Besides @dessalines and me who work on Lemmy full time, there are many people who contribute to Lemmy without any financial reward. Those include translators, community moderators, programmers and others. Without them, Lemmy wouldn’t be what it is today.
Because we are funded by donations, we aren’t able to reward these contributors with money in any useful quantity. Besides, not everyone wants to receive money and turn this into a kind of job. So what we can do is try to reward people in other ways. Here are some ideas:
- Code Contributors: We are starting to write changelogs for every release now, and will mention who contributed to the code. We could also include a list of contributors directly in Lemmy, eg in an about page (here is an example from Syncthing).
- Translators: Mastodon credits them by mentioning their names in the changelog. I have another idea, we could show the names of translators directly inside Lemmy, to the people who are using that language version. So if someone uses Lemmy in Spanish, they would see the names of Spanish translators (could be on an about page, or next to the language setting).
- Documentation Writers/Translators: Seems pretty straightforward, we can mention them on the first page of the documentation.
- Mods/Admins: These are different from the previous ones, which are related to Lemmy development, while this is about using Lemmy. Moderating is generally a pretty thankless job, and I can’t think of any projects or websites that reward it especially well.
- Any others that I forgot to mention?
One thing to note is that this shouldn’t cause much extra work for us developers, because then we would have less time to fix bugs and implement features. So it should be possible to automate these tasks (eg with a script that reads the names of contributors from git), or someone should volunteer to take care of manual tasks.
Another thing I am wondering is how to treat contributions of different sizes. Should someone who translates a single string be listed in the same way as someone who does the translation for a whole language? Maybe we could set a minimum contribution size for people to be listed, or order the names by the size of their contributions?
I am curious to read your ideas and suggestions, especially from those who already contribute to Lemmy (or similar projects).
I think these are all great ideas.
Can’t we have like an annual mod-admin day? On which we collectively thank our mods and admins? With high quality memes.
Proposal:
admin-appreciation day = 13 July (because today)
mod-appreciation day = 13 August (because one month later)
Or are there more meaningful dates?
1 one up this, maybe irl stuff too? like Lemmy holidays? idk
Haha. I like it. One day without Lemmy. And then when we come back, we share our holidays pics.
Yes, a day where all moddable tasks are turned off for users so all mods and admins can have a day. You can still view Lemmy, like posts and comments, but no commenting or posting.
Er… if the point is that people are doing these things for no reward, why would you want to introduce rewards? That would completely upset the whole ecosystem.
out of kindness I suppose
Really like the idea of mentioning the translators of a language for those who speak that language. Regarding contribution size, I think just listing the contributors in a proper order could work unless that list is too big, but this is a different problem anyway.
yup, top 5 or so by some metric and then a link to the full list.
If you’d go by how other projects are doing it, you should create an altcoin named LemmyCoin and have Elon Musk tweet about it in 3 years.
buy, lemmyngs ;) (Elon Musk, probably, 2024)
If he ever endorses this we’re going to sticky his crimes to the front page.
Lol, that would be amazing!
And make Lemmy apparently more centralised.
Maybe a contributors page with a short note of what they’ve worked on. And allow the contributor to post a single link of their own next to their name - maybe some would want to link to their favorite organisation, a personal portfolio / github, or their own patreon / cryptocurrency address, etc.
As a user I might see that a particular person has implemented some accessibility feature, language, or other function, follow their link and read about or contribute to whatever they’ve linked to.
Where would you put this page? And who would maintain it? If you volunteer, then we can talk about it :)
Hmmm… ok let’s put a pin in that idea :-)
I have no idea what the mod story should be except that it is relatively less important now, while the site is still not huge, but will become extremely important once we get to the point where large communities are their own fiefdoms and whatever other nonsense is going on over there on Reddit.
As a translator, I like the idea :)
you could put donations links for those contributors who would like that. Maybe you can’t pay them, but someone else could.
What about creating a dedicated thread for that and for every release, all contributors are listed and appreciated. Additionally there could be a static text that mentions all the other volunteer’s who contributed and helped indirectly
