cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/16660104
Consider supporting Lemmy development or donating to your local server if you have the means. Peace!
I’m assuming 1172 is a count of donations to official mainstream servers. I have definitely contributed to my local server.
I think it’s only donations to the development team. Summing up the donors across Liberapay, Open Collective and Patreon gives close to the number in the title.
I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It’s that the best way to support the project?
The Lemmy project - yes. You want to check if your home instance is sustainably funded too. I think lemmy.world for example is well funded. So is lemmy.ca - my home instance.
I’ve been stating since I joined that Lemmy needs to find a way to sustain itself beyond donations.
If you’re not paying with real money or work, someone else is, or you’re paying with something else.
If you need to show me an ad every once in a while I’m all for it. I’m not saying go full Reddit, but as a non-profit, please try and break even. Financial instability is just as bad as getting hacked or ddos’d.
Wikipedia managed to do it on donations only. Federated social media is similar in many ways and I think it’s entirely possible that we may get development and hosting to be funded in a similar fashion.
Its important to view this through an economic scope, what is the cost of a regular user to a server. Then how much are donors giving and does that supplement the cost of non paying regular users.
Also these non paying regular user add to Lemmy by buffing out numbers and attracting more donating user to the platform.
If we can donate then we definitely should and that way we can run under this model.
I’ve wondered if it would be possible to have a federated award system for funding… Similar to what Reddit was doing at one point. I actually kind of enjoy that and the fun emoji-like things that you’d see on interesting posts and comments.
That sounds like it’s asking for some crypto currency mess though, or some (most?) instances just hanging them out for no charge.
Word. The large instances are well funded at the moment. I think the funding is lacking on the developer side. Subscribe if you can. I have. :)
Frankly, given the conflicting priorities and attitudes of the two primary Lemmy devs compared to the needs of instance admins, I’d rather the better-funded instances pooled some of their excess and funded an independent contributor to work on mod tools, GDPR issues, and other things that operators are concerned about that have been backburnered by the current devs.
Using this as my opportunity to brag that I have been a donor since the Reddit exodus! Hopefully I am donating to the right place:
The official Liberapay link now points to https://liberapay.com/Lemmy/.
Have a look at their profiles and decide for yourself.
I need my union contract before I can afford donating 😭
