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!
People are avoiding supporting lemmy monetarily due to the actions of the developers. We do not reward bad behaviors here. If lemmy development ends most of us will just move to kbin or piefed. This is a non-issue.
This is bs, because you - and perhaps almost everyone else here - are supporting monetarily much worse people than the Lemmy developers.
Hmm glad I found this post and the comments. I recently came here from Reddit and joined some random communities just to have something in my feed. I was a bit shocked at hammer and sickle posted non-ironically in the meme group. Noting that communists weren’t better than Nazis got me called an ungrateful shit for existing (which I apparently owe to Stalin) and banned. Moved to the second-biggest meme community the search found, where I’m not banned yet but being educated by Westerners that life in communist coutries was cheerful and Holodomor was an oopsie.
I’m glad to hear that this is not all that Lemmy stands for, but a bit disappointed learning that top developers are a part of the problem. I’m conflicted about donating to say the least, and it does not bode well for lemmy adoption in general. I’ll stick around to see if other servers gain momentum, but I’ll need to keep an eye open for other reddit alternatives I guess
Drag is an anarchist and banned from lemmy.ml for being left wing, so drag hopes you will listen with an open mind to this:
Karl Marx said that communism is stateless. That means in communism, the government has no authority to coerce people. Authoritarianism isn’t communism. In fact, Joseph Stalin never claimed that the USSR had achieved communism. He said they’d achieved socialism, and he made empty promises that it would be communist at some point in the future.
You know where communism was actually successfully implemented? America and Australia. Karl Marx and his friends were inspired by the Haudenosaunee people of North America. Marx called it “primitive communism”.
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Every state burns oil. Therefore every state is oppressing drag. You logic would only work if they weren’t harming everyone. Besides, the Palestinians and the Ukrainians have asked for our help.
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You are not banned from lemmy.ml
Huh. Drag misremembered. It was just a community ban performed by the lemmy.ml admins, and it’s expired
Drag will have to unblock that community and post more leftist history until the ban is permanent. Shouldn’t take long.
Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
Nobody wants to argue with Cowbee
Person1, since you’re new here, this is Cowbee, our resident tankie apologist/propagandist.
The most reasonable-sounding genocide denier and authoritarian regime supporter this side of the gulags. I highly recommend their alt’s comments on Hexbear if you’re interested in their more “mask off” persona. Also, remember the number one rule when interacting with hexbears: never directly engage them.
Edit: Here are some of Cowbee’s Uyghur genocide denial comments, for example, if anyone’s interested. Note the hardline tankie talking points, but couched in the classic Cowbee “reasonable” rhetorical style.
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To quote a popular hexbear aphorism present in this very thread, “‘Omg rude online’ like there’s no worse sin”.
Quite an introduction, and quite a lot of slander. I’m a Communist, Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, etc, regardless of how you want to call me. I’m certainly not a genocide denier, and I’d say all governments are “authoritarian,” what matters is which class is exerting its authority. My goal is in fact to dispel myths surrounding Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Communism, etc.
If they check my Hexbear account, they’ll see more conversation surrounding gaming and casual conversation, haha.
Edit: here’s Hakase attacking feminism and here they are defending the arrests of animal rights protestors. Even more, here’s hakase defending transphobes.
You’re not a communist, you’re a state capitalist.
I’m a Communist, specifically a Marxist-Leninist. I’m not an Anarchist, but I’m not a “State Capitalist” either. I advocate for gradually building towards a fully publicly owned and planned global economy along democratic lines, ie Marx’s conception of Communism.
You want a “socialist” revolution, and would turn your nose up at a communist revolution creating communism immediately. Drag thinks you have to support the idea of a communist revolution in order to be a communist. Unless you already live in communism.
Marxist-Leninist
but I’m not a “State Capitalist”So you’re a revisionist.
Most of Lemmy is fine - just avoid the tankie triad of lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear and you should be good to go.
Edit: And maybe also the instances that haven’t defederated hexbear in particular, since when they show up threads tend to go to shit, as you’re seeing here, unfortunately.
I can certainly see that Hexbear and the other two are very vocal and toxic here. Engaging in some discussion or getting my views challenged is fine, I’d rather not close myself in a bubble, but it’s sad that they would be so quick to insult and ban you. It does worry that they have some of the biggest communities. I wish I could say “oh well the protocol is neutral” but I think that with most OSS projects it matters tremendously who is at the helm; also, another poster outlined quite well that these instances seem to be the showcase for the system.
They are only big by number because they are some of the oldest instances. So they have a lot of inactive accounts and communities. The number of actually active users is less than .world or .ee.
They only seem more active because they are terminally online and have communities that are specifically designed to brigade threads when they don’t like what’s posted.
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I moved to PieFed before it was fully ready, and I’ve been able to personally defederate from lemmy.ml by blocking all users since I did. No admin approval required. That feature alone was worth it to me to put up with the pain of the platform not being ready yet.
Since then, the platform has greatly improved, and now has many MANY features that Lemmy (and a few that even Reddit) lacks. For example the most recent additions are polls and post flairs. Which tbf Lemmy has plans to add, but features languish in its roadmap for multiple years at a time so I would not expect them anytime “soon”. Tbf Rust is a difficult language to work with, but that’s just all the more reason to love PieFed, written in Python that many more people can contribute to. Which is what has been allowing it to add new features literally weekly as of late.
PieFed is extremely nice - come check it out! Make an account, and by the time you get through the setup wizard you will already have fallen in love with it.:-)
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The roadmap contains a new feature for extended instance block, which also blocks all posts and comments from that instance’s users. If some feature is not implemented in Lemmy thats not out of malice, but because we really dont have time to work in everything that people ask for.
Its supposed to be tankie TROIKA 😤
Mbin, not Kbin. Kbin is dead.
There actually is one instance left, a tiny little hold-over in Poland, last I checked, but everyone else that was using Kbin has since switched to Mbin.
Except me personally, who switched to PieFed (which is fantastic btw!:-).
Just like with Elon Musk, if someone wants people to support them monetarily, they shouldn’t work hard to make themselves objectionable to wide swaths of the population they are trying to extract money from.
You can argue that, despite their opinions, the lemmy devs provide something of worth.
Elon Musk made electric cars popular. Nazi scientists developed rocket technology. That’s all fine and good, but I’m still not going to give them my money.
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So does nestlé, I still boycott them as our values don’t align.
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I think kitkats taste nice but I haven’t had one in years. Whether you think they are shit or not, the point is that they provide some value for some people. On ethical grounds, I don’t buy them.
For many people, this is the same thing. Lemmy provides value to me. However, it is open source with other forks and the devs don’t run my home instance. If Lemmy required advertising or a fee to use, it would have failed. However users are not under an obligation to donate. Generally, I would advocate donating for foss software. However, there is a difference between supporting software and supporting people.
Kitkats aren’t as nice as they used to be.
The must have heard I was boycotting and stopped trying. Sad, really, when you let yourself go.
This is not wrong
You can support lemm.ee, then, instead?
I might as well since I probably gave Sunaurus a big headache with this thread.
What actions of the developers are you talking about? I’m not trying to start a fight, I’m honestly out of the loop or whatever.
I imagine the biggest point are the censorship, disinformation and tankie allegations. These are all documented in this post. Another point worth bringing up is that they are the admins of lemmy.ml, where most of the allegations happen. Lemmy.ml also has something of a tankie problem and one of the devs has said that the donations will also cover the cost of running the instance. So by donating to the devs you’re also donating to an instance that possibly has no problem with censorship, disinformation and harboring tankies.
I would be willing to turn a blind eye if I could trust the devs to step away from lemmy.ml and focus solely on the development of Lemmy. But I don’t trust the devs enough to actually do that so I personally won’t be supporting Lemmy development until someone else becomes the maintainer of Lemmy.
EDIT: just to cover off the inevitable “what will happen if we stop supporting Lemmy. I don’t want to go back to Reddit” fear. If Lemmy doesn’t work out and it gets abandoned there’s always Mbin. Anyone here from the Reddit exodus knows that it’s annoying to migrate but Mbin can federate with Lemmy which means going from Lemmy to Mbin is going to be less painful than form Reddit to Lemmy.
Mbin is one example, PieFed is another. Both are superb!:-)
AND it’s open source software. Nothing is stopping anyone from just forking Lemmy.
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Isn’t that the point? Is t that how main and kbin started?
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.
I’ve given it some more thought. There’s no guarantee that money going to the developers won’t be used to for the instance they are financing. If I give you money and the lemmy.ml funds are empty, are you going to let lemmy.ml die? Considering you said it is used to test new versions of lemmy and measure performance and test how effective the mod tools are I don’t think you would let lemmy.ml die. You’d finance it yourself, most likely from the money that is donated for the development of lemmy. So separating lemmy development and lemmy.ml instance costs wouldn’t really change the situation.
But I also no longer think it’s inherently necessary to step away from lemmy.ml. I get the value a real instance would give to development, so what I think needs to happen is a shift in what lemmy.ml is supposed to be. If the purpose of lemmy.ml is to support the development of lemmy then the primary goal of the instance should be that. Clearly the biggest issue people have is politics and how lemmy.ml is used as a vessel to push a certain kind of political agenda, which means if the primary goal is to support development then the instance right now contradicts its primary goal. It’s dissuading people from donating to the development and it’s making the main developers (you in this case) focus on the drama (for the lack of a better word) instead of spending time developing. I think the solution is pretty simple, lemmy.ml should take a hard anti-politics stance. Do a purge and kick all politics off the instance, including instance users who discuss politics on other instances. Have it be memes, technology, privacy and FOSS and gaming and everything else that doesn’t necessarily lead to politics. Users who want to take part in political discourse can find instances that allow political discourse, and that includes you and Dessalines. If you want to be political create an alt account on a different instance. Communities that want to be political can find other instances to be in political. You don’t need politics to run lemmy.ml. And for the sake of clarity also add to the instance about section that the instance exists to support lemmy development because currently that is not written anywhere.
If you think that’s unfair to the current users of lemmy.ml I honestly don’t see how you could resolve this situation without stepping away from lemmy.ml.
So you expect us to make a lot of major changes to the oldest Lemmy instance in existence and disappoint many users. All for the goal of maybe possibly getting a few more donations, without any guarantee. Its more likely that youre a cheapskate looking for any excuse to avoid donating, and keep using Lemmy without contributing at all. If you dont want to donate at least be honest, I would respect that.
I’m simply explaining the grievances people have that is stopping them from donating and what I personally would do in your situation to alleviate those grievances. That grievance is the nature of lemmy.ml which you’ve either voluntarily or involuntarily let slip into promoting a very specific political agenda that most lemmy users don’t agree with. If you’re genuine in your desire to have lemmy.ml as something that helps development then it should be apparent to you how the current state of lemmy.ml contradicts that desire. If you can’t acknowledge that I can only assume you’re using the development of lemmy as an excuse to keep lemmy.ml as it is.
Which segues to the end of my previous comment. If you think that’s unfair to the users of the instance then the only thing that you can do is step away. You can always start a new instance or you can work something out with the existing instance owners to get the data and feedback you need to develop Lemmy. And to be clear those instances can’t be Lemmygrad or Hexbear because those two instances are also not acceptable for most Lemmy users and wouldn’t solve the grievances people have.
At the end of the day it is not my concern if you get funded or not. I have no issue funding the development despite your obviously transphobic stance and Dessalines stance on Uighurs because I am capable of separating your work from who you are. I don’t have to like you to support your work so I’m willing to compromise here. But me tolerating both of you doesn’t mean I’m going to compromise supporting a platform that is actively promoting an agenda I cannot accept. I’ve already compromised on tolerating you, how about you compromise a bit to meet half way? If you’re unwilling to compromise this is my final alternative to supporting lemmy. Remove yourselves from the project, let someone more reasonable than you to take over and I’ll donate to them.
You have to understand that at this point Lemmy is bigger than you and its popularity is growing in spite of you and lemmy.ml. The fact that Lemmy is growing but your donations are shrinking should make that point evident. It’s up to you if you’re going to adjust to the new reality or stick your old ways and run into monetary issues.
They should try just using it for development instead of forcing out tankie propaganda, then.
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.
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.
If I stepped away from lemmy.ml it would make Lemmy worse and cause more problems for other instance admins.
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?
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.
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.
In other words your experience on Lemmy has been mostly positive? Then why dont you want to support the development of this free software? Keep in mind that lemmy.ml is exclusively financed via Opencollective, all other donation platforms go directly to developer salaries.
See some stories here: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
They’re communists 😱
They’re
communiststransphobic, class reductionists, support Russian invasion of Ukraine, support Uyghur genocide, support N. Korean dictators, worked hard to ensure Republicans won US elections, run an instance where they act like the authoritarian dictators they love and ban everyone who disagrees with them even slightly for being “liberals” 😱FTFY
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Let me guess, -proceeds to make up some bullshit nobody ever said-
How like a tankie to decide someone else’s argument for them since you’d rather argue against a strawman than actually be concerned about the facts.
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I wasn’t saying the person you mentioned doesn’t exist or got banned. I’m saying you’re putting words into my mouth I never said, pretty blatantly. Though I feel you focusing on this other dude who got banned that isn’t even a part of this conversation and Gaza which I never mentioned is just more deflection on your part.
Tankies, specifically
Authoritarian commies who have very different-from-reality opinions and word definitions
Oh, and transphobia
It’s so funny to me when I express an even remotely moderate opinion and get called a right-winger. Lol, is lemmy really where right-wingers would go for online discourse?
tankie is just the new scary sounding word for communist derived from when the soviet union helped defeat a CIA backed color-revolution in Hungary
lol
looks at moderation history
zionisthow does this fascism keep getting into my anticommunism?
Ad hominem and appeal to authority at the same time. Impressive.
Why would the CIA back a revolution demanding minimum wage and the right to unionise?
To destabilise the soviet union of course. They can still take away those rights later, like they did after the collapse of the soviet union.
https://hexbear.net/post/4475702
the original source from the comments:
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10110-10525.pdfIf the state had agreed to the students’ demands for minimum wage and the right to strike, there wouldn’t have been any instability. Suppressing revolutions with tanks doesn’t make society more stable. Sounds like the USSR sucked just as bad as the USA if they fell for that easy bait.
“Tankies” don’t really enjoy communists. It’s not honest dialogue to mix them up with each other
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Freeloading where? They can be donating to the instance they are on.
Those places suck and doesnt even have quality apps…
I dont think its a non-issue.
If those issues keep you off them, I’m good with that.
I had them blocked for misogyny, no wonder lol
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showing an unbelievable lack of understanding and your whole ass on the internet huh? you’re entitled to your opinion, like everyone else. but it sure is a stupid one.
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Weight classes to take care of body differences? Those are to take care of body differences in the same gender! Lols.
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The Olympics have allowed trans women to compete against cis women since the 90s, and yet there’s never been a trans medalist. If there was a genuine advantage to being trans in sport, at least one country in the past three decades would have loaded their team with trans women and cleaned house. However, taking enough hormones to make a masculine body into a feminine one after it’s already grown means you’ve got way less testosterone than a cis woman, so that counters out any initial advantage. Claiming otherwise is misinformation. Spreading misinformation to the detriment of trans people is transphobic.
It’s so sad that liberals will literally cozy up to fascists and monetarily support them however they can… But a FOSS project run by commies gets them clutching their pearls super hard
Imo, it’s people just rationalizing not wanting to give $5 away. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with deciding you don’t want to donate, that’s your choice, but be honest with yourself. If they weren’t commies, people would be finding some other excuse to not donate.
Just had a whole argument about this on that lemmyworld post that’s at the top about boycotting ml cuz someone brought up how they can’t donate if the developers are gonna use some of that money on ml server cost. They can’t see the bigger picture. Instead they wanna cry over how their $5 or whatever donation is gonna be used. Pathetic.
i reported a fundraising website for the ukrainian neonazi and murderer sternenko and thats still up, but talking politics online is just inexcusable
What’s better is that’s also the user who either watches new on ml like a hawk or has a bot that just scrapes content to pull off ml comms to put on world comms.
The devs also say that they would gladly accept any development help as well, if you’re either unwilling or unable to financially contribute.
This needs to be more highlighted than just donations.
Not trying to call out politics. But I rather find a way to contribute open source than watch my money keep the lights on very specific servers.
Made a small donation. Every bit counts, I hope.
I’ll do my part, I just wish my country’s currency wasn’t worth 1/6 of an euro :/
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I’d like to join my voice with those saying it’s worth donating even if you disagree with the devs personally. My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform, and treating the Internet respectfully as a forum.
The Lemmy software supports so many communities to communicate, including the huge lemmy.world that famously hates .ml. Because the software is open, it can do that freely.
You who hate capitalism, do you donate your ad data to capitalists so they can grow sickeningly rich off your use of their software? Then you might at least let these devs live comfortably off your use of the software. And if you pay in ways you see, instead of ways you don’t, does that trouble you so much?
You don’t have to agree. And you can still use Lemmy freely! But since this software has been such a blessing to us wanting a non-reddit platform, I hope many will be happy to bless the devs back - and they’re only asking for a modest salary.
My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform
But… isn’t it impossible to donate solely to the software, when they also will use the funds to pay server costs for lemmy.ml? The referenced post did not exactly highlight that little tidbit of information… yet isn’t it true nonetheless?
Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere,
- it works out about 2% of your donation, if that
- the devs would be entitled to spend their salary on personal projects anyhow, it’s an effective salary not ngo funds
- .ml serves as a useful test server and public beta for the rest of Lemmy
- it’s effectively funding every instance, by providing the software - by that metric, the opposite .world gets the larger share
- because of the small scales, ordinarily there’s not a lot of sense to separate .ml funding because it’s so small. It’s not like the devs are being devious
To me, that stacks up fairly.
I’m just being pedantic, but also the problem seems easily solved by having someone else moderate that instance, while they focus on just the coding.
Of course they are 100% free to do as they choose and I would not dream of wanting them to do otherwise.
Then too, the people deciding whether to donate can do the same - and it seems that the rather unusual moderation practices of lemmy.ml are a sticking point for whether they want to contribute funds or not. The amount of those funds, whether the devs have the “right” to do so or not, that is all besides the point. Some people just don’t like to fund things like genocide, period.
But now we are veering into political territory that I know less about. Thank you for sharing those facts about the situation, as I continue to learn about it that is very helpful:-).
it’s worth donating even if you disagree with the devs personally. My impression is they’re decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform, and treating the Internet respectfully
I want to underline this. And ask the reader to put themselves in the devs’ shoes for a moment.
Usually, when people have strong opinions, like extreme political views, they try to further their goal wherever they can. To abstain from that desire, and create tools which can be freely used, even by their political enemies, requires a considerable amount of decency and deserves our respect.
Either this, or they value FOSS so much (more), that they still keep Lemmy open for everyone.
In a way, they support people from the opposite side of the political spectrum, by providing them their platform freely. Isn’t that exemplary in putting the fedi spirit above political differences?
I have very short experience with Lemmy, having just moved here from Reddit. I joined one of the most popular forums on .ml unaware of the fame of this instance, and from my short experience “Treating the Internet respectfully” is the opposite of what is found there.
I am sorry for your bad experience on Lemmy. Most people fall into the same trap, and more often than not, leave altogether. I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy actively chiding me for having done so, due to them having come here, seen that, and immediately noped out.
It doesn’t help that Google points people to Lemmy.ml (DuckDuckGo properly points to Lemmy.World, as the most active instance, but lemmy.ml has an older history), which to a guest account shows only Local (rather than globally All) posts, which ofc are full of people making fun of the Western world and society - even to the point of saying that people who do such innocuous activities as having bank accounts should be killed (sadly, I’m not joking, although the people making such claims likely were… and yet… were they, were they REALLY?!).
Nobody likes to be made fun of, so it’s no surprise that the likes of Reddit’s r/RedditAlternatives is filled with such stories of people encountering such and never coming back. But I am glad that despite Lemmy.ml’s efforts to hide it, you managed to find the nicer portions of Lemmy where we can actually enjoy conversations.:-)
Okay, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two developers, with their decisions in moderating that one instance, have dragged down the reputation of the entire platform. They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.
And instead of questioning why that is and addressing it, they’re asking for more.
This doesn’t inspire trust in them. I trust their ideology not to mess with the platform, what I don’t trust is their competence if they can’t stop hemorrhaging donation money by refusing to deal with the biggest wart on the platform. They have all of these people saying they would donate if they would just deal with this conflict, but they won’t. How badly do they need the money to keep developing if they’re not willing to separate?
Here’s the better question: do they even want to keep developing if they had to separate from it?
More importantly, just from a straight development perspective, this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever. There have been a lot of really clumsy mistakes and lack of best practices.
What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?
If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now. I don’t think there are enough people around that can manage a fork of this platform as it exists, so we are tied to them. And I don’t think I like that. I would like to see this platform expand beyond them, but the current course doesn’t seem to indicate that will ever happen.
As Dessalines replied, your assertion of losing donations is wrong.
But yes indeed, their views, those of .ml, and how both handle them, are driving some donors away. You’re asking them to lay down their views, hide or change their opinions, separate from the vocal community on their server (noting that .world is just as vocal, self-righteous and self-assured), in order to develop the software that you use freely (well, that you might then donate to).
Honestly I feel that makes sense and nonsense at the same time. I can see it making sense in some circumstances; but personally I don’t think so in these. Maybe the rhetoric I see on .ml just doesn’t impact me the same as you?
But as an overarching argument that for the sake of Lemmy they should change… That just seems too much to ask, over the internet. Maybe to ask politely and accept a no. Maybe in person, one might argue and counsel strongly. But people are entitled to their opinions and the internet isn’t actually such a good place to change them.
So if the devs keep devving Lemmy, let them. They’re providing a good thing for us, and I hope more people donate.
As to the technical aspects, it just feels like an emotional outburst. FOSS projects’ maintenance is always hard, and there are always difficulties. We do our best. They are trying to. And if a community came along that loves Lemmy and wants to develop it, they could either contribute or fork. Perhaps their fork would last longer? Perhaps not. But for now this Lemmy is here, and is Free, so we are glad to use it.
If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now.
Why bother? Mbin, PieFed, nodebb, flarum, the list of alternatives goes on and on. Lemmy is fairly mature, that’s true, but also the devs kept adding new features, so there wasn’t a need to fork it. Plus, each individual instance already somewhat “forks” it each time they do an update - what I mean here is that some like Hexbear.net and Lemmy.world have extremely heavy modifications that they have made, affecting only their own instance (to clarify, the latter is more code checking iirc while the former was actual modifications).
If anyone needs to they could fork Lemmy at any time. But who wants to learn Rust, a language that is super difficult yet unfinished, compared to e.g. Python that PieFed uses, or Mbin is PHP (and Sublinks iirc is Java, etc.)?
Best to break away free from Lemmy entirely. Have you noticed how Lemmy is even more authoritian than Reddit? Yes modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod to ask why or discuss, no “right” to even know which mod it was - you simply submit your content, and if a mod decides that they don’t like it, then it disappears, without leaving a trace (in contrast, Reddit leaves removed posts still accessible to anyone with the URL), or without warning. The closest thing I’ve ever heard of that is like this is when Reddit “shadow-banned” someone. While on Lemmy, every single post removal is that way. The admins have total control using Lemmy, and mods have a lot, but regular users? Naw, that’s a different story… you all get much fewer freedoms than even Reddit offered (usually, unless they actually did shadowban you).
I much prefer PieFed tbh:-). It has a ton of ideas pushing for democratization of moderation features, putting control of such matters into the hands of the individual users rather than forcing mods to have to do all the work of moderation. e.g. if someone doesn’t ero see posts containing certain keywords like “Musk” or “Trump”, a user can elect to filter those out (the available options there are: All, None, and get this: Some, which is very nice!:-), rather than making a moderator have to decide for the entire community as a whole (they still can do that, but now they don’t have to, bc the software provides another alternative for those users who want to, leaving the users who don’t want that filtering to see that content, while still sharing the same space, rather than having to make a new community:-).
They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.
Nope, not even the tiniest bit. We know how vital lemmy is, and want to secure its long-term future by being entirely sustained by donations. We never at any point reached that goal, and given that nutomic had a new baby, this is more important now than ever.
hemorrhaging donation money
I have no idea what this means. We’re paying our daily living expenses so we can comfortably work on lemmy without having to find other work. The costs are food and rent.
this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever.
I’d love to be able to grow our co-op, and add more developers! Donations make that possible too, especially if they exceed 2 average dev salaries (we’re a long way off from that).
What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?
It’s clear you’ve never tried, because we’ve never and would never reject code contributers for petty reasons like “not fitting in”. If ppl don’t want to work with communists, that’s on them. Personally I’d never reject someone for their ideology, especially if what they’re doing is FOSS, which serves the common good.
I would like to see this platform expand beyond them,
We don’t stop people from forking lemmy and never would, that’s entirely their right.
thanks for the post sir, happy to throw a few money units in
I started using Lemmy like 2 years ago, stopped for a long time, and came back a few months ago. I’m sure something has changed in that time, but I don’t know what.
It could be because Lemmy is written in Rust, which is kind of notorious for how difficult it is to be productive in it. Or maybe it’s that there aren’t enough developers, or there isn’t enough funding.
In any case, my motivation to help fund this project is not helped by the insufferable cuntery of the tankies in the .ml communities. Knowing that the core devs are also tankies makes me want to see it fail. Fuck those people.
You can read the release announcements to see what changed. Be warned its a lot.
Support sent.
Thanks!
I signed up for a medium donation.
While I don’t agree with some things happening on .ml We should not discard imperfect allies. Thank you devs for the great work you’re doing.
Inherently incompatible ideologies =/= imperfect allies
Have you noticed that every other reddit alternative turned into right wing parapolitical forums? That’s so much worse.
Thank you!
ml arent allies at all, they’re the problem, and they wont see a stinking cent from me. It would be like donating to elon musk because I like a twitter Account that posts there.
It’s like supporting Ukraine but donating to putins propaganda outlets.
I’m a (small) monthly supporter already! I wish lemmy had a way to give people a little checkbox in their profile for supporters.
or they could work to project completion and not add new features.
So right now I’m not in a financial situation that I can even possibly think about donating.
My general issue with FOSS is the guilt trip I go on when devs plead for donations – that’s MY issue, not any of the dev teams – but it plays a part in not using FOSS as much as I would like. I don’t want to sell my soul, but that’s about all I have to give right now so free ad-supported services and software are where I tend to lean to these days.
However, I am trying to put as much focus on supporting less shitty humans and buy locally whenever I can now. I didn’t realize the views of the devs of Lemmy until a few days ago and I’m a little concerned to be even using Lemmy as a whole as it shows some level of tacit support for the devs and their beliefs. If they weren’t open about it, obviously this wouldn’t be an issue but since it’s out in public it’s an issue.
I swear I have a point to all this…
Is Lemmy funded just by direct contributions from users or do instances take extra money from their donations and funnel it down to the main project?
If anyone is familiar with the various 12 Step programs, this is pretty much how those main programs get funded. The local meetings take donations that pay for the rent and any other expenses and then donate left over funds to the main service organization while keeping a reserve for emergencies.
If I were in the position to donate, I would feel much better donating to Lemmy.ee rather than the main project considering their views on certain political issues. I would not be directly donating, but if the instance donated extra funds I might be ok with that. It just feels different for some reason.
You realize it’s the owner of .ee that made the post right. Since the instance is still running, still federated with the main one, and the post is still up, maybe that says something about how acceptable those politics are
Are you telling me DeCeNtrAlIZaTiOn and FOsS are not enough to magically keep a project going?
Surprisedpikachu.png
I came here because reddit is turning into a corporate shithole. Users getting banned because of Luigi apologia and so on and so on. Was really relieved that we did in fact have a great, open source alternative to reddit.
My problem is the lead developers of this platform. They do not see the issues with their political bias being woven into their platform (and their transphobia), it will face the exact same shit thats happening to reddit today.
I can’t pay money to people who deny the pain of trans people. I just can’t. And if the lead developers of Lemmy run out of funds, well then I guess they’ll have to just take a good look in the mirror if they don’t see the reason why Lemmy failed. For now I’m gonna use lemmy if I can, but you can’t expect people from reddit to come here and support you guys when their is really hateful shit being spewed by those people (tankies).
They do not see the issues with their political bias being woven into their platform
What the fuck are you talking about? Their ideology is not part of the project in the slightest. Which is why every other instance works perfectly even if they don’t agree politically with the dev team
For now I’m gonna use lemmy if I can, but you can’t expect people from reddit to come here and support you guys
That’s because you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Go back to Reddit with such shitty takes where you move away from massive corporations only to leech off small projects supported by small donors and real people.
You’re literally just another one of those people complaining about the lack of alternatives in tech while also being unwilling to support the products you’re currently using and talking shit about…
Cool off.
Why? So more users like you can come to this platform and use it while shitting all over it by contributing nothing to it?
As I already said, go back to Reddit
