this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

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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

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

But I want to support lemmy.ml

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

I appreciate the transparency! :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This should probably be documented on the open collective page.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago

Right, updated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

a little more then 24h into the campaign.

patreon increased from $871 to $1,138 (+30%).

liberapay rose from $301 to $393.66 (+30%).

I think it could have been improved further , the text could be a bit longer (I talked to Nutomic and few suggestion were kinda shortened too much IMO). but i think we can overall call the campaign a success. I realize we can tweak and experiment with this for far too long and without A/B testing we could be "fooled by randomness" and make the wrong choices. but we could measure how many people leave the page of the text before we expect them to finish reading to get a indication if it is too small or big. information beats speculation.

Anyway this text is now "field tested" and should probably be used more with maybe minor tweaks (link to it from the website donate page and the pop up).

Is there any evidence the pop up asking for donation is working as intended? , adding randomness to this could make it too hard to debug.

I think what it does prove beyond all doubt if the pop up is working is that the pop up text is not enough. People want a clear and persuasive rational. underestimation potential donors ability to read a short text could be a costly mistake. a quick googling indicates a optimal length of about 1,000 to 2,500 words while the current text stands at about 500 words.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours 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!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I’ve been considering donating for a while (I already donate to my instance) so I’ve set that up now. ~$5 a month isn’t much but I hope if a few more people do it too it will start to add up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

What do you mean by "upvote award feature"?

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