I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!

  • Fubarberry
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    -111 year ago

    If I understand right, the lemmy devs are already paid to develop lemmy full time. I don’t fully understand the arrangements or who’s paying them though.

    • @leraje
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      251 year ago

      Not quite. This is from their OpenCollective Page:

      “Lemmy is entirely open source and funded exclusively by donations. The maintainers dessalines and nutomic have been working on it full time for the past years thanks to generous support by the NLnet foundation. Now that this support is coming to an end, the project is increasingly relying on donations from individual users to fund development. Your donation allows the developers to fully focus on making Lemmy better for everyone.”

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Why did NLnet sponsor the development for years, and now when Lemmy is successful, they stop sponsoring it?

        What was the goal of the sponsorship?

        The https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/ link goes on about how the internet is preditory today and big tech exploits users, and then at the end:

        Lemmy is an open source tool that helps users discover what the fediverse has to offer as a decentralized alternative to for example Reddit. Everyone can host their own instance of Lemmy, determine their own moderation policy to keep discussion as civil as you would like and let users share, post, vote and interact without any corporate interference, all from the comfort of their server of choice. Search and discovery on the fediverse becomes easier, more fun and social, without forgoing independence and agency.

        Yeah ok, so why stop sponsoring the solution?

        • @[email protected]
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          101 year ago

          NLnet paid them for every feature they launched, but with the explosive growth, they’ve been focusing on refactoring the codebase and making it more scalable, which doesn’t count as a “feature” I guess.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            Reminds me of the corporate idea of software where new features are more important than quality.

            It’s like having a garden where you just spread new plants out and ignore the ones that don’t feel good where they are.

        • @leraje
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          61 year ago

          NLnet offer grants so I would assume when they sponsor a project its for a fixed term, either in time or stage of development or amount of money.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            Seems like throwing away money.

            I think users aren’t smart enough to donate to the Lemmy devs, not enough money at least.

            They will donate to apps and even instance owners, but not to the people who make the actual software we are all using.

            • @leraje
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              81 year ago

              NLnet aren’t crystal clear but I think they see their role as getting something up and running rather than continued funding, which is fair enough. Trying to support a multitude of projects indefinitely isn’t really feasible. At some point I feel it’s justified to ask users of the project (i.e. us) to support future work.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                Lemmy needs at least 3 more years of funding… It just got off the ground here.

                I think if people don’t donate, this will turn into open source worked on by volunteers, which means a much slower pace.

                • @leraje
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                  31 year ago

                  I absolutely agree, whilst I do monthly donate to .world, I donate more to Lemmy devs at the moment as it 's at a crucial stage of development and financial support is imperative right now. I just don’t think NLnet are set up to offer that sort of grant system.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    1 year ago

                    Yeah I agree.

                    I’m worried actually about this. Donations doesn’t really work most of the time, its not a fixed income and won’t provide stability for the devs. :/

                    Imagine if this turns into some kind of open source where random people work on it sometimes. Will be buggy and slow development and lack direction. It may even stall completely.

            • @[email protected]
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              31 year ago

              The problem is both the devs and instances need donations. Just saw a post one instances bills are $2300 a month. No on is going to pay that out of pocket.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 year ago

                Oh boy, the last time I heard about finances (a month ago) it was all well below $100. Lemmy.ml only costed something like €10 a month.

              • @[email protected]
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                1 year ago

                Yeah it’s better to keep instance size within your budget.

                But with so many users on Lemmy.world, donations could maybe work. Problem is that it’s not a fixed income, but the bills are fixed every month.

    • @maajmaaj
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      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • Fubarberry
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        31 year ago

        Last I checked, the Sopuli admin said that running his instance cost pocket change, $20-30 a month. That might have been before the explosive growth though.

        I do think he had a donate link to buy them coffee though.