YSK: Lemmy has 53k monthly active users but only 1172 have ever donated

I'm assuming 1172 is a count of donations to official mainstream servers. I have definitely contributed to my local server.
- I think it's only donations to the development team. Summing up the donors across Liberapay, Open Collective and Patreon gives close to the number in the title.
  
  I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It's that the best way to support the project?
- It’s quite nice running it myself

Ugh! Can’t they just monetize the sale of our personal data and push nauseating ads every other post… like any other respectable post aggregation platform?
- Ads they won't (At least I believe so.) But I won't be surprised that some data harvesting companies have servers set up to collect all the data, aggregate, and sell it. Lemmy is an openly federated platform after all.
  
  sell it
  Sell it? For what, 0 dollars? If anyone wants the data, they can just set up an instance themselves.
  The data is freely available. Just like open source stuff.

I think it's a symptom of Lemmy's core premise - where do I direct funds as the "common" user (read as less technically sophisticated)? To access and engage with Lemmy I...
use an app...
that channels a specific server....
contained within are individual mods that maintain communities and curate content...
and all of that lives within the larger "world" of Lemmy as an idea
There are many hands in that chain. Your dedicated users can handle negotiating that decision maybe, but the "common" user cannot - and this post is trying to discuss Lemmy at scale, so you're talking about that "common" user.
Again, it's counter to the founding spirit of Lemmy, but we're missing a centralized path to supporting all of the distributed hands doing work on this idea. Not an easy problem to solve, but one that should be acknowledged.

The Lemmy devs are a bunch of tankie weirdos, so I'm definitely not going to give money to them.
- Yeah they have made it clear they don't want me around, on top of that. Donate to instances, not the devs.
- Thanks. I was about to post that I haven’t yet decided whether to donate to my instance or the developers. I might just go with your opinion
  Edit: although after reading, I’m not entirely sure. Part of supporting freedom to discuss is also supporting freedom to discuss things you disagree with or even things that are genuinely hateful. I do tend to end up more on the free speech side than the cancel side. The posted thread from archive at least the complainant moved on: we need to be able to vote with our feet like that
  
  Lemmy.ml is the devs instance, and they have a habit of banning anyone who even slightly differs from their opinions. Basically, if you're not a tankie like them, they will likely ban you.
  They're not interested in free discussions.
  
  Trust me, the Lemmy devs do not support freedom of discussion.
- I'll hang into my cash and hope for a fork by some non-tankie devs.
- I just want Reddit back, it was much better. But it's dead.
  
  Its been dead ever since normies found it and took it over. Around when /r/wtf turned into into a G rated Disney movie to appease advertisers or soccer moms, etc.
- I'd bet my life savings they're already funded by the CCP/Kremlin.
  
  ... Can I have your reasoning? Just because they are communists doesn't mean they are foreign agents, all it means is that they are authoritarians. Besides,idue to lemmy's federated nature the governments would be better off infiltrating or straight up buying larger social media companies
  
  not every idiot on the internet is funded by the ccp

I've subscribed to patreon in the beginning, and one of the perks was supposedly access to a private group with the devs on discord or matrix, forgot which one. After 3 months and a few questions on how and where to gain access that went completely ignored, I stopped. Not because of the money; but because empty promises don't sit well with me.
Edit: They still list "access to the development chatroom" as a perk, now even in the $1 tier. Used to be only from $5.

I'm a monthly donor :)
- Seeing your comment I was like, oh I know this guy. And then I remembered you are the one building the lemmy frontend I use. Thank you :)
- Me too! It feels great, honestly. Highly recommend.

I'm poor af alright?

I had no idea it accepted donations, if not for this post I would have no idea where to do it. And still not sure how it works and where the money is for exactly. Is it like sponsoring servers for 1 particular instance?
- The links in this post are for funding the two developers who work full time on Lemmy, the software.
  The instances are sponsored separately via their own contribution links. E.g. look at the sidebar on lemmy.world and you're probably gonna find them.
  For the system to work we need to fund both the software development and the instances. Currently the software development funding is further behind as it still doesn't cover two modest salaries. On the other hand I think lemmy.world is sustainably funded. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
  
  That's useful thx for the intro.
  I think it's enough for the big picture, and it enables me to make several follow up questions such as
  I had no idea this was in the hands of 2 people. Do they really make a living primarily on crowd sourced funds? Exciting and scary for the future of software in general!

53k monthly active users is way less than I expected. But makes sense with how slow things are here.
- Need more bots
  
  Said no one ever.
  
  How would bots help? No one wants to interact with a non human

Using this as my opportunity to brag that I have been a donor since the Reddit exodus! Hopefully I am donating to the right place:
https://liberapay.com/dessalines
- The official Liberapay link now points to https://liberapay.com/Lemmy/.
- Aren't they a tankie
  
  Have a look at their profiles and decide for yourself.
  https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines
  https://github.com/dessalines
  https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic
  https://github.com/nutomic
- yeah that's the main dev of lemmy, but there's a separate lemmy liberapay too now (both are ok probably)

I know people like to shit on the Reddit gold concept. But I still think it makes sense and is one of the least obtrusive ways to raise funds sustainably.
- And it was fun to let people know how much you appreciated their comment ot post.
- That wouldn't really work in federation, unless the reddit gold mechanic is tied to that specific instance.

I give $1 a month on patreon, hopefully that's enough cause I'm broke AF.
- If you're broke, don't give. I think there's enough of us who can afford a few bucks a month and we should get more people to do it.
- It's a dollar more per month than most of us, including myself, will ever give.

i was once told to hotlink images from other hosters.. as opposed to uploading to lemmy. (to save on resources!)
- Hotlinking is stealing. Besides servee owner could change the images your hotlinking to. Or he coukd delete it altogether
  
  Haha I remember seeing the geocities threats about hotlinking.
  
  The web is built on hot linking hypermedia. It is more fragile obviously, but it distributes the bandwidth and storage load. If nobody hotlinked, then small forum admins/Lemmy admins/etc. have considerably more cost to bear.
  
  This meme is hotlinked, as God intended.
  
  If the server owner isn't fine with others hottlinking they can simply deny requests not related to there website(s). On that note, I hope you are donating to your instance, otherwise by your logic you are stealing there resources.

We like free stuff?

I would if I had money :(
- poor losers like us are the ones likely to spend our time in places like this.
  and poor losers like us dont have the money to donate.
  
  I would bet that at least 90% of Lemmy could afford a recurring donation of $1 to $3 per month. If 90% of 50,000 users donated $1 per month, they could bring in $45,000 per year. Currently, the 1172 donators are donating even more than that, which pays for 1 full time developer. If we picked up the slack, they could afford two, effectively doubling the dedicated work output.
  It’s that simple. Either we band together and keep this system afloat, or we give our data to corporations so they can sell it and pay the bills that way. There isn’t really a third option.
  Edit: I can’t believe this has been up this long and nobody has corrected my awful math. It isn’t $45,000 per year, it’s 45,000 users donating a combined total of $540,000 per year. Basically, 90% of us donating $1 per month could take this rocket ship straight to the moon.

I did try donating for Lemmy through Liberapay using the link in this post but canceled the process when I saw that the money recipient was “peertube.social”, which I don’t use. I’d feel better donating if the money went to Lemmy and not Peertube.
- Weird, the link goes to Lemmy's page for me - https://liberapay.com/Lemmy. Did OP have it wrong and then updated it?
  
  I mean when I navigate to the Lemmy’s donation page and proceed with setting up a recurring payment, my bank asks for confirmation of the transaction. During this, my bank identifies the recipient as “PeerTube.social”. I find it a bit confusing, but I guess the other Lemmy founder also owns peertube.

I need my union contract before I can afford donating 😭

Word. The large instances are well funded at the moment. I think the funding is lacking on the developer side. Subscribe if you can. I have. :)
- Frankly, given the conflicting priorities and attitudes of the two primary Lemmy devs compared to the needs of instance admins, I'd rather the better-funded instances pooled some of their excess and funded an independent contributor to work on mod tools, GDPR issues, and other things that operators are concerned about that have been backburnered by the current devs.
  
  Wasn't there some guy who wanted a total of 8 dollars to fix the GDPR issue and they didn't get funded? Something tells me the operators aren't too concerned

I would donate if I wasn't so broke =)

Yeah no, after seeing how they treat their users and mods.. I'll stick to funding my instance.

TBH I'd be willing to pay $1/month. If every Lemmy user did that I think it would be plenty to keep the servers hot.

I'm on Lemmy.ml, so I've been donating €10 monthly for the past year to dessalines!
- Might as well just send the money straight to Putin's propaganda department.
  
  Totally uncalled for
- Lol, what a waste

Yeah I'm definitely not gonna donate money to people who are publically and proudly communists.
I might donate to my local instance though. They seem like cool cats.
- Nothing wrong with being a communist. Being a tankie on the other hand... Fuck them
  
  Nothing wrong with being a communist.
  That might be debatable.
  Being a tankie on the other hand… Fuck them
  This is not.
  
  Yeah. And for ~~tankies~~, sorry, "communists", the Lemmy devs do whine about money an awful lot.
- Communists are people who live on a commune.
  A commune is a group of people living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities.
  On one end, a group of friends who live in a house sharing food and living space, you can absolutely call them communists. And the other end of all the bad shit. Same with capitalist, where there's multiple angles of it all.
  That bad shit is tankie, where its authoritarian communists.
  I hope I helped.
  
  Communists are people who live on a commune.
  That's perhaps not a commonly(hah) agreed definition of the word.

Who’s the Chad that donated a whole 15 ETH to that addy 👀 — https://etherscan.io/address/0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01

Why would I donate?
- Do you like it here? Do you want it to succeed? Do you realize that instance servers and rust developers cost money? Those are the reasons why.
  Either we help this place thrive now, or we’ll be watching assholes like Threads dominate the Fediverse. We can all be part of the solution, or we can be apathetic and continue to complain about the corporate internet while doing absolutely nothing about it.
  I have never regretted a donation to a FOSS project.
  
  It's an ok experience. Realistically Reddit was much better before a bunch of changes and Lemmy hasn't filled that/not sure it will catch up.
  I don't care if it succeeds or not. We'll all just move on to the next thing if it doesn't.
  Yes of course it costs money - but it's not my business to run and it's the business's problem. I'm not a charity or an investor so I don't need to worry about whether the business succeeds or not.
  So basically, no reason to donate.

Yeah, well, about that...

I’ve been stating since I joined that Lemmy needs to find a way to sustain itself beyond donations.
- If you're not paying with real money or work, someone else is, or you're paying with something else.
  
  If you need to show me an ad every once in a while I’m all for it. I’m not saying go full Reddit, but as a non-profit, please try and break even. Financial instability is just as bad as getting hacked or ddos’d.
- Anything beyond donation is asking for ads.
- Its important to view this through an economic scope, what is the cost of a regular user to a server. Then how much are donors giving and does that supplement the cost of non paying regular users.
  Also these non paying regular user add to Lemmy by buffing out numbers and attracting more donating user to the platform.
  If we can donate then we definitely should and that way we can run under this model.
- I've wondered if it would be possible to have a federated award system for funding... Similar to what Reddit was doing at one point. I actually kind of enjoy that and the fun emoji-like things that you'd see on interesting posts and comments.
  That sounds like it's asking for some crypto currency mess though, or some (most?) instances just hanging them out for no charge.