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:
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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.
From what I can see, what’s stopping a lot of people donating is the fact that donations cover .ml as well, I personally think this is a non-issue, because .ml doesn’t cost much to run (from what I can see).
Would it be possible to split donations for lemmy development, and donations for lemmy.ml?
Lemmy.ml is the dev test instance, for one, and for two, the donations are to pay the devs wages, which allows them to dev Lemmy full time. You’re essentially saying you want to control what the devs of Lemmy can pay for with their salaries at that point.
What’s wrong with dev.lemmy.ml enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml?
That aside, I think that there would be enough people who would donate to .ml, I read somewhere that it was €30/month, which doesn’t seem like much.
We always put out calls before (major) releases, but very few ppl actually help test. This means a lot of bugs only get spotted when more eyes see them in production.
All of these issues are solved in the corporate world by paying quality assurance / testing teams, but open source projects don’t have those resources.
Where are those posted? I think I always miss them, happy to help with testing before major releases
In the matrix dev chats, but we could also post them elsewhere.
The fact that there aren’t a lot of users to give feedback. Lemmy.ml is like a public beta channel, in a way.
true, but if it gets more people to donate, I think it would help.
Maybe, but that would be incredibly hard to enforce. The fees for upkeep on Lemmy.ml are very small, it isn’t what’s at risk, what’s at risk is having full time devs for maintenance and new features. Lemmy.ml would stay even if the devs need to switch to part time dev work.
Maybe keep the support page as-is, but add a small “donate without supporting lemmy.ml” link.
that’s the pettiest shit I have read in 2025
I know, but if it pushes more people to donate I think its important.
The devs can do that if they want, but that’s not really going to change the fact that the fees for Lemmy.ml are so small that it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is the idea that people can support the software without supporting .ml.
Yes it would be possible. The question is if people would really be more willing to donate in that case, or if they would look for a different excuse instead.
There are obviously other good reasons for not donating or at least thinking hard about it first.
But removing one bad thing surely couldn’t hurt.
Actually lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
If that is the case you should make it clear in the description what exactly is being funded on each platform.
I already updated the description on Opencollective to mention this. Other platforms only cover developer salaries like the descriptions say.
I don’t think it was updated when I looked earlier but it looks good now 👍
You might consider adding to the descriptions on the other platforms that .ml is explicitly excluded considering that many seem to be confused but that’s up to you.
That seems unnecessary because most people dont care. There is a vocal minority which keeps complaining but they dont need to be appeased any more.
Sure, if you believe that is the case.
I don’t really care what you do. It’s not like it impacts me.
The only persons that it impacts are you and that other guy which might or might not get fewer donations. It’s not really about appeasement it’s about assurances.
Took me a moment to understand the point. But I agree, from a transparency view alone. The users of .ml should be funding .ml, not the people trying to keep lemmy as a project alive. Generally, large insrances should be funding the project, not the project those instances imo.
There’s also the fact that Nutomic is a known transphobe, and donating to lemmy’s development means supporting said transphobe. If we could get non-problematic devs, that would be ideal. But until then, the only real options are “use Reddit” or “support a tankie transphobe.” And neither is a great choice.
tAnKiE
You are on a “tankie” website made for and by tankies
I’m specifically not on a tankie website; I’m on an anarchist website that is federated with a tankie website. The largest reason most instances still federate with .ml is because it’s the only instance that the devs will use. So if you want to actively follow Lemmy’s development, (and despite the devs’ problematic attitudes, I think everyone here wants Lemmy to succeed), you need to federate with .ml.
You are sitting on lemmy complaining about lemmy devs being tankies so you won’t donate to them but you want them to succeed but you hate them but you love them
You can want a project to succeed, even if you don’t like the person in charge of the project.
Its not that hard. If hitler (or name your villain) made and kept improving a cancer drug and nobody else is taking up the mantle, you’d probably care more about keeping people alive (or in this case off of heroinbook and reddit) than the person.
Lets be honest, 2500 per dev is a joke. They could be making three times that if they just accepted one of the offers that are thrown at them BECAUSE of lemmy and other projects showing their skills.
Barely keeping them alive is not helping their views or anything they care about besides lemmy being improved. For transparency reasons I too would prefer to have separate fundraiser for ml directed at ml users but thats a different topic.
Another important point is that reddit stans would want you to hate tankies grrr and not donate so lemmy goes away as one of the few alternatives. A alone would fund these two if I could just because fuck reddit.
I love what they’ve made but their views are absolutely abhorrent. Having said that I am willing to donate as the project overall is a beautiful piece of software & I’ve donated a handful of times already but I will seethe that a single penny goes to keeping .ml online.
what does a cia-backed color revolution in hungary 70 years ago have to do with lemmy?
no, no no they mean the modern definition of tankie: Someone left of Kamala Harris (everyone knows she’s as left as it gets before you horseshoe theory around and become red fash)
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