Lemmy Needs Donations!

OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 320 points –

Between Lemmy.world desperately needing new mod tools, Lemmy.ee disabling image uploads, and the two main Lemmy.ml devs working on Lemmy for less than minimum wage, I want to urge and remind everyone to please Donate!

The Lemmy devs have refused advertisements, refused collaboration with Meta, and focused all of their efforts (and then more) to support the wave of users who left Reddit. The Lemmy devs did this, as they let the work owed to their sponsor take the back seat, to give everyone here today reading this message the best experience possible.

Lemmy is already at 1% the size of Reddit, but only has 2 full time employees. Not only do they deserve more for the gruelling hours they've put in, but so does everyone else who's contributed too.

https://join-lemmy.org/support

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Here's information from the AMA recently about lemmy dev salaries:

Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.

I don't know where they're based, but if they're here in the US, that amount of donations would cover about half of one dev ($4k * 12 = $48k; a low developer salary in the US is ~$100k), meaning we need about 4x the donations just to fund development efforts. That is, if we want to retain two full-time developers instead of having it change into a traditional open source project with mostly community contributions.

Just some data to back up that point. I don't know how much the current developers would consider sufficient to stay with the project longer term.

It's nice how fast Lemmy is growing, but I think it is a good idea to manage expectations. In the world of free and open source software you can't just throw money at the problem to make it better. The development of Lemmy will occur at will whenever someone feels like contributing. It's not someones job to develop Lemmy so it isn't guaranteed to happen at all.

Edit: Just for clarification I'm not suggesting to not donate. I'm just saying donating doesn't guarantee development.

It actually is someone's job at the moment; NLNet gave a grant to Dessalines and Nutomic to work on it IIRC

Interesting news. Thank you for the clarification. Is there any announcement about this?

https://lemmy.ml/post/35293

How do I give a one-time donation? And not a monthly donation.

I did a custom amount annual donation with manual renewal on librepay, that seems to be the easiest. Otherwise you could send crypto to one of the wallet addresses they linked.

Yes, that is the best way. Liberapay is also great as it doesn't take any commission itself (although if you actually use liberapay frequently, it would be a good idea to also donate to them!).

I don't typically like to feather my own nuts but...

Been donating 4.20/week since early June

o7

I will say that I would be a lot more willing to donate if the soft ban on Ukraine news was lifted.

Tell me more? I see Ukraine news. Usually browse by top 6 hour or hot.

Ah it's just lemmy.ml with the soft ban. The main "dev" instance.

Ah ok, thank you. Yeah that would be a barrier to donation for me too. Seems odd.

It doesn't if you know the politics of the developers of lemmy. That doesn't seem to impact the software though, only the instances they manage, so just use another instance if you don't like those rules.

I donated some money, but do the links in the "donate" link support Lemmy.ml or Lemmy.world or both?

I subscribe to mostly Lemmy.world instances, and have a Lemmy.world account. Which community makes the most sense for me to support?

I subscribe to mostly Lemmy.world instances,

you subscribe to communities on the lemmy.world instance. Ultimately, lemmy.world doesn't exist without the efforts of the developers behind Lemmy, so that's definitely more important imo.

Thanks for the correction. I'm still learning the jargon. At least I didn't call them subs.

https://join-lemmy.org/support goes to the Lemmy developers not to any particual instance though lemmy.ml is hosted by the Lemmy developers. Each individual instance have their own support methods in the sidebar.

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I don't really feel motivated since Lemmy is centralized now on Lemmy.world. It would have been great with a decentralized network, but sadly we didn't get there.

The value of Lemmy for me is in its decentralized nature. Otherwise we may as well use reddit or some other centralized corp service.

With almost all users, communities and links going to Lemmy.world... Let's just say I don't want to pay for another centralized network.

The Lemmy software itself is decentralized though, and if the software gets better we all benefit from it.

I feel like Lemmy.world will benefit, not so much everyone else.

If donating directly to the two main Lemmy developers, then every instance benefits lol

In the way of getting better mod tools, sure.

Well, I think bug fixes and general improvements is a good thing too

Lemmy needs less political extremists shitting up every thread they go to

As soon as lemmy blocks REDDIT from being linked from this site.

Block that POS reddit site from being linked on Lemmy, it's always linked on Lemmy, it's like Lemmy is a fucking reddit side-site.

Lemmy is a link aggregation site. The entire purpose is to link to other sites.

Lemmy is a link aggregation site. The entire purpose is to link to other sites.

Lemmy was created because of reddit fucking BS, and there is no reason to allow reddit URL to appear on this site.

That's all Reddit was when it started too- a link aggregator Digg side-site.

Let natural growth run its course, and curate your communities better to see less Reddit content. I spent an afternoon discovering communities thst weren't built on reposts and see quite a decent amount of original content, and actively hide all the reddit-linked content.

They will not ever be blocking Reddit content because that will be the early death of this platform. Besides, devs choosing to hard block sites in the back end is a horrible, horrible precedent. Learn to deal with it.

How?

actively hide all the reddit-linked content.

Block the lemmit.online and irradiated bots that just spam reddit links, as well as basically every community from lemmit.online Then add reddit to your uBlock lists so any accidental direct links just get blackholed. Bam, reddit is gone from your life.

I personally just sub to communities I like and only browse by subscribed. I haven't seen a single reddit link here.

I don’t know what communities you subscribe to, but I almost never see Reddit links here.

perusing 'everything' is where you'll run across the reddit-y kind of stuff

So just... don't do that? I'm not sure what's so hard about it. I almost never visited /r/all, and I don't do that here either. I just sub to things in interested in and only look at those.

In your settings you can hide posts from bots

Or just block the lemmit bot like someone else said

Some clients do this now... url blocking, also word filters.

Ngl I agree. Lemmit bots aren't providing us content. The hacker news repost bot isn't providing us content. We need OC not reposts that link back to Reddit.

Block the keyword in your settings?? ...

HOW???

Are you using the official lemmy webapp, or an app?

Pretty sure there was a browser extension that blocks posts containing keywords in the lemmy webapp IIRC but can't remember what it's called, if you do a search for a community called Lemmy Apps you should find one there

https://lemmy.world/post/465785

Aside from that, if you're on mobile most of the apps support keyword blocking & filtering in their settings, such as Eternity, Connect, Mlem, Memmy and Sync