to accept) . Like in software development part of it is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. So trying to transition to more closed model is expected (some of the projects you mentioned went back to being open source).

Sure i have my opinions about software licensing but for me open source is good enough. if something like that will happen and the software is good a fork will be made. That is a acceptable risk-reward calculation to me.

I am considering applying for a grant to fund the development, but there may be complications, especially given that I am a Ukrainian citizen currently living in Ukraine. I am not yet sure what specific difficulties might arise.

Maybe contact framasoft, the creators of peertube. maybe they could help or even provide employment .

Therefore, as an alternative, I would consider fundraising directly from interested users and the community to support development. Since you mentioned fundraising, I would like to ask how you feel about having an option to financially support the project’s development

I recommend giving in a shot, while trying to use lemmy approach of having a good fundraising process with a pop up specifically . I actually tried to write a learning resource for funding open source so there is a lot to say about that. but you would still need a relatively large number of active users. Lemmy for example has around 37K monthly active users and earns around 3.6K a month. so around 10 active users per dollar. I looked at other fediverse platforms and i think it is one of the most effective fundraising processes when measured using active users per revenue ratio.

You could also just put ads in it and maybe a option to pay to remove them . openfront does this and still seems relatively popular. FOSS is nice but eating is better.

Would you personally consider becoming a financial contributor? If so, what monthly amount would you potentially be willing to contribute?

I am afraid i am not a very good case study. i am not really a peertube users and already spend a relatively large chunk of my time on FOSS so i don’t want to invest in it too much.

Regarding your points about benchmarking the recommendation system and curator-based feeds, I am not entirely sure I understood what you meant. Could you please clarify?

Regarding elo ranking something like a page on the website where you are shown two pages with recommendations from two different recommendation systems and you would vote which page and system provided better recommendations . You could also just have one feed and see which recommendation system has a better viewed video to liked video ratio.

Regarding curation. some account invites a bunch of people to act as curators. then something like the most liked videos this group of people had in the last 24h or week get shown. something like that.

If you are looking for free hosting, maybe checkout tuxfamily.

You could also put some links for donations (liberapay , open collective etc) and fundraise the money for better hosting outside of ukraine (and maybe some could go to ukraine government though taxation ). I saw a patreon but no mention that the donations could be used for better hosting which could motivate people.

If you don’t want to deal with taxes, i think using some non profit could help with that (opencollective , Software Freedom Conservancy , spi etc ).

I would like to see some benchmarking of the recommendation system, maybe with a elo ranking like done for AI .

allowing feeds by teams of curators is an idea i would like to have explored (it could be benchmarked using surveys or elo).

This seems really good btw.

Why not link the source code from the website (or did i miss it?)

Which is not useful if those users are people who try out the platform and then abandon it, or worst bots for state actors.

Right now i don’t see any movement in the amount of donations (patreon, liberapay). so i am not kinda skeptical this will end up being meaningful growth.

They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

Maybe it is better to avoid duplication of effort and contribute to OSGL.

You just need to add a “mature” tag to it and a option to filter by it. contributing to it is easy as far as i can tell.

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don’t think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn’t guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.

Using custom libraries sounds like a problem that is easy to miss. sure the super diligent developer will be fine but its like saying there is no point in linters because people just don’t read coding guidelines.

Looks like a few services already have a mechanism like i described in place. e.g. Kubernetes throws a “APIRemovedInNextReleaseInUse”.

Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.

“time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.

Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.

information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.

Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.

We have lemmy apps that still aren’t supporting API changes added over a year ago. We even had one such case last week.

That sounds like something could be improve. is there some sort of warning mechanism in place?

Say when using a lemmy client. the client either specifies its a production build. or if its not then the lemmy server reports where deprecated API’s are used.

Not sure that is the correct approach. break frequently break often seems better (that’s what PHP and java seem to do as far as i can tell, unlike python 3 which caused a lot of drama).

notify a API is deprecated. give some time for users to update to the new API (1 year?) and then remove it.

Of course after version 1.0 there might be less breakage so it won’t be a be problem.

Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.

Also a demo instance would be nice.

Probably this. honestly after googling it does not seem open source.

This isn’t what i had in mind. i meant more like changing the line to something like:

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, donating money and helping find and fix bugs.

With “donating money” maybe replaced with “funding”.

I think liberapay has that feature.

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs

I feel like people giving their hard earned money for lemmy also should get a show of appreciation.