I know people like to shit on the Reddit gold concept. But I still think it makes sense and is one of the least obtrusive ways to raise funds sustainably.
I did try donating for Lemmy through Liberapay using the link in this post but canceled the process when I saw that the money recipient was “peertube.social”, which I don’t use. I’d feel better donating if the money went to Lemmy and not Peertube.
I mean when I navigate to the Lemmy’s donation page and proceed with setting up a recurring payment, my bank asks for confirmation of the transaction. During this, my bank identifies the recipient as “PeerTube.social”. I find it a bit confusing, but I guess the other Lemmy founder also owns peertube.
I would bet that at least 90% of Lemmy could afford a recurring donation of $1 to $3 per month. If 90% of 50,000 users donated $1 per month, they could bring in $45,000 per year. Currently, the 1172 donators are donating even more than that, which pays for 1 full time developer. If we picked up the slack, they could afford two, effectively doubling the dedicated work output.
It’s that simple. Either we band together and keep this system afloat, or we give our data to corporations so they can sell it and pay the bills that way. There isn’t really a third option.
Edit: I can’t believe this has been up this long and nobody has corrected my awful math. It isn’t $45,000 per year, it’s 45,000 users donating a combined total of $540,000 per year. Basically, 90% of us donating $1 per month could take this rocket ship straight to the moon.
Do you like it here? Do you want it to succeed? Do you realize that instance servers and rust developers cost money? Those are the reasons why.
Either we help this place thrive now, or we’ll be watching assholes like Threads dominate the Fediverse. We can all be part of the solution, or we can be apathetic and continue to complain about the corporate internet while doing absolutely nothing about it.
I have never regretted a donation to a FOSS project.
It’s an ok experience. Realistically Reddit was much better before a bunch of changes and Lemmy hasn’t filled that/not sure it will catch up.
I don’t care if it succeeds or not. We’ll all just move on to the next thing if it doesn’t.
Yes of course it costs money - but it’s not my business to run and it’s the business’s problem. I’m not a charity or an investor so I don’t need to worry about whether the business succeeds or not.
Who do you think “the business” is? Lemmy is a free open source software created by volunteers. The one paid developer works for donations alone. Every instance is independently run, free of charge, and donation supported.
Have you looked around and noticed the lack of ads, algorithms, and promoted posts? All of that is due to Lemmy not being a business.
If you don’t want to contribute even a positive word toward other people donating what they can, then I’m really not sure what you’re doing in a brand new community driven FOSS project.
Alternative to reddit and to keep track of other technologies.
But yes, I get that the whole thing is free and donation driven. At the same time, if it’s free then it’s free. Why would you pay for something that’s free, sort of defies the point. If it can’t sustain itself being free then it can’t be free.
Maybe it’s an autistic thing but it’s just logically irrational.
That does explain some of my bewilderment at your stances in this conversation.
Nobody says you have to donate, but you are discouraging others to do so as well with your definitive statement of “no reason to donate”.
In effect, if nobody donates, we are putting 100% of the pressure on about a dozen individuals who run large instances and/or who develop the software. Overbearing financial pressure like that burns out good administrators.
Lastly, helping in any way you can is just plain neighborly. If you can’t help by donating, you can at least not discourage others from doing so. Even a “I appreciate the hard work that goes into this place” is a contribution.
Instead, you’ve chosen to basically say “I don’t care, not my problem, I don’t care if it burns”, which is a pretty rude thing to say in a thread directed as a thank you to the people who have put in all the hard work and time to make this place.
So, in summary, you don’t have to donate, you don’t have to care, but if you are discouraging others from caring and getting involved, you are no longer neutral, you are part of the problem.
Its not free in the traditional sense, its just someone else pays for you. These projects work by being “free” with their biggest/most charitable users supporting it. Every major software project that runs the web, be it curl or python, works that way. You do not pay to use the service, you are instead paying to help delay the abandonment of the project and bring updates to improve your experience.
If you don’t particually want this project to succeed, then that’s fine, though you should probably pay your instance a dollar to cover the bills incurred by your own use of there resources.
I think it’s a symptom of Lemmy’s core premise - where do I direct funds as the “common” user (read as less technically sophisticated)? To access and engage with Lemmy I…
use an app…
that channels a specific server…
contained within are individual mods that maintain communities and curate content…
and all of that lives within the larger “world” of Lemmy as an idea
There are many hands in that chain. Your dedicated users can handle negotiating that decision maybe, but the “common” user cannot - and this post is trying to discuss Lemmy at scale, so you’re talking about that “common” user.
Again, it’s counter to the founding spirit of Lemmy, but we’re missing a centralized path to supporting all of the distributed hands doing work on this idea. Not an easy problem to solve, but one that should be acknowledged.
I had no idea it accepted donations, if not for this post I would have no idea where to do it. And still not sure how it works and where the money is for exactly. Is it like sponsoring servers for 1 particular instance?
The links in this post are for funding the two developers who work full time on Lemmy, the software.
The instances are sponsored separately via their own contribution links. E.g. look at the sidebar on lemmy.world and you’re probably gonna find them.
For the system to work we need to fund both the software development and the instances. Currently the software development funding is further behind as it still doesn’t cover two modest salaries. On the other hand I think lemmy.world is sustainably funded. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
I think it’s enough for the big picture, and it enables me to make several follow up questions such as
I had no idea this was in the hands of 2 people. Do they really make a living primarily on crowd sourced funds? Exciting and scary for the future of software in general!
There’s a bit more detail here. I think I saw something about NLnet funding getting renewed recently. There are other open source contributors too, but these two are the main Lemmy team.
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