Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
Please make mod tools a top priority. It's absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.
Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you'd like to help us out, here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we're working on something worthwhile.
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that's separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it's preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I'll make sure that's in there.
You may want to be very open about how much has been donted and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on the philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology ... eventually.
For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.
I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!
Just sent $44... My fav #.
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they're been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don't think we'll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
I'm proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7
People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn't, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.
The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don't have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.
I'm not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
charge 10 doge per upvote
Great idea! Surely you could just charge, oh I don't know, $20 million a year for it? That would easily cover operating costs and so much more!
What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That's where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there's a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.
That's definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It's basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it's associated with goes down with it.
It's a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.
IMHO, the problem is more subtle: nothing on the internet will stay forever, if you find a piece of information you like to save forever, you should save it locally AND with something like internet archive. A community can transfer to the same community in another server with proper forewarning. Finally, mastodon introduced the ability to move your account to another istance manteining your followers for quite a while now, maybe lemmy can find a way to introduce something like that too
Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.
If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you've missed the point. It's federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.
The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it's interconnected, it's self-managing, and it will scale only until it can't and then it will peacefully split.
You should orobably read what OP wrote instead of just the title
Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There's plenty of ways to make money without VC.
Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don't know...
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that
I've always dreamed of, and now with even more Fediverse usage it might be easier to push, to have local municipal governments fund simple sites in the states as part of a pretty standard practice of creating community spaces, and so that local governments can have a site to host accounts without the chance of being censored by big tech in the future.
I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.
Well, it's working right now, isn't it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.
The majority of the current users are enthusiasts. They usually are significantly more willing to donate compared to average.
Did mastodon die, without funding?
Many instance have gone down due to costs being too high
A big issue there has also been single-user admin/mod teams. Running a site of several thousand active users is not something just one or two people can do, especially when you also have to screen remote content that's streaming in.
You can always shut down user registrations if the server's reaching the point of financial sustainability.
This is something that needs to happen more - The whole point of the fediverse is that you don't need any high population instances. Look at the situation with lemmy.ml - they're hitting major infra issues as a result of their high user count, but they're still accepting new users (as far as I can tell). Just close the doors and post a list of reccomended other instances with similar focuses.
You can still access all the same content, regardless of your instance, or even platform
This is why I'm a communist.
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don't think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don't end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
If you have ever browsed sites like questionablecontent.net, you may have noticed that they have a privately hosted ad server where people can reach out to Jeph and buy ads for his site.
This is a fairly rare occurrence as the requirements for the ads that he approves are pretty strict from what I understand and he's not just going to hawk the latest caffeinated Seltzer vitamin water blend to his followers.
That being said there are a lot of self hosted ad platforms that can be easily monetized and allow the site owner to dictate exactly how intrusive the ads are where the ads are coming from and to ensure that the ads effectively blend into their site design.
But a more realistic approach would be to ask users to pay an annual fee or something.
If I knew that the community was fairly strong and robust I wouldn't mind paying $10 a year or something to keep my community vibrant and strong, or rather than going with a fixed annual amount if they were to put out a donation drive the way Wikipedia does then I might be tempted to throw a little cash when I'm feeling flush.