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

  • jochem@lemmy.mlEnglish
    81·
    10 months ago

    Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    32·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Izzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3711·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • dill@lemmy.oneEnglish
      15·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Jomn@jlai.luEnglish
        10·
        10 months ago

        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!).

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    131·
    10 months ago

    I don’t typically like to feather my own nuts but…

    Been donating 4.20/week since early June

    o7

  • robocall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    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?

    • Madbrad200@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • robocall@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

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

  • socsa@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1511·
    10 months ago

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

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    27·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

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