this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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its sort of depressing that they will rely on donations though. would be nice if there was some way for them to make money without gambling on random ppl
Fundraising when done well can be good, wikipedia (wikimedia foundation) made about 150M in 2021.
Having an instance that shows ads (even duckduckgo style ads that are privacy respecting) could be good (with funds going to development), maybe rysolv (or some other bounty site) could also provide revenue or getting paid for custom development or just paying a retainer so when need development a developer will be available.
Sponsorship (where you show the logo in the front page given a company clicks) like vue.js does it is also an option.
One problem with FOSS is that there isn't anything like a endowment , with enough money invested you theoretically could use the 4 percent rule and fund lemmy forever.
We only have 2-3 full time devs at the moment, it wouldn't take much to fund us at all. Youtube streamers make more than most open source devs :(
We might try to do yearly funding drives after this year when our NLnet grant runs out.
Here's ou, donation page if anyone would like to support our time: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
That's unfortunate to hear...
Any possibility of renewing it/reapplying somehow?
We've renewed it for several years now, but most of the important activitypub work is done. Now we're focused on code maintainence, performance, ancillary features, and front-end work.
Yeah it works but Wikipedia is constantly threatening to close up because of lack of donations right? That's a huge fault that persists no matter how well done their fundraising campaign. I wonder are there examples of fundraising where they gather more than enough to foot the bills? Do they expand then like a business would or do they save that excess for next year? I have to assume they'd invest and grow it. Is Wikipedia or lemmy an example of FOSS though? It's not as simple as open sourced software once you put it on the web and build a business behind it. Maybe the bones of it was FOSS but we're passed that point now yeah? Obviously I have more questions than answers, just an interested layman. Cheers.
I don't think i saw that wording in years, and they probably exaggerated , There are other examples of open source projects that fund multiple develoepers , thunderbird, krita, blender , iirc for some of them people say they are competitive with closed source alternatives.
Yeah for lemmy the code is open source and for wikipedia the code and content are open source.
I guess I just don't get how being open sourced code is really relevant to Wikipedia? The code is not special is it? They don't need donations to pay for elite programmers, it's servers and IT people. The code being open source means that someone else can copy their own Wikipedia if they felt like competing and thought for some reason that they could. The fact that Wikipedia Foundation is non-profit basically precludes this but I think you answered my question basically anyway, they don't rely on only donations.
It's relevant that it's open source because you don't have to pay for it and a competitor could arise (iirc there is a startup that does that, provide a "better" user interface to wikipedia), and the software is pretty complex so you should pay full time programmers and UX researchers and designers.
I guess so. I would really love to see the paid competitor that successfully displaces Wikipedia. It would have to be extremely impressive wouldn't it? Like paradigm shift level impressive. Any startup that currently claims to do it "better" will also need to make it available for free, or instantly fail because of no users ever bothering to sign up.
The Wikipedia software is used by many institutions. When i still worked in uni, we tried it for our group internal documenting. In the end went for a less complex wiki software, though. :-)
I mean it's a different topic, aside from how a business (for profit or not) takes software (foss or not) and makes money from it. Wikipedia software is used a lot I'm just saying it's not relevant to what I was talking about. Like if companies didn't use this free software for internal documenting they would use something else, no biggie. In the same way that if the worlds largest online encyclopedia no longer had Wikipedia software, they would use something else, no biggie. The word wiki is like the word kleenex and that's great for the founder of wikipedia, maybe? But it's still just tissue paper.
Yep the software license would not be so relevant, that's right.
I believe the word "wiki" pre-dates wikipedia --> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
I've thought about this. It's likely that ads could happen but possibly only on specific instances so that some instances could remain relying on donations.
I see donations as mostly a problem for the app itself. The instances could begin charging a fee for hosting or whatever. So long as it's reasonable, I see no issue