this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
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I don't know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance...) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.
I just hope you understand you won't be the one determining what is "more than enough" - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it's going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.
We wouldn't be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.
Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we're not even close yet), then we'll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.
Even if you do not want to call your project a business, "we want enough to survive and pay rent" is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.