this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. For some time, lemmy's been struggling with donations. For all these years, the lemmy devs, like them or hate them; have been building the software that powers the entirety of the forumverse (that's what i'm calling it, fuck you) so if you have even a dollar/euro/peso/whatever to give, it would be greatly appreciated (by the lemmy devs, and all instance admins!)

Good day to y'all :D

crossposted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

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] 11 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Just to point out that the developer's Marxism is truly an irrelevant thing in all places that matter. Their efforts in software development are 99% more impactful to your life than their theoretical support of authoritarian regimes will ever be. And as bad as their denial of historical or current event might be, they're ultimately inconsequential. They're not in charge of foreign policy. They would never have an impact in Chinese internal politics. However them being Marxist at least ensures that they nominally have their ideology towards the right location in support for the disenfranchised instead of the rich. Even if like 50$ per month go to the .ml instance, it truly matters very little.

Honestly, people need to get some perspective on how much impact being a Marxist online has in the world. It has none. Marxists as a political force are mostly irrelevant no matter how eloquently they will try to claim global south revolutionary efforts as their own. Efforts in FOSS however is obviously very relevant and impactful.

PS: Yes, their statements on transgender people are problematic, but they seem to want to retract them. Let's see

All that said, if you still can't bring yourselves to donate to lemmy devs because 0.1% of that might go towards the lemmy.ml hosting costs, you have no excuse to not donate to your own instance. Our donation buttons are on the main page and not only do you fund this instance, but also all the development efforts in tooling such as Threativore and Fediseer which are also FOSS.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Not until you do something about the tankies.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

This is excellent timing. I just got an email last night that my auto subscribed donation to our instance was canceled and I don't know why. I went to just reschedule it and they wanted my cc info but I was waaaay too drunk and in the middle of Pathfinder to go find my card.

Appreciate the reminder. I'll fix that now.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago

Dess had his mouth running further than him, saying stupid shit, but I can downplay that and keep donating to him for the future of Lemmy as a whole. The Lemmigrad donation stream may be his own choice, but if he does that, we therefore can ask for a total detalisation of his income and spendings. We deserve to know, if he does that from his own paycheck himself, or if our donations directly support this one stalinist resource.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I dont like that they imply lemmy would die without them like mbin and piefed dont exist? And they are running off activityhub, not like the core is lemmy? Correct me if im wrong, but if they stopped developing wed prob have a short period before apps switched to supporting mbin/piefed or others popped up? Guess the hard parts migrating all existing communites/instances.

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

Who gives a single shit about either of those. We're on Lemmy, not on mbin, piefed etc. because they are a bit ass right now.

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

Im only not on them because lack of an iphone app

[–] [email protected] 22 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

The devs activly support calls for the deaths of all americans on ML. There needs to be a way of supporting the codebase without supporting the core devs....

[–] [email protected] 15 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Support the codebase without supporting the people who write the codebase seems impossible. Unless you want to fork it and then take the money for that.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, theres a whole universe of solutions if youre actually interested in finding them....

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Sure, I am open to hearing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

ok, im just spitballing here but what if, there was like a community of devs that took donations to develop the code. but this time they dont actively support calls for genocide, or deny obvious genocides or something like that. maybe a charity could be involved...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Is there any source to that claim? It sounds ridiculous even by lemmygrad and hexbear standards

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Another example why "unlimited genocide on the first world" remains relevant

(libs not getting JDPON memes is funny AF)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago

As an American, death to America and all its cultists known as citizens who worship its civil religion of exceptionalism. 🫡🫡

~~How many layers of irony am I even on here.~~

[–] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Well, you can always do the liberal thing instead and sell Lemmy off to a billionaire parasite like Zuckerberg or Bezos. I'm sure they will always welcome another right-wing social media mouthpiece.

Take your pick.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Liberals would rather have Lemmy die than fund the services and servers, it's rather telling they want one unified opinion to be for all of Lemmy. And if the devs wanted the same thing, they're evil and trying to control the platform.

Right now dbz0 is having people brigade it because we want to have AI on our platform. They're mad we have our own rules on our own instance.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Right? Like isn't that the entire point of the Fediverse? Aren't we meant to be able to exist in little instances with values that we align with? And if people don't like it, they're free to move somewhere else, or peacefully block us and our ways?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Tell that to the .world users who wants dbzer0 gone because we don't like copyright.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

.world is the worst of the large activity groups, and it is worse because they are big enough they can start to manufacture concent that everyone else is bad, and then scare people off from the other instances. They to me feel like a group of people who are only mad at reddit because reddit hurt them, but have no issue with the fraimwork that made reddit reddit, and so are creating a distilled version of reddit.

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