cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/16660104
Consider supporting Lemmy development or donating to your local server if you have the means. Peace!
Why would I donate?
Do you like it here? Do you want it to succeed? Do you realize that instance servers and rust developers cost money? Those are the reasons why.
Either we help this place thrive now, or we’ll be watching assholes like Threads dominate the Fediverse. We can all be part of the solution, or we can be apathetic and continue to complain about the corporate internet while doing absolutely nothing about it.
I have never regretted a donation to a FOSS project.
It’s an ok experience. Realistically Reddit was much better before a bunch of changes and Lemmy hasn’t filled that/not sure it will catch up.
I don’t care if it succeeds or not. We’ll all just move on to the next thing if it doesn’t.
Yes of course it costs money - but it’s not my business to run and it’s the business’s problem. I’m not a charity or an investor so I don’t need to worry about whether the business succeeds or not.
So basically, no reason to donate.
Who do you think “the business” is? Lemmy is a free open source software created by volunteers. The one paid developer works for donations alone. Every instance is independently run, free of charge, and donation supported.
Have you looked around and noticed the lack of ads, algorithms, and promoted posts? All of that is due to Lemmy not being a business.
If you don’t want to contribute even a positive word toward other people donating what they can, then I’m really not sure what you’re doing in a brand new community driven FOSS project.
Alternative to reddit and to keep track of other technologies.
But yes, I get that the whole thing is free and donation driven. At the same time, if it’s free then it’s free. Why would you pay for something that’s free, sort of defies the point. If it can’t sustain itself being free then it can’t be free.
Maybe it’s an autistic thing but it’s just logically irrational.
That does explain some of my bewilderment at your stances in this conversation.
Nobody says you have to donate, but you are discouraging others to do so as well with your definitive statement of “no reason to donate”.
In effect, if nobody donates, we are putting 100% of the pressure on about a dozen individuals who run large instances and/or who develop the software. Overbearing financial pressure like that burns out good administrators.
Lastly, helping in any way you can is just plain neighborly. If you can’t help by donating, you can at least not discourage others from doing so. Even a “I appreciate the hard work that goes into this place” is a contribution.
Instead, you’ve chosen to basically say “I don’t care, not my problem, I don’t care if it burns”, which is a pretty rude thing to say in a thread directed as a thank you to the people who have put in all the hard work and time to make this place.
So, in summary, you don’t have to donate, you don’t have to care, but if you are discouraging others from caring and getting involved, you are no longer neutral, you are part of the problem.
Its not free in the traditional sense, its just someone else pays for you. These projects work by being “free” with their biggest/most charitable users supporting it. Every major software project that runs the web, be it curl or python, works that way. You do not pay to use the service, you are instead paying to help delay the abandonment of the project and bring updates to improve your experience.
If you don’t particually want this project to succeed, then that’s fine, though you should probably pay your instance a dollar to cover the bills incurred by your own use of there resources.
This is such a bummer of comment on so many levels. It’s like the tragedy of the commons became sentiment and chose nihilism
Yep it is. But it’s reality. No point fighting for something that doesn’t exist.
I’m poor af alright?
Who’s the Chad that donated a whole 15 ETH to that addy 👀 — https://etherscan.io/address/0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01
TBH I’d be willing to pay $1/month. If every Lemmy user did that I think it would be plenty to keep the servers hot.
Yeah no, after seeing how they treat their users and mods… I’ll stick to funding my instance.
I would if I had money :(
poor losers like us are the ones likely to spend our time in places like this.
and poor losers like us dont have the money to donate.
I would bet that at least 90% of Lemmy could afford a recurring donation of $1 to $3 per month. If 90% of 50,000 users donated $1 per month, they could bring in $45,000 per year. Currently, the 1172 donators are donating even more than that, which pays for 1 full time developer. If we picked up the slack, they could afford two, effectively doubling the dedicated work output.
It’s that simple. Either we band together and keep this system afloat, or we give our data to corporations so they can sell it and pay the bills that way. There isn’t really a third option.
Jimmy Wales over here.
Yeah I’m definitely not gonna donate money to people who are publically and proudly communists.
I might donate to my local instance though. They seem like cool cats.
Nothing wrong with being a communist. Being a tankie on the other hand… Fuck them
Nothing wrong with being a communist.
That might be debatable.
Being a tankie on the other hand… Fuck them
This is not.
Communism is a political philosophy which in and of itself does not advocate for oppression. There is indeed nothing wrong with it, at least if you advocate for freedom of thought.
The Stalinist version of authoritarianism has been conflated with communism by american (mostly) media during the cold war. It is however a very specific ideology.
Apologists for authoritarian regimes, whatever their political leaning, deserve no platform or tolerance. Plurality of thought however is needed and essential.
Yeah. And for
tankies, sorry, “communists”, the Lemmy devs do whine about money an awful lot.You know there is money in communist nations right? The Soviet Ruble was a thing. This comment reeks of “You criticize society, yet you participate in it”. The Lemmy devs need money to survive, especially in a cutthroat capitalist world. I don’t find it hypocritical with their beliefs. Criticize them for their waving away authoritarian actions, for spreading propaganda, or silencing wrongthink on their instances, but I don’t think it’s fair to come at them for wanting to be fairly compensated for their labor, that’s Marxism 101.
The end goal of communist theory is a stateless, moneyless society. The fact that no country has been successful in transitioning to such a society doesn’t matter here, the end goal remains the same, when speaking about theory.
I personally maintain the major downfall has been putting one person in charge. That’s never gone particularly well, even in capitalist democracies. I’d like to see a country try it out with a council at the top, preferably 9 or more members, but always an odd number to prevent ties.
Also they all failed to establish a proper democracy first, and therefore fell into authoritarianism
Unfortunately executive power tends to coalesce in a single person whenever an emergency situation occurs. Rome tried rule by committee like what you’re describing but gradually slid into dictatorship because of various forces that are basically just human nature.
The Six Nations pulled it off for 15,000-25,000 years. That’s just based on the limited archaeological evidence and oral history, but still. I don’t think it’s human nature so much as a lack of viewing war/violence as a failure of society. The Romans outright celebrated their generals, and many other societies have done so as well.
I’m sure that having the major religion of the last couple millennia in Europe being based on a god of war from the bronze age collapse era didn’t help us any either.
Communists are people who live on a commune.
A commune is a group of people living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities.
On one end, a group of friends who live in a house sharing food and living space, you can absolutely call them communists. And the other end of all the bad shit. Same with capitalist, where there’s multiple angles of it all.
That bad shit is tankie, where its authoritarian communists.
I hope I helped.
Communists are people who live on a commune.
That’s perhaps not a commonly(hah) agreed definition of the word.
The Lemmy devs are a bunch of tankie weirdos, so I’m definitely not going to give money to them.
I’ll hang into my cash and hope for a fork by some non-tankie devs.
I’d bet my life savings they’re already funded by the CCP/Kremlin.
… Can I have your reasoning? Just because they are communists doesn’t mean they are foreign agents, all it means is that they are authoritarians. Besides,idue to lemmy’s federated nature the governments would be better off infiltrating or straight up buying larger social media companies
A lot of them aren’t actually communists, that’s a facade. I have no problem with most communists, it’s a wonderful theory and I get along much better with them than actual capitalists. In fact, I suspect a lot of them aren’t even people, they’re LLMs.
Lemmy.ml is a mouthpiece for the CCP. They aggressively spread CCP talking points. I abandoned an old account because they followed me around and downvoted everything I posted. This was right after the reddit exodus so I was posting positive, funny memes to help Lemmy grow. They’re very quick to delete and ban people who disrupt their echo chamber, and in my experience they almost never argue in good faith. A lot of them seem like bots, if you talk to them you’ll get weird, non sequitur responses.
Lemmy is a easy target for propaganda, there’s very little oversight.
not every idiot on the internet is funded by the ccp
Of course, but when someone is involved in leadership of a community that constantly spreads CCP propaganda and organizes to maliciously downvote people who push back against it, it’s quacking like a duck.
I just want Reddit back, it was much better. But they’re dead.
Its been dead ever since normies found it and took it over. Around when /r/wtf turned into into a G rated Disney movie to appease advertisers or soccer moms, etc.
I know, it’s such a shame.
Thanks. I was about to post that I haven’t yet decided whether to donate to my instance or the developers. I might just go with your opinion
Edit: although after reading, I’m not entirely sure. Part of supporting freedom to discuss is also supporting freedom to discuss things you disagree with or even things that are genuinely hateful. I do tend to end up more on the free speech side than the cancel side. The posted thread from archive at least the complainant moved on: we need to be able to vote with our feet like that
Lemmy.ml is the devs instance, and they have a habit of banning anyone who even slightly differs from their opinions. Basically, if you’re not a tankie like them, they will likely ban you.
They’re not interested in free discussions.
But they just personally don’t want that on their instance while they create the lemmy software that allows for everyone to speak their opinions.
They have an extremely low bar for censorship, and I have already seen signs that they will abuse their role to keep their finger on the scale. For example, they selectively federate mod logs, and seem to be running a custom build which allows them to do this. What other forms of fediverse trust are they willing to compromise for ideological purity?
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just looking at mod logs across instances? There have been about a billion little things that have slowed or stopped content from sharing properly over the history of this system so far—how can you be sure there is malevolence on their part and not simply a bug that hasn’t been patched?
Spoiler: They don’t. They are also not letting the absence of facts hinder them from claiming stuff to be true. Subsequently they worry about why their comments are being moderated.
Slight correction: Lemmy.ml is their reach-out and diplomacy instance. Their actual instance is lemmygrad.
I guess their diplomacy with me was to follow me around and downvote everything I posted until I just abandoned my original account.
Exactly they only harassed you instead of sending you straight to permaban gulag. Took me all of four or five days to get banned from lemmygrad and that’s without even posting in their communities.
Trust me, the Lemmy devs do not support freedom of discussion.
Yeah, they donated their spare time to give you a decentralized platform where you could criticize them because they want to stifle “freedom of discussion”… That the lemmy.ml instance is heavily moderated on stuff like imperialist propaganda is a non-issue for freedom of expression due to the nature of federation. The devs do not even want their instance (lemmy.ml) to be the biggest, but actively promote joining other instances.
You confuse your right to express your opinions with the privilege of someone else providing you a platform for you to express them on. The devs provide the former without obligating themselves to be the ones to give you the latter.
You’d have a better point if the rules against “imperialist propaganda” were more evenly enforced to include all forms of imperialism.
But at the end of the day, when given an opportunity to reflect their own values in the way they run their instance, they have chosen a very restrictive framework to that end. I don’t know how you can come to any other conclusion. It is clear that their development effort is not done to protect any speech besides what they have deemed acceptable, and as far as I am concerned, they have repeatedly shown that they will happily keep their fingers on the scale to whatever extent possible. This is why they will ban people for commenting on other instances, and then not federate the mod logs, etc. These things should absolutely be seen as evidence that they will exert control beyond their own instance if they can.
A lot to unpack here…
include all forms of imperialism
Being mainly concerned with global economic imperialism does not imply acceptance for more traditional imperialism.
reflect their values
Instances are independent and federated, hence do not need to reflect the values of the project as a whole in any way. These properties of decentralization are the values of Lemmy.
I’ve seen the rest of your claims before and you have been asked to present any facts contributing to them elsewhere. Seeing that you still have not responded to them, I will refrain from discussing it in depth for the time being.
I get the impression that your bar for “evidence” are lowered due to some personal experience. To actually engage on a point you made, modlogs have been a mess for a while and there are good reasons not to federate all details of content moderated (such as child porn). It seems weird to me that you contribute this to an angenda of the devs trying to control other instances when they were the ones that gave the other instances their independence in the first place. The actions also does not furher any such agenda in a meaningful way. The much simpler and probable explanation is that engineering stuff like this is hard.
It’s extremely easy to see that the modlog on .ml specifically doesn’t match the modlog on other instances, and for issues which have nothing to do with csam. This whole dismissal of it “being a mess” is a pretty convenient excuse for the people who are literally implementing these features. We also know that they never seem to show any admin actions, though this could be attributed to them using alts to moderate. Still kind of shady, but I guess marginally less so.
If .ml admins would care the explain why their build sure seems to behave differently in a few key areas, then it would go a long way towards assuaging these fears. Or perhaps, if they took concerns about their heavy handed moderation more seriously, they would indeed get the benefit of the doubt in regards to their broader intentions.
You are confusing freedom of discussion to using an specific instance with specific rules. Lemmy is clear proof of what you say is not true, and you are incorrect in your deductions of what/why and who.
Yeah they have made it clear they don’t want me around, on top of that. Donate to instances, not the devs.
I know people like to shit on the Reddit gold concept. But I still think it makes sense and is one of the least obtrusive ways to raise funds sustainably.
That wouldn’t really work in federation, unless the reddit gold mechanic is tied to that specific instance.
And it was fun to let people know how much you appreciated their comment ot post.
53k monthly active users is way less than I expected. But makes sense with how slow things are here.
Need more bots
How would bots help? No one wants to interact with a non human
Said no one ever.
I’m assuming 1172 is a count of donations to official mainstream servers. I have definitely contributed to my local server.
I think it’s only donations to the development team. Summing up the donors across Liberapay, Open Collective and Patreon gives close to the number in the title.
I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It’s that the best way to support the project?
I believe they prefer Libera pay over the other options last I had checked
The Lemmy project - yes. You want to check if your home instance is sustainably funded too. I think lemmy.world for example is well funded. So is lemmy.ca - my home instance.
I know for a fact that DB Zer0 could use some love, and their admin has created a lot of extra tools that have helped the Fediverse manage abusive instances. If your instance is well funded, but you would still like to donate somewhere to show your support, I highly suggest you check them out.
Their donation links are in their sidebar.
It’s quite nice running it myself
Word. The large instances are well funded at the moment. I think the funding is lacking on the developer. Subscribe if you can. I have. :)
Frankly, given the conflicting priorities and attitudes of the two primary Lemmy devs compared to the needs of instance admins, I’d rather the better-funded instances pooled some of their excess and funded an independent contributor to work on mod tools, GDPR issues, and other things that operators are concerned about that have been backburnered by the current devs.
Wasn’t there some guy who wanted a total of 8 dollars to fix the GDPR issue and they didn’t get funded? Something tells me the operators aren’t too concerned
I would donate if I wasn’t so broke =)
