An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
Please stop accepting crypto"currencies"—multi-level marketing pyramid schemes—and I donate.
Faulty generalization That some scammers or greedy people in rich countries are promoting it like a ponzi scheme to benefit themselves doesn’t mean every person use it in the same way. Some people use it for its savings in a highly devaluating currency (my use case), others for money laundering, or to send money to Palestine, or to flee a collapsing country because of war and avoiding their money being seized by the policy at the borders, for ransomware, or creating circular economies in poor countries, to donate to human rights activists in dictatorships, to buy drugs, etc, etc these are just some of the dozens of verified uses cases. That’s what happens when a technology is free and permissionless, it’s not good or bad by itself, it’s as good or as bad as the person that uses it. AI is being used to scam people and to detect cancer more precisely than the best experts. That’s and inherent feature of free software. Lemmy is a perfect example, would you promote not using it because there is an instance used for child porn?
It would’ve been a faulty generalization if, like knives or Lemmy, most use cases were benign. Unfortunately crypto"currencies" are predominantly speculative and malignant to society.
You know that what you said is pure speculation based on personal experience, random publications, ideology or mainstream and social media, which is the only way you can reach that conclusion, unless you have peer-review publications with the statistics of worldwide usage. If you lived in Africa you would say that Bitcoin is godsend, as you can hear it from many africans
If the Lemmy admins adhered to everyone’s request to “stop doing X and I’ll donate”, they would end up with zero more donations because people will always give another reason for not donating
I know. But I am not everyone, and this request is not unique. Wikimedia stopped accepting crypto"currencies" as well by community vote.
I’ve donated plenty to Lemmy with crypto, and the article you linked addressed none of the reasons I use it (privacy, anyone?). So while it’s cool you’re passionately against crypto, I think Lemmy is getting more out of it than it’s lost
FIAT stanning never went this hard.
False dilemma. Being against wasteful greed-incentivizing MLM pyramid schemes doesn’t mean not objecting to the flaws of contemporary finance as well.
Crypto is far less wasteful than the fiat banking fraud scheme.