If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @[email protected] and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.
I’m proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7
o7
I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I’ll make sure that’s in there.
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Liberapay is simpler, automatically splits payment between devs, and has no fees (other than the payment processor). They’re even funded by their own model.
Opencollective isn’t as good because you have to submit invoices to get paid.
Patreon is absolutely the worst because it’s not made for teams, and they take a big cut for essentially just running a wordpress for you with payment buttons.
You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology … eventually.
For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.
Just sent $44… My fav #.
Thanks for all that you do. Signed up for recurring donations!
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Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they’re been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don’t think we’ll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.