Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It’s okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
A. Not a “dude”
B. I’ll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn’t think popularity was support:
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
I guess that’s true when you’re a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I’m sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?