Lemmy

Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.

Here's information from the AMA recently about lemmy dev salaries:

Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.

I don't know where they're based, but if they're here in the US, that amount of donations would cover about half of one dev ($4k * 12 = $48k; a low developer salary in the US is ~$100k), meaning we need about 4x the donations just to fund development efforts. That is, if we want to retain two full-time developers instead of having it change into a traditional open source project with mostly community contributions.

Just some data to back up that point. I don't know how much the current developers would consider sufficient to stay with the project longer term.

It's nice how fast Lemmy is growing, but I think it is a good idea to manage expectations. In the world of free and open source software you can't just throw money at the problem to make it better. The development of Lemmy will occur at will whenever someone feels like contributing. It's not someones job to develop Lemmy so it isn't guaranteed to happen at all.

Edit: Just for clarification I'm not suggesting to not donate. I'm just saying donating doesn't guarantee development.

I don't typically like to feather my own nuts but...

Been donating 4.20/week since early June

o7

Just threw in couple bucks, thanks devs

Thanks for the quick link, just donated.

I’m already donating :)

I donated some money, but do the links in the "donate" link support Lemmy.ml or Lemmy.world or both?

I subscribe to mostly Lemmy.world instances, and have a Lemmy.world account. Which community makes the most sense for me to support?

I will say that I would be a lot more willing to donate if the soft ban on Ukraine news was lifted.

I don't really feel motivated since Lemmy is centralized now on Lemmy.world. It would have been great with a decentralized network, but sadly we didn't get there.

The value of Lemmy for me is in its decentralized nature. Otherwise we may as well use reddit or some other centralized corp service.

With almost all users, communities and links going to Lemmy.world... Let's just say I don't want to pay for another centralized network.