Between Lemmy.world desperately needing new mod tools, Lemmy.ee disabling image uploads, and the two main Lemmy.ml devs working on Lemmy for less than minimum wage, I want to urge and remind everyone to please Donate!
The Lemmy devs have refused advertisements, refused collaboration with Meta, and focused all of their efforts (and then more) to support the wave of users who left Reddit. The Lemmy devs did this, as they let the work owed to their sponsor take the back seat, to give everyone here today reading this message the best experience possible.
Lemmy is already at 1% the size of Reddit, but only has 2 full time employees. Not only do they deserve more for the gruelling hours they’ve put in, but so does everyone else who’s contributed too.
https://join-lemmy.org/support
Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.
Here’s information from the AMA recently about lemmy dev salaries:
Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
I don’t know where they’re based, but if they’re here in the US, that amount of donations would cover about half of one dev ($4k * 12 = $48k; a low developer salary in the US is ~$100k), meaning we need about 4x the donations just to fund development efforts. That is, if we want to retain two full-time developers instead of having it change into a traditional open source project with mostly community contributions.
Just some data to back up that point. I don’t know how much the current developers would consider sufficient to stay with the project longer term.
It’s nice how fast Lemmy is growing, but I think it is a good idea to manage expectations. In the world of free and open source software you can’t just throw money at the problem to make it better. The development of Lemmy will occur at will whenever someone feels like contributing. It’s not someones job to develop Lemmy so it isn’t guaranteed to happen at all.
Edit: Just for clarification I’m not suggesting to not donate. I’m just saying donating doesn’t guarantee development.
It actually is someone’s job at the moment; NLNet gave a grant to Dessalines and Nutomic to work on it IIRC
Interesting news. Thank you for the clarification. Is there any announcement about this?
How do I give a one-time donation? And not a monthly donation.
I did a custom amount annual donation with manual renewal on librepay, that seems to be the easiest. Otherwise you could send crypto to one of the wallet addresses they linked.
I don’t typically like to feather my own nuts but…
Been donating 4.20/week since early June
o7
