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.

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?

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...

1. use an app...
2. that channels a specific server....
3. contained within are individual mods that maintain communities and curate content...
4. 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.

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 :)

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?

I'm poor af alright?

53k monthly active users is way less than I expected. But makes sense with how slow things are here.

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

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.

I give $1 a month on patreon, hopefully that's enough cause I'm broke AF.

i was once told to hotlink images from other hosters.. as opposed to uploading to lemmy. (to save on resources!)

We like free stuff?

I would if I had money :(

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.

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

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. :)

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!

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.

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

Why would I donate?

Yeah, well, about that...

All the rich shareholder types migrated to reddit.

I’ve been stating since I joined that Lemmy needs to find a way to sustain itself beyond donations.