Comment by nutomic@lemmy.ml on How is Lemmy going to make money?

If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

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.

Contributions welcome.

One problem with that smart ass reply - I don’t know how to code in Rust/TypeScript as I’m sure many of the users here are in the same boat. How about you add basic QoL features before launching?

Lemmy is not a company, it’s built by volunteers. If you want a corporate platform go to Reddit.

Ban me now you cunt. You’ve more sensitive than Spez and I didn’t think that was even possible.

Ah and here comes the toxicity along with the reddit flood.

I honestly can’t tell if

removed by mod

was removed by mod, or just an italicized removed by mod.

Bud, this is like going to someone’s house for a party and complaining that they don’t have your favorite beer. How about you go for a beer run?

That’s not even remotely the same and everyone that upvoted you is just as stupid. If you think mod tools are in a great state, you’re also delusional. Sorry you have such low standards to agree with the lazy admins releasing software that wasn’t ready.

I didn’t say anything was in a great state. I just said this software is like a party, no one’s here to serve you. You aren’t going to be catered-to because your eyeballs are worth selling. So if you want it to happen, help out. That’s how it works.

Hell, even if it isn’t strictly a mod tool, being able to do this from someone’s profile page would be good.

Wholeheartedly agree

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.

I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.

Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.

Just arrived on Lemmy through join-lemmy.org, and I could quickly find a server.

I first saw a post about lemmy.ml being out of capacity which lead me to join-lemmy.org

I guess most of refugee will do the same.

Still have to learn a lot, I still don’t know what are instance hosting, i guess profiles and subtopics, therefore if i interact on a sub hosted on lemmy.ml i guess I would also use it.

Well, going to study this

Thanks for this platform, even though reddit death was a liltle hope for me to waste less time on my phone !

28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.

I don’t know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.

Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.

I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.

I realized I’d much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called “the magic of thinking big”, and one of its points was to ask the question: “What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?”

We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.

I wasn’t worried about nutomic and you. We all appreciate what you guys are doing for us ex Redditors seeking a new platform, even more so that you are willing to sacrifice so much personal comfort just to bring joy and entertainment–two luxury goods–to all of us. Most people seeking a job are not in it for ideals though, so it’s not completely unreasonable to think that you might need to compete for your work force by offering salaries comparable to what’s common in your market.

I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.

And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.

I guess France is not part of central Europe because 80k(even employer cost) for entry level position I never heard about it

Even 4k isn’t that easy to get at the beginning

And 4k (employer cost) is in the end like 2100e after all taxes

I don’t know about France. I live in one of your neighbouring countries and as a graduate or even undergrad software dev you won’t have a hard time finding a job that pays 60k+. 80k+ is rare but definitely also exists.

Edit: And yea all of these are pre tax obviously.

I live in Italy and here a 50k€ job is considered on the very high end for a senior developer. It means around 2500€/month (for 14 months) net and keep in mind that the medium job in Italy is just a bit less than 34k

oh okay, places i thought about it’s like 700e for a 3 rooms flat. And of course in France you have healthcare and stuff, but most likely the same in most of Europe

With the cost of living in country in east i think they could find skilled passionated devs, and pay them a fair price, which french companies already do (without the fair price)

The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

We wouldn’t be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.

Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we’re not even close yet), then we’ll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.

Even if you do not want to call your project a business, “we want enough to survive and pay rent” is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.

These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it’s definitely enough to live. And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to “work for the portfolio”?

No one is talking about “a lot of money” here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a “co-op” all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.

I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don’t get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.

I think I’m misunderstanding, €28k for 7 full time workers is more than enough?

It’s per month, not per year, so per year they’re receiving €336K, which seems more than enough to me unless people are demanding 6 figure salaries which are not really necessary.

Hmm ok, I’m not that aware of how much tax and what general cost of living is in the countries the 7 people are living in, so I guess €4000 (before tax)/month could be enough…

It depends entirely where people live, even inside countries can differ drastically - as an example, I currently live on around £23,000 a year before tax (about €29,000) while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount. This is in the north of England, but if you were to go further south, you would need a bit more most likely.

The discourse on the internet is that you seemingly need some crazy amount of money, but the average wages of places are nowhere near the figures people give, and most people are living alright, even if it’s not particularly extravagant.

This isn’t to say people should be living on scraps or anything, we’re all underpaid at the end of the day, but the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” you see on many (US-centric) places on the internet is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.

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