Hello world,
as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won’t start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.
All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We’re currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it’s certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.
We’re looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.
You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
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.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy’s primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I’ve experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.
And it boils down to this:
The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.
Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.
Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.
Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication’s reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible… a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.
The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org’s case is this:
Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev
Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.
Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.
If this doesn’t happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.
To be absolutely clear, on .ml hardly any mods do modding, almost all the removals and bans is by one of 2 admins, dessalines themselves or davel (and occasionally a 3rd admin cypherpunks)
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.
If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.
And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.
You seem to have a good grasp of the problem and have proposed a viable solution. Would you like a one month, one year, or permanent ban?
Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…
I wanted to text “here’s your award”, but then I remembered we don’t have awards.
So here is your “hey, that was a great comment! I laughed and it made my day a bit better”- word-award :)
@nutomic I hope you’re currently taking notes of all of the feedback you’re getting from everyone, particularly this comment. There is a lot that lemmy.ml needs to do to rehabilitate their reputation, and that needs to be done before people will be willing to donate.
If the lemmy devs continue to ignore the feedback from everyone regarding their management of lemmy.ml, their problem is only going to get worse. But if they are open minded about feedback then they have a chance to win people back
I agree with everything you said generally. But one thing I don’t see being mentioned much. That is kind of glaring. Is the fact that when you are developing software etc. You have testing systems and you have production systems. And they are two different systems. You never test on production. And you never use your test server as a production server. It’s a bad idea in general, and there’s no need to. And that really says it all.
The fact that they are using lemmy.ml as a testing and a production server. Isn’t it justifiable, and it isn’t acceptable. Despite the fact that I generally enjoy activity pub, the fediverse and of course use lemmy. Lemmy development will not see a single penny from myself. Nor should it see a single dime of donation from anyone until that’s no longer the case. Which isn’t even bringing up the Cesspool of an echo chamber this joke of a “test server” is
How would you do public testing without making it significantly more expensive?
Many larger foss projects roll out Point releases to a trusted circle of volunteer testers. I’m sure there’s plenty of people running many different sized instances who enjoy being on the latest greatest version of software. If I was currently running an instance. I would probably number myself among them. I do run many servers. Just not currently any for lemmy/mastodon Etc. However it’s pretty common/normal practice.
We have various test servers, but these are not enough to catch all the potential problems in a new release. Lemmy is very complex software, and a minor change can cause performance problems in an sql query and cause downtime for instances. Such problems are impossible to catch on test servers, at least with our very limited resources.
keep in mind they’re a team of just 2 people. It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team
That has to apply when deciding whether to support them as well, then.
Not to mention that the communities over there have moderators - the devs just insist on taking matters into their own hands, which is a significant part of what makes them so deeply unpopular. They’re choosing to mod like this, when they really don’t have to.
They seem quite popular from .ml users, i only see complaints about them from none .ml users come to think about it. Why should my instance have to listen to your moderation citiques but when I find that your instance is too lax when it comes to the right wing I get told to pound sand “tankie” its not your instance? do we all see this double standard?
The difference, and why it’s not a double standard, of course, being the fact that I’m not going to your instance and asking for money.
Like, think about it for a second - imagine that I actively moderate .world or some “lib instance” where I aggressively ban tankie talking points, and that I also contribute a huge amount to the codebase of Lemmy. If I were to go to the tankie instances to ask for money that’s going into my own pocket, I’d get laughed out of the room. There’s no way they’re gonna cough up dough for someone like that, especially with all of the horrible accusations they make about .world (transphobia, nazis, etc.).
And we know this is the case, because they’re already rioting in the donation threads about Nutonic’s transphobia. And he’s already a tankie. If a literal tankie can’t pass the purity test well enough to get their support, there is zero chance a “lib” would.
Anyway, there’s no right wing content here that I’ve seen, but regardless, I absolutely support .ml users having their instance moderated exactly as they would want. That’s what decentralization and federation is for, after all.
I also fully support the devs using .ml as their testing ground for new versions of Lemmy.
I do not support the devs of the entire Lemmy project actively censoring dissenting viewpoints on a tankie instance. They have a right to moderate their instance however they see fit, of course, but I also have the right to not give them any of my money because of it.
If the devs do want money from us, then, as has been mentioned repeatedly, all they have to do is stop actively moderating .ml themselves and let their mods do it for them, and I believe the donations would pour in.
They don’t seem willing to do that (Dessalines, at least), and so they will continue to receive pennies outside of the Tankie Triad. And y’all would do the exact same if the situation were reversed, and you know it.
Simple as.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I imagine it’s easier to maintain enthusiasm for continued development when you’re also using it to support online discussion the way you want. I can see this being a big deal
But I can still choose where my money goes and doesn’t go
My instance is not asking for money, the devs of the program are, yes they are also on the mod list for this instance however they are clear in the fact that they are asking for this as the only 2 full time developers who. Second they are not posting this on every instance if you look at the poseter they are from .world
Second .world DOES moderate that agressivly, I would argue that they mod more agressivly to their political fraimpoint than .ml does for any reason.
Third they are not just “contributing alot to the code base.” they are doing BY FAR the majoirty of the work, they founded the program, and have not been able to bring on anyone else because as shown above they are barily making enough to scrape by as it is.
I can tell you as a user who has been on there sense the only real alternitives where nitch or beehaw, I have not seen any of this over reaching censorship you claim, now I admit I have a bias of I do go there, my politics are quite left of center, however, the mass censorship that is talked about is not a reality seen by or complained about by the user base
I am also not saying “you must pay them money” what I do find interesting is that there is even before this a large talk about how .ml moderates, dispite its moderation being very well liked and suported by its users, and a change to the style that you are advocating for would be VERY VERY unwelcome within the userbase. The fact that 2 of our admins are also devs, should not give you the outsized right to demand changes in our moderation practices.
I cannot and will not speak for the political beliefs of the devs, but I can tell you that once again as an administration team they are suported, and as for suporting FOSS projects with creators I disagree with, I have donated to Notepad ++, when I used it constantly on windows, the developer is a HUGE Neoliberal, does not try to hide it, I still suported it, because I at the time had the money to suport it and valued his labor in maintaining it.
But this long winded to say, this is still a double standard, that you feel entitled to demand .ml or lemmygrad, or hexbear to change their moderation style, but I a user from .ml cannot request that you change yours. If you don’t want to donate for political reasons just say that, dont couch it in that you want to “liberate” our instance… we by and large like how it is moderated.
Nope, it’s not.
I spent the time to actually respond to you in good faith, but if you’re not going to actually address the points I made in my post, I don’t see why I should waste any more time with you.
No money for tankie devs until they stop modding.
I did address it line by line, I do not agree with your argument.
Where I do agree is that if you find communism so distasteful that you cannot suport a communsim sure no one is forcing you to donate
If this was a reach out saying “Lemmy.ml is hemraging money please give us money to keep the instance up” sure I could understand but what they are saying is “we are the full time devs of the project, we cannot provide the project the hours it needs to survive at the current funding level, please help us keep it alive.” and the responce is “Change the instance moderation style if you want money to develop” and I am saying that I find it very wierd that you and .world feel like they should be able to dicate moderation, especialy when the instance is not the issue at hand.
I am also pointing out that I hear the most complaints about .ml moderation from .world users and .ee users, and I was musing that I find it a double standard that you feel like you are able to impose a will on how to moderate when it is largely popular internaly, but we are screamed at if we do the same.
Now I do not know how replying point by point makes this badfaith, was it that I put my conclusion at the end and your reasons did not change my opinion?
Fine, maybe we’re just talking past each other somehow. I’ll give it one more try, and I’ll try to be clear. This is the main point:
I understand your concern here, and I fully agree that if we were trying to control how .ml is moderated, then this would absolutely be a double standard.
My response is that we’re not dictating the moderation of the instance, we’re dictating that the developers of Lemmy should personally not participate in that moderation.
The moderation of .ml could be literally, exactly the same, with literally exactly the same bans, deletions, etc., as long as it’s not Dessalines doing it.
The moderation policies are fine; the devs acting as a moderator for a tankie instance is not fine.
Once again, we do not want to dictate how your instance is moderated. We do not care how your instance is moderated, other than finding it generally distasteful. We want to make sure that the devs of Lemmy are not the ones doing that moderating.
Also, this is orthogonal to the main point, but it’s worth mentioning:
You’ve put words in my mouth here. If .ml were a communist instance, I’d be fine with donating. It’s the fact that it’s specifically - a tankie, authoritarian, genocide-denying, human-rights-violation-supporting instance that aggressively silences all dissent just like the authoritarian, genociding governments they hold up on pillars instance - that I find so distasteful.
I would love it if the devs were actually communists.
They could probably do something like a voluntary self-re-education camp for themselves and change their terroristic views. There’s probably some inspiration somewhere in the world.
Or if not that, get other devs to continue the project and do something else.
Thing is, you don’t have to federate with .ml. If you think .ml is badly moderated, you don’t have to be part. Tech devs are also entitled to have personal projects that they needn’t do very well; and if .ml serves well as a test server for the software, all the better.
I agree the controversy has driven people away. But maybe that controversy is part and parcel of Lemmy: you either let it be or hide it; is hiding it so much better?
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Oh forsure where will they test new festures with testeds then lmao You paying for it?