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.
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Update: For those of you who want to support Lemmy development without financing the hosting of lemmy.ml, know that the hosting is paid exclusively through OpenCollective. You can see the payment details at this link. This means donations through all other platforms (Liberapay, Ko-fi, Patreon, Crypto) are exclusively for Lemmy development, and not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.
Edit: Liberapay is the preferable donation option, as it has very low fees and is also open source.
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
But I want to support lemmy.ml
Then you can donate via Opencollective. But honestly it doesnt matter, because lemmy.ml hosting is already covered, and is very cheap compared to developer salaries.
I appreciate the transparency! :)
What if I’m so propagandized by American technofascist social media that I am incapable of believing Marxists would be able to make and maintain a project of this size? How do I donate to the real devs? (/j)
Real question: assuming I’m basically broke, which is more helpful to y’all: a yearly dono of $100 or a weekly pledge of $2?
The real devs are locked into a server room with appropriate supplies of food and caffeine. So dont worry about them.
Yearly or weekly doesnt make a big difference so whatever works for you. Depending on the platform small donations may have higher fees though.
I advise you to consider the weekly pledge over the one time donation. It would be a better course of action as it might help them plan ahead.
Also, I’m a caveman, so I would advise against following my advice
This update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
Nutomic and Dessalines, and lemmy.ml
From the post
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work.
So @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml are the developers
You can see from their usernames, they are primarily associated with lemmy.ml, which they are the admins of
As far as I understand it, the development team of Lemmy is bigger than that, but nutomic and dessalines as the founders and paid to develop lemmy full-time of course are the most important ones.
@sleeplessone@lemmy.ml is a maintainer of lemmy I think and
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca is a maintainer of lemmy backend?
Not sure about the status of flamingos and phiresky who also contribute to the codebase and were part of the recent AMA
Flamingos is a much loved admin of feddit.uk ☺️
Sent my money in. Thanks for what you do with the software, brother.
I personally block hexbear, and de facto ignore lemmy.ml because I find it to be a hive of vitriol and unproductive toxic behaviour, but I still signed up to donate because imho, lemmy’s open and decentralized nature make it fundamentally valuable and a worthwhile piece of societal infrastructure.
But please don’t abuse our trust.
If I didn’t respond to anyone below, thank you. It means a lot, and makes the years of work I’ve spent on lemmy feel worthwhile and important.
It absolutely is. You also inspire people to get into foss and take up the good fight. Thanks for doing this.
Underrated point. I started out with all the usual bloatware and, at best, a rudamentary feeling why that might be bad. I ditched Windows by now and are activly trying to get rid of Google and their likes, replacing more and more apps with foss alternatives. Trying to pull my family in too. That simply not would have happend without beeing exposed to this by Lemmy.
If I remember correctly, I got exposed to this because of the GNU + Linux interjection copypasta, which made me know about GNU
Thats me a year ago. Now i run pretty much 100% foss, have converted some family, run a foss it business and help activists stay safe on electronic devices. I’m not joking. Lemmy was a big part in that.
Just did the $5 donation on patreon. It’s on a lot but I hope it helps, I might not agree with everything the founders believe in but I really appreciate this open sourced community and the ideas and conversations I’ve had on it. It’s definitely worth supporting
Thank you, all donations help :)
I love lemmy the project. But there has too much political arguments in some communities and they will hate you if you aren’t 100% agree with them. Even the post and the group/community are not political, comments will turn it to political. I am kind of tired(although I know some ppl are thrilled with political arguments). There is not much the devs can do, but the content does affect the user experience quite a lot.
Nevertheless, thanks for all the hard work, nutomic and dessalines. I will donate.
Fully agree that theres too much politics. Like you say too often about attacking some kind of enemy rather trying to understand other perspectives. For better or for worse, those seem to be the types of people more likely to use a new platform like Lemmy. Hopefully in the future they will also get tired of this stuff.
Unfortunately Reddit and their mods/admins behaviour over the years show that the opposite will happen. When the Lemmy mods are already so militantly anti-open discussion and authoritarian, they’re not going to soften up - they’ll go even further towards the dictatorship they clearly desire.
I’d love to donate or even start contributing towards the code myself, but the current environment that is being fostered on the big “default” communities and instances is like Reddit on steroids, just speedrunning to the end game of mass bans and mod abuse - and I don’t envision myself wanting to be a part of that for too long. I wiped and deleted by 15+ year old reddit account because of what it had turned into.
I don’t know the solution, but something needs to be done at a system level to give users a way to remove mods and change how communities are managed.
I feel sorry for your situation. But at least in lemmy the dev are willing to try to resolve this problem. Low chance is still better than zero chance.
Here is an wild idea. Since a few communities are so divided and clearly they only have a good time when they talk to ppl exactly like them. Flame war happens when two groups of hardcore opposed users argue. Since normal users won’t have all days to argue with either side, if one side leaves, the wars is ended.
So instead of banning users by admin or blocking one users each time by users. Can we have allow users to create their own public group (or a gang)? Users can join any groups. Instead of blocking one user, users can simply block the whole group. Posts and comments will be hided if blocking.
Advantages:
- No banning is needed means admin’s time and gang members’ time can be saved.
- finally no one disagree with those gangs members anymore, so I guess they’re happy
- instead of using time from admin and uninvolved users, users who frequently involved controversial topics everywhere should spend their own time to create a group for staying in their comfort zone.
- uninvolved users don’t have to read all those flame war
Disadvantages:
- those gangs become more extreme cuz they miss the opportunity to understand each other
- dev have to do more work
- server may have more load
- some users might say those gangs should host their own instances
Ps: I don’t use the term community because our board is also called community. I don’t want to mix them up. May be i should call it users group, but I am too lazy. I do agree better word should be used.
I don’t know the solution, but something needs to be done at a system level to give users a way to remove mods and change how communities are managed.
Maybe just start an instance where politics are banned?
Have you considered applying for a FUTO grant?
I actually got in contact with them yesterday, will probably have a meeting soon to discuss how we can work together with them.
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
Really wish Nutomic would apologize for it, it’s depressing.
Can you please just apologize to those who were offended and promise to be more sensitive moving forward? That’s the sure-fire way to defuse the allegations accusing you of being a transphobe and put everybody at ease.
Refraining to comment further on the topic is smart until you learn more about the dynamics at hand. Transgender individuals face an unprecedented amount of discrimination and vitriol.
If anything, the bourgeoisie are generally polarizing people against each other, particularly pitting people against others who are different or who are in vulnerable positions.
The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time.
not an apology. wish you were still banned.
you can do better
Page not found.
Just scroll down 👇
There is nothing to scroll, it just says
GoException: no routes for location: /post/29579005/18404108?hint=29579005/18404108&hintInstance=lemmy.ml
That sounds like a your app problem. Try using a browser.
Nutomic is transphobe?
going as far as putting lgbt flags on government buildings
This motherfucker actually fell for rainbow capitalism
I realize that it was a mistake to post that. The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time. So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future. In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
This response itself belies a chauvanism which is not befitting of a communist. Socialism requires the liberation of all, and queer workers face super-oppression due to their status as being queer or trans.
A solid stance on queer liberation is critical for socialists to have because queer people are one of the many groups in society that due to their super-oppression can act as lightning rods for conflict against the bourgeois state.
I recommend this article on Leslie Feinberg and hir life. It’s critical as communists to have the right stance on this much in the same way as supporting AES and National Liberation, and dismissive attitudes such as your initial reaction here betray a chauvanism that other revolutionaries or oppressed people will likely find sickening. I don’t say this to demean the possibility of your growth, but instead to say that I want to see your growth on this issue and to take the right stance.
this is a half-assed non-apology and basically a promise not to grow or learn anything about trans people (people, not a “topic”; frankly dehumanising). are you a marxist or not?
I’m gonna be candid with you this is what your comment reads like (to me):
I realize that it was a mistake to post that.
But not to think it.
The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time.
The controversy is between the oppressed and oppressors. It’s “complex” because you don’t stand in solidarity with the oppressed.
So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future.
But continue to think like that and act accordingly in silent
In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
Since it keeps them out of sports?
Okay the last one was a joke because it feels like such an empty phrase after the non-apology preceding it. I’ve been putting off reading this for a long time, but will pledge to do so now starting today. Join me.
From “Combat liberalism”:
To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type [of liberalism].
Edit: Tomorrow is the anniversary of the attack on the Institute for Sexual Sciences which got famous as the nazi’s book burnings. There will not be a better time to start reading Feinberg than now.
Do you also think that eg when corporations celebrate Black History Month that the bourgeoisie is also pro-Black? Capitalism has a vested interest in neutering and subsuming liberation movements so that they cannot pose a threat to capital itself, and also of course, as groups such as LGBTQ+ people become less socially stigmatised, it becomes worth it profit-wise to market towards these demographics specifically as the financial hit from bigots becomes less. We can see this reverse in real time in the US as it becomes more profitable to appeal to social reactionaries, showing that any appeals to “pride” were, as queer people have been saying all along, a marketing campaign and nothing deeper.
I don’t think this comment at all suffices. If you’re going to be a communist, then you need to put the effort in to engaging with all struggles for emancipation, and that includes trans people’s struggles. You shouldn’t “refrain from commenting on” liberation struggles; you should be supporting them.
You make some good points. But keep in mind that I dont live in the United States, and I have never even met a transgender person irl. For me this is something which is only discussed online, so Im missing a lot of context and information. Case in point, I had no idea what “Black History Month” is and had to look that up. Anyway if I discuss this topic further it will be through an anonymous alt account, to avoid any further drama.
Exactly.
I will consider contributing financially to Dessalines but not nutomic so long as they spread and maintain reactionary positions against trans people. To be honest I’m even on the fence about Dessalines for maintaining a public relationship with nutomic in light of this.
“Give money to a transphobe so we can have open source Reddit” doesn’t have a great ring.
Nutomic has also stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards server costs for .ml… Yeah, no thanks. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled.
So when are you donating?
Refusing to make someone’s financial situation easier until they stop being transphobic is not a convincing argument against transphobia. Think about how your actions affect your side’s reputation from the other side’s perspective.
Rejecting someone that aligns with oppression is a great way to build against oppression, actually. Do you think Jewish Germans should have donated to the Nazis to build up “good faith” with them? Surely if they just acted like, “good Jews” they would have been spared, right?
This logic is typical status quo liberalism that tells you to tut-tut every oppressed group for not fighting back “the right way”. Of course, liberals have never succeeded using the methods they suggest, so this really amounts to telling the oppressed to shut up and die. This talking point is promulgated so that you and others will refuse to work in solidarity with the oppressed. Don’t let yourself be manipulated this way.
Prove that this is not false equivalence fallacy. Maybe there’s additional info about Nutomic that I’m missing.
Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.
Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. “Don’t blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don’t complain about your life, at least you’re not [oppressed group]” These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.
The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.
I need additional information, probably about Nutomic’s behavior, to see how it’s related to what you’re talking about.
The information is in the thread you are replying to. And no, you actually don’t, becauae what we are discussing is your paternalistic liberal response to others refusing to donate to a transphobe and then your leaning on debatebro fallacy misunderstandings when I explained what was wrong with it.
If you can’t self-criticize and adapt then just don’t respond.
It was not “debatebro” because nothing I said, except probably my first comment, was debating. Sorry for the confusion.
I don’t give a fuck about convincing transphobes, I believe they should all be thrown off a cliff along with every other kind of bigot. Obviously, I will not pay a transphobe if I can avoid it.
To those who don’t want to give because of the devs’ political views, I’d like to say this goes into improving the Lemmy software our communities here are based on, not making some political podium for the devs in particular.
There’s a lot of rubbish on Lemmy… because it’s the internet. Like the Great Garbage Patch of the Pacific, it collects; but I still like the Ocean. Some people look down particularly on .ml, but personally I think this is unjustified.
In fact, before joining Lemmy I heard some rumour of the controversy and went looking. I certainly disagree strongly with certain things I found, but my impression was of Dessalines and Nutomic treating the Internet as a forum for respectful debate and this Lemmy as a technology project not a personal political force - as many see Reddit as becoming. Well, that was my impression, so I was happy to join, and I’ve not been disappointed.
On this Lemmy software we have many communities, some which vehemently hate each other, but we’re all supported by this foundational software. If it’s too awful to you, you could of course use a different platform, and still federate with the Lemmy communities you love! But we’re still here.
Because, after all, in any real community there are people you don’t get on with, and part of life is about learning what it means to love each other and live together even so. And that goes for every software project too - somewhere, hiding in the dark recesses, is something quite unpalatable intrinsically linked in. If your ideology says you can’t use anything built with such problems, you’d better start building everything yourself.
So, you don’t have to support Lemmy. Even if you use it. You don’t have to agree with my take on it. But I’d like to encourage most of you to consider supporting Dessaline and Nutomic to continue this development work, and not just the bare minimum they need - let it overflow with blessing, since we have received such blessing from them!
…Or you can all send me angry replies for ranting too long on the Internet about something you disagree with ;-)
deleted by creator
I’ve been considering donating for a while (I already donate to my instance) so I’ve set that up now. ~$5 a month isn’t much but I hope if a few more people do it too it will start to add up.
I gladly doubled my monthly contribution. Thank you so much for working on Lemmy! I had no idea you worked on it full-time. That’s insane! It is the first fediverse software I ever used, and it opened my eyes to a whole other side of the internet I didn’t know existed.
From what I can see, what’s stopping a lot of people donating is the fact that donations cover .ml as well, I personally think this is a non-issue, because .ml doesn’t cost much to run (from what I can see).
Would it be possible to split donations for lemmy development, and donations for lemmy.ml?
Yes it would be possible. The question is if people would really be more willing to donate in that case, or if they would look for a different excuse instead.
There are obviously other good reasons for not donating or at least thinking hard about it first.
But removing one bad thing surely couldn’t hurt.
Actually lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
If that is the case you should make it clear in the description what exactly is being funded on each platform.
I already updated the description on Opencollective to mention this. Other platforms only cover developer salaries like the descriptions say.
I don’t think it was updated when I looked earlier but it looks good now 👍
You might consider adding to the descriptions on the other platforms that .ml is explicitly excluded considering that many seem to be confused but that’s up to you.
That seems unnecessary because most people dont care. There is a vocal minority which keeps complaining but they dont need to be appeased any more.
Lemmy.ml is the dev test instance, for one, and for two, the donations are to pay the devs wages, which allows them to dev Lemmy full time. You’re essentially saying you want to control what the devs of Lemmy can pay for with their salaries at that point.
What’s wrong with dev.lemmy.ml enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml?
That aside, I think that there would be enough people who would donate to .ml, I read somewhere that it was €30/month, which doesn’t seem like much.
We always put out calls before (major) releases, but very few ppl actually help test. This means a lot of bugs only get spotted when more eyes see them in production.
All of these issues are solved in the corporate world by paying quality assurance / testing teams, but open source projects don’t have those resources.
The fact that there aren’t a lot of users to give feedback. Lemmy.ml is like a public beta channel, in a way.
true, but if it gets more people to donate, I think it would help.
There’s also the fact that Nutomic is a known transphobe, and donating to lemmy’s development means supporting said transphobe. If we could get non-problematic devs, that would be ideal. But until then, the only real options are “use Reddit” or “support a tankie transphobe.” And neither is a great choice.
For someone like me who wants to see Lemmy be a place that’s owned by users, run by users, and moderated sensibly, what should I do? I have a problem with supporting the lemmy.ml instance.
The lemmy.ml instance costs like 30$/month to run. Your donation isn’t going to that; your donation is going to develop Lemmy itself
Your donation isn’t going to that
Some fraction of my donation would go towards the $30. Any amount of money going from me to .ml, be it $10 or $.00001, is too much.
I know $30 is “not much”, but the amount doesn’t change my principles.
If they do not treat lemmy.ml server donations separately from lemmy development donations, that is a problem.
Please stop accepting crypto"currencies"—multi-level marketing pyramid schemes—and I donate.
What if I paid for all my free software?
I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway? —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.htmlFaulty generalization That some scammers or greedy people in rich countries are promoting it like a ponzi scheme to benefit themselves doesn’t mean every person use it in the same way. Some people use it for its savings in a highly devaluating currency (my use case), others for money laundering, or to send money to Palestine, or to flee a collapsing country because of war and avoiding their money being seized by the policy at the borders, for ransomware, or creating circular economies in poor countries, to donate to human rights activists in dictatorships, to buy drugs, etc, etc these are just some of the dozens of verified uses cases. That’s what happens when a technology is free and permissionless, it’s not good or bad by itself, it’s as good or as bad as the person that uses it. AI is being used to scam people and to detect cancer more precisely than the best experts. That’s and inherent feature of free software. Lemmy is a perfect example, would you promote not using it because there is an instance used for child porn?
Faulty generalization That some scammers or greedy people in rich countries are promoting it like a ponzi scheme to benefit themselves doesn’t mean every person use it in the same way. Some people use it for its savings in a highly devaluating currency (my use case), others for money laundering, or to send money to Palestine, or to flee a collapsing country because of war and avoiding their money being seized by the policy at the borders, for ransomware, or creating circular economies in poor countries, to donate to human rights activists in dictatorships, to buy drugs, etc, etc these are just some of the dozens of verified uses cases. That’s what happens when a technology is free and permissionless, it’s not good or bad by itself, it’s as good or as bad as the person that uses it. AI is being used to scam people and to detect cancer more precisely than the best experts. That’s and inherent feature of free software. Lemmy is a perfect example, would you promote not using it because there is an instance used for child porn?
It would’ve been a faulty generalization if, like knives or Lemmy, most use cases were benign. Unfortunately crypto"currencies" are predominantly speculative and malignant to society.
You know that what you said is pure speculation based on personal experience, random publications, ideology or mainstream and social media, which is the only way you can reach that conclusion, unless you have peer-review publications with the statistics of worldwide usage. If you lived in Africa you would say that Bitcoin is godsend, as you can hear it from many africans
If you lived in Africa you would say that Bitcoin is godsend, as you can hear it from many africans
“[…] As already mentioned, imposing technology doesn’t work; struggling people know their needs far better than anyone. On the contrary, it seems that the “developing” countries should be telling us what do:
- “The East African region has cemented its position in the digital economy as the global leader with the highest penetration rate of mobile money in the world.” —Daily Monitor (2021)[49]
- “Finally, a number of telcos have managed to develop a superior client experience early in the evolution of mobile financial services in Africa. M-Pesa’s client experience is remarkably simple: it takes only three inputs and six clicks to send funds, on any type of handset. Registration is straightforward; merchant acceptance is widespread, and there are no transaction fees on bill payments.” —McKinsey (2017)[50]
All without blockchain. Who would’ve thunk? For first world countries we sure think third-rate. […]” —Crypto Cult Science
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Simply copy-pasting from my own website because of POSSE: “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”
