- cross-posted to:
- thenetherlands@feddit.nl
- cross-posted to:
- thenetherlands@feddit.nl
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.
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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.
I personally block hexbear, and de facto ignore lemmy.ml because I find it to be a hive of vitriol and unproductive toxic behaviour, but I still signed up to donate because imho, lemmy’s open and decentralized nature make it fundamentally valuable and a worthwhile piece of societal infrastructure.
But please don’t abuse our trust.
maybe give incentives like upvote award feature for the respective instance that has been donated to. that way people would be more willing to get something out of it in a more tangible way
For someone like me who wants to see Lemmy be a place that’s owned by users, run by users, and moderated sensibly, what should I do? I have a problem with supporting the lemmy.ml instance.
The lemmy.ml instance costs like 30$/month to run. Your donation isn’t going to that; your donation is going to develop Lemmy itself
Your donation isn’t going to that
Lemmy instances are already owned and run by their different instance admins and moderators. Regardless of how you feel about Lemmy.ml, development for Lemmy supports all who use different instances.
The alternatives are doing the dev work yourself, or finding a different platform to use.
Further, as @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml said, the Lemmy.ml costs are very low, it’s the actual life costs that allow development of much-asked for features and maintenance to continue.
“You have to donate to tankie transphobes to support the Reddit alternative” isn’t a great look though. And nutomic has stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards supporting the .ml servers. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled, no matter how you look at it.
I’ve vocally criticized Nutomic’s transphobia, but I have no issue with them being Communists. Further, I already answered the bit about funding Lemmy.ml, let me copy and paste the relevant section:
Further, as @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml said, the Lemmy.ml costs are very low, it’s the actual life costs that allow development of much-asked for features and maintenance to continue.
The donations pay the devs salaries. Donations pay for their video games, food, etc. What the devs do with their salaries allows them to continue developing Lemmy full time, how they choose to spend their salaries is on them.
not really related, but is this https://weblate.join-lemmy.org/projects/lemmy/lemmy/ the official way to translate the project? i dont donate due to my financial status, but i often do translation for opensource stuff.
Yes thats right. Translations are also a good way to contribute.
Sent my money in. Thanks for what you do with the software, brother.
Do you have a preference as to which platform the donation is done through?
Liberapay is preferable as it has low fees and is also open source.
Thank you, Liberapay it is. Keep up the good work!
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.
Ok so personally I really wouldn’t mind having some non-tracking ads in a banner somewhere to at least support a bit (perhaps on an opt-in system). This’d allow me to support lemmy just a little bit every time I use it.
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
Refusing to make someone’s financial situation easier until they stop being transphobic is not a convincing argument against transphobia. Think about how your actions affect your side’s reputation from the other side’s perspective.
Edit: to be clear, this is not a statement on whether or not Nutomic is transphobic.
Rejecting someone that aligns with oppression is a great way to build against oppression, actually. Do you think Jewish Germans should have donated to the Nazis to build up “good faith” with them? Surely if they just acted like, “good Jews” they would have been spared, right?
This logic is typical status quo liberalism that tells you to tut-tut every oppressed group for not fighting back “the right way”. Of course, liberals have never succeeded using the methods they suggest, so this really amounts to telling the oppressed to shut up and die. This talking point is promulgated so that you and others will refuse to work in solidarity with the oppressed. Don’t let yourself be manipulated this way.
Prove that this is not false equivalence fallacy. Maybe there’s additional info about Nutomic that I’m missing.
Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.
Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. “Don’t blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don’t complain about your life, at least you’re not [oppressed group]” These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.
The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.
I need additional information, probably about Nutomic’s behavior, to see how it’s related to what you’re talking about.
The information is in the thread you are replying to. And no, you actually don’t, becauae what we are discussing is your paternalistic liberal response to others refusing to donate to a transphobe and then your leaning on debatebro fallacy misunderstandings when I explained what was wrong with it.
If you can’t self-criticize and adapt then just don’t respond.
It was not “debatebro” because nothing I said, except probably my first comment, was debating. Sorry for the confusion.
Nutomic is transphobe?
I realize that it was a mistake to post that. The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time. So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future. In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
Do you also think that eg when corporations celebrate Black History Month that the bourgeoisie is also pro-Black? Capitalism has a vested interest in neutering and subsuming liberation movements so that they cannot pose a threat to capital itself, and also of course, as groups such as LGBTQ+ people become less socially stigmatised, it becomes worth it profit-wise to market towards these demographics specifically as the financial hit from bigots becomes less. We can see this reverse in real time in the US as it becomes more profitable to appeal to social reactionaries, showing that any appeals to “pride” were, as queer people have been saying all along, a marketing campaign and nothing deeper.
I don’t think this comment at all suffices. If you’re going to be a communist, then you need to put the effort in to engaging with all struggles for emancipation, and that includes trans people’s struggles. You shouldn’t “refrain from commenting on” liberation struggles; you should be supporting them.
You make some good points. But keep in mind that I dont live in the United States, and I have never even met a transgender person irl. For me this is something which is only discussed online, so Im missing a lot of context and information. Case in point, I had no idea what “Black History Month” is and had to look that up. Anyway if I discuss this topic further it will be through an anonymous alt account, to avoid any further drama.
I also don’t live in the United States; do you think trans people only exist in the US? Transfemicide is an even bigger issue in the global south; for instance, Brazil, a global south country, is notorious for its high transfemicide rates, and has a strong transfeminist movement as a result. There will be trans people in all countries who face transphobia, and the countries lacking a particularly noticeable trans liberation movement will be because transphobia is so bad there that trans people feel the risk of speaking out is too great.
I do suggest that you put some effort into educating yourself and engaging with trans and LGBTQ+ struggles where you are, which will not just be “online”. I don’t know where you live, but at worst it will just be the case that the trans people where you are, are not inclined to become political militants because of both transphobia in general meaning they put an even bigger target on their heads, and transphobia on the left that is common across the world meaning that trans people feel unwelcome in organising spaces. This is not related to the original topic of donations, I mean this just for the sake of your politics. If you really can’t find any kind of organised political activity around trans issues where you are, you could at least read transfeminist texts, and tbh feminist texts in general, since feminist theory (including Marxist feminist theory) has discussed the issue of gender, gender essentialism, and transphobia for decades now. For instance, in relation to your screenshotted dm above, it has been a feminist demand for decades (rescinded upon only because some feminists decided to jump on the anti-trans bandwagon) to desegregate sports, and I think anyone who knows anything about women’s sports knows all the ways in which the gendered segregation of sports harms women athletes’ careers.
You have certainly met a trans person if you’ve met, say, 100 people. You just didn’t recognize them from their appearance or voice, either because they are closeted or because they convinced you they were cis from their appearance and voice. Presumably your country is so oppressive towards trans people that they are too afraid of being out, there are no trans events for you to attend in solidarity, or you are just making excuses for reactionary positions.
Trans visibility is not just in the United States. Out and self-identifying trans people are visible around the world, including the two largest countries, China and India. You can’t visit either imperialized county without meeting someone that is self-identifying themselves as trans. And one of those countries is run by a communist party.
These responses just sound like a reactionary unwilling to self-crit. And I don’t see much in the way of any alt accounts: the people criticizing thoss non-apologies and continued ignorant statements generally don’t have any replies.
Do open self-crit and try to learn from those who know better.
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.
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!
lemmy.ml is run by the developers?
Yes, it’s the “original” instance
Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything… It reminds me of the vegan fuss era.
You still use lemmy’s backend and have a safe frontend space to stay. That’s kinda hypocrite to use a service that is “anti-lgtb” and still make a fuss about it. If lemmy really was about racial or sexual discrimination you would already know it.
It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use… Uuhhhg it’s kinda getting out of hand !
What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators. If you’re a just a dumb leech, use a service that somehow “discriminates” you, don’t donate, but PLEASE ! Leave.
Please stop accepting crypto"currencies"—multi-level marketing pyramid schemes—and I donate.
What if I paid for all my free software?
I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway? —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.htmlIf the Lemmy admins adhered to everyone’s request to “stop doing X and I’ll donate”, they would end up with zero more donations because people will always give another reason for not donating
If the Lemmy admins adhered to everyone’s request to “stop doing X and I’ll donate”, they would end up with zero more donations because people will always give another reason for not donating
I know. But I am not everyone, and this request is not unique. Wikimedia stopped accepting crypto"currencies" as well by community vote.
I’ve donated plenty to Lemmy with crypto, and the article you linked addressed none of the reasons I use it (privacy, anyone?). So while it’s cool you’re passionately against crypto, I think Lemmy is getting more out of it than it’s lost
