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!

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    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?

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      1·
      13 hours ago

      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.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        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:-).