If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
Please make mod tools a top priority. It’s absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.
Contributions welcome.
Removed by mod
Lemmy is not a company, it’s built by volunteers. If you want a corporate platform go to Reddit.
Removed by mod
I honestly can’t tell if
removed by mod
was removed by mod, or just an italicized removed by mod.
My browser is set to default to French (which I speak / am still learning) and to me it says
supprimé par le modérateur
so this one is real. A visual distinction could be nice, that might be a decent newcomer contribution to the codebase.
Ah and here comes the toxicity along with the reddit flood.
For real, I’m back today after a couple of days and there are so many removed comments. Why can’t we have nice things, people? *groans*
Hell, even if it isn’t strictly a mod tool, being able to do this from someone’s profile page would be good.
Wholeheartedly agree
Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.
Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I’ll make sure that’s in there.
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I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!
Just downloaded Jerboa last night so I have something to browse when I delete the reddit app during the black out. The collapse/expand tool is honestly something that would have made me avoid the app, so thank you for your service lmao.
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Liberapay is simpler, automatically splits payment between devs, and has no fees (other than the payment processor). They’re even funded by their own model.
Opencollective isn’t as good because you have to submit invoices to get paid.
Patreon is absolutely the worst because it’s not made for teams, and they take a big cut for essentially just running a wordpress for you with payment buttons.
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they’re been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don’t think we’ll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
Your heart is in the right place, man <3
People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn’t, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.
The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don’t have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.
The good news is we’ve seen this before with Mastodon.
Not only did we see an influx of monthly donations, we saw admins expand the needs of their servers in real-time with the help of the community.
After having witnessed that in the midst of the bird migration, I have no concerns with how Lemmy will handle the inevitable influx when it comes to uptime and finances.
I immediately started contributing to Fosstodon’s Patreon and I will be happy to do the same here!
Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There’s plenty of ways to make money without VC.
Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don’t know…
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/
They do get funding from NLNet
Yes! :)
I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.
Well, it’s working right now, isn’t it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.
The big migration hasn’t happened yet. There’s going to be a big spike in new users during the blackout, and then again when Apollo shuts down.
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.
And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.
Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API
As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits
I’m happy to donate and will do, just like buying an app really if once per year.
The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do
also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao
like the rest of the Fediverse: through ingeniosity, community and self-organization!
(understanding “make money” as “pay for its infrastructure and maybe for some dev and other of the essential work now ran by volunteers” not as “profit”)
