Lemmy - Donate
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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.

Donate

  • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    74·
    7 days ago

    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.

      • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        34·
        8 days ago

        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.

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.mlEnglish
      25·
      8 days ago

      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?

      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        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

      • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        23·
        7 days ago

        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.

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.mlEnglish
        13·
        8 days ago

        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

  • grapemix@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      5·
      5 days ago

      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.

      • ToolMenace@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        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.

        • grapemix@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          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:

          1. No banning is needed means admin’s time and gang members’ time can be saved.
          2. finally no one disagree with those gangs members anymore, so I guess they’re happy
          3. 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.
          4. uninvolved users don’t have to read all those flame war

          Disadvantages:

          1. those gangs become more extreme cuz they miss the opportunity to understand each other
          2. dev have to do more work
          3. server may have more load
          4. 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.

        • wiki_me@piefed.socialEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          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?

  • Tieas@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    6 days ago

    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

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    42·
    9 days ago

    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.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    32·
    9 days ago

    Lemmy default UI should seriously consider a daily donation goal, similar to old Reddit. Implement a backend API to fetch the daily amount needed and the current amount donated, and stick it on the right hand side by all the trending communities. As a stats nerd, this would seriously motivate me to donate more.

  • Joe Bidet@lemmy.mlEnglish
    28·
    9 days ago

    NB: also don’t beat yourself down if you cannot be contributing financially: there are many ways to contribute to the community by posting, commenting, reporting, moderating, and overall just being active and nice ;) your presence and participation here already means a lot!

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      Yep, instance admins and mods need your support also. It takes a lot of work to keep an instance free of trolls, and its a thankless job.

    • Joe Bidet@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!

        • Michael@slrpnk.netEnglish
          12·
          8 days ago

          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.

    • TheOubliette@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • AccountMaker@slrpnk.netEnglish
    19·
    8 days ago

    Donated on Liberapay.

    As others have said, this is financing software development, not a political campaign. I first learned of the fediverse when Reddit removed 3rd party apps, and I felt like my eyes were opened. This is what I want the internet to be, decentralized and running on open source software, and I’m sure I’m far from being alone in this, so thanks to the devs for that.

    Also Jerboa is great!

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      I actually got in contact with them yesterday, will probably have a meeting soon to discuss how we can work together with them.