Hey folks!
I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.
Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.
However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.
Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.
I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.
If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.
Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!
lemmy.ml is part of Lemmy development as it is used to test new versions before release, take performance measurements and have first-hand experience with the mod tools. If I stepped away from lemmy.ml it would make Lemmy worse and cause more problems for other instance admins. In any case the costs for lemmy.ml hosting are already covered at a much lower donation level, anything you contribute goes directly to developer salaries.
Then you really shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t want to donate when part of that support goes toward an instance that openly and aggressively supports authoritarian regimes, human rights violations, and genocide denial, and brutally censors any dissenting viewpoints.
The other option, of course, would be to run lemmy.ml in a way that doesn’t actively piss off the majority of Lemmy users, but that doesn’t seem to be a path you’re willing to consider.
Honestly I’m genuinely torn about the situation. I’ve found such a great place here (outside of the tankie triad, of course), that as much as I disagree with your politics I’d probably donate anyway because of how great Lemmy is as a platform, if only you developed behind the scenes and weren’t personally responsible for one of the worst places on said platform. As it is, as long as both a) lemmy.ml continues to be run the way it is and b) you continue to have an active part in that instance’s abhorrent behavior, I can’t in good conscience give you any financial support.
Would you donate to Lemmy if lemmy.ml hosting was funded separately?
Probably not - for me it’s more that the majority of my negative experiences on Lemmy have come on lemmy.ml, so the sticking point really is your involvement with it.
For a lot of other people in these threads though, it does seem like funding the hosting is the biggest deal. If the server costs for lemmy.ml are as low as you say, splitting off the hosting costs separately in some way (like taking donations directly from lemmy.ml that go into their own account separate from general Lemmy donations, for example) probably would see at least some sort of increase in donations to the overall Lemmy project. Especially if you made an announcement that this is what you were doing and maintained an official “separation of finances” position going forward.
If it wouldn’t be too much extra work, it’s probably worth a shot.
At this point, I’m not sure I would trust the truthfulness of that claim. The hard-core refusal to do so up until this point has been both surprising and unsettling, to say the least.
I would consider it, but being completely honest, this whole event has really soured me on it. I probably just start looking outside of lemmy sometime in the coming weeks 🤷♂️
There was no hardcore refusal because this matter wasnt even mentioned as a blocker for donations until a few days ago. In fact lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
They should try just using it for development instead of forcing out tankie propaganda, then.