For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them.
:(
I had such a hard time explaining to someone today that there is no universal set of Lemmy rules/politics and you can run your own instance with literally 0 rules
people have forgotten that things can exist outside of the few billionaire/trillionaire closed source walled gardens they've become so reliant on
Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's awesome that something like Lemmygrad can exist, while also a community criticizing Lemmygrad (there are several) all on the same platform, and without any real central control.
If you don't want to see certain content, you can block it and move on, while getting the benefits of federation.
I joined communities from a half dozen instances, and I'll probably join communities from even more as I get better at finding communities.
The communities trying to pillarize the entire fediverse over calling lemmygrad hate speech are, however, not a great thing. Undermining the interconnectedness of the platform at scale by agitating on other platforms that they blacklist or be blacklisted under false pretenses may as well be precision-engineered to negate what is useful about the platform.
For us maintainers (dessalines and nutomic), it has resulted in an endless stream of questions and notifications, which is impossible to keep up with. Previously there were 5 - 10 Github notifications per day; now they have risen to over 100 daily.
That is what i was worried about, Feedback for developers probably correlates with the number of active users , more users mean more feedback (github issues and comments) and more stuff to read, I thought this might not be a problem because i looked at mastodon and didn't see a lot of issues getting opened in a day, but it's the comments that could be the real problem, unless you will improve your funding and start hiring more people (even temporarily hiring freelancers) things will probably get worst and you will lose a lot of good feedback.
We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
looking at liberapay , patreon and opencollective my calculation says you are getting about 4465 dollars (2714+217.58*4.345+806) when this comment was written , that's about 0.15 dollar per active user (assuming about 28K monthly active users).
For comparison beehaw has about 3069 monthly active users and got this month (6/1/2023 -> 6/17/2023) about $3,461.60 ( 1.12 dollar per user, probably better then reddit for most of it's history).
So i am pretty sure the problem is with getting funding (most people are not aware of the option to donate, or/and are not convinced or incentived to do it). Lemmy should work on it's conversation rate.
If you are interested, i worked for a while on a guide to help fund open source and got some good feedback on it, maybe you will find it useful.
From what I've seen, the fediverse generally is doing a rather poor job of normalising donations from users. If you have some expertise or experience in this domain, and are willing, I'd urge you to just get involved and gather people or whatever you can to create better tools or design patterns or strategies for this.
I suspect there's trepidation from developers to get to "pushy" with donations and so turn off their user base, and yet they don't really no how to go about it well and so it just becomes a lost issue when in reality it is central to a "free" fediverse.
I also worry that getting this right earlier rather than later is important. As people join the fediverse, they absorb the culture, norms and design language of the place. The earlier donations are just a normal part of things, the sooner they're actually normalised.
On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn’t provide any sources. Such slander doesn’t deserve any response and is best left ignored.
- Previous discussion on the moderation policy on lemmy.ml including response from @dessalines@lemmy.ml : Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
- Accusation of a Mastodon user (probably the one they are referring to): https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
- Essays from @dessalines@lemmy.ml: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md
So um, no one on the face of this earth hates fascism more than a communist, the evidence you dug up only seems to reinforced the not a fascist and its utterly rediculous to call us that.
Nothing here says he's a fascist. His "genocide denial" stance stems mostly from the idea of being anti-capitalist and not trusting US-centric sources. Its not entirely without merit. Noam Chomsky for example is accused of the same thing for the Pol Pot genocide, though at the time he was right for the same reasons -- accusations started flying in the US based on completely banal sources.
I used to be like this, its not entirely harmful. And in any case, I don't give a shit about his politics. We should be thinking about how to separate peoples politics from the platform, and the work hes done on Lemmy does exactly that.
Noam Chomsky for example is accused of the same thing for the Pol Pot genocide, though at the time he was right for the same reasons – accusations started flying in the US based on completely banal sources.
You're giving Chomsky's version of the story, but it's such a weird story because one of the only communist projects Chomsky ever spoke in favor of was easily one of the worst ones (along with Peru), ones that even hardcore "tankies" disavow. Like, wasn't this the motherfucker that said the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a victory for the "left"?
Granted, there is misreporting on Cambodia, which started when it was contemporary and continues to this day, but that misreporting is mostly on the magnitude of the crimes committed, not the basis of calling them crimes (i.e. they were still awful).
It is extremely harmful when people like them go around non-tankie left wing subs and eventually gain control through nefarious means and eventually transition it into yet another tankie propaganda sub. Or when they moderate a supposedly general left wing sub but any criticism of authoritarian communism gets you muted and called a liberal, eventually allowing their propaganda to seep through to regular socialists as any criticism is shot down. /r/GreenAndPleasant is guilty of the latter.
It's not really the politics but the way power hungry people get.
Noam Chomsky for example is accused of the same thing for the Pol Pot genocide, though at the time he was right for the same reasons
It's also a valid opinion to criticize Chomsky for his reaction to the Cambodian genocide.I can't recall all the details of how things went down, so I have no comment myself, but I do have other criticisms of him.
It doesn't make him a fascist, or a Nazi/Nazi sympathizer. That would detract from what I have to say about the people who actually are, since that's a separate conversation. Same goes for the devs perhaps (but that's also a separate conversation).
This is doxxing. People have different usernames for a reason.
Your point being?
None of what you linked supports any of the claims that they are a genocide supporter or a fascist, if that's what you tried to show (in fact you proved the complete opposite on the latter).
See, it's all this stuff that really makes the
Such slander doesn’t deserve any response
statement feel very Steve Huffman to me. It very clearly does deserve a response because the problem doesn't end with just saying "nope lol that's not us" and people like me have to go digging through all this bullshit just to figure out the facts: they believe anti-China news and similar is U.S./media propaganda and will moderate opposing viewpoints with "Orientalism" bans and similar. That's not a hard statement to type, and if this viewpoint is in good faith then I struggle to see why they refuse to just say that and consistently resort to "if you don't like our moderation policy feel free to join/start a different instance!" without ever actually clarifying the moderation policy. Even lemmygrad pretty much says outright "if you like capitalism, fuck off."
makes the statement feel very Steve Huffman to me
Then you didn't read it, they link a page that clears up their position on it right below that sentence: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
I mean, dude's not CEO, he doesn't control the instances. He does own a very large instance, but I don't think it's even the most dominant instance post-redditting.
I disagree with his views, though I will admit to some sympathy on some aspects (not the genocide stuff), but ultimately, he's just a dude who makes this software. He doesn't own it, he doesn't have a monopoly on its control, and really, the entirety of the Fediverse could, if he went full Huff, say "fuck you" and defederate his instance. That's the power of a distributed service. Heck, your own instance, kbin.social, could lemmy.ml at any time and it'd have little impact overall.
Even were I to concede to him being "Huffman-like" (which I do not agree with), I don't think he's actually relevant enough in the real-world usage of the software to care about as far as that goes.
Just made a donation on Liberapay, thanks for everything that you've done!
I subscribed to their Patreon. I don't pay for subscriptions normally, but for an open source platform I'll gladly pay to keep it that way!
Same. I also ent ahead and became a regular patreon giver. Only 10 a month but its far better than buying some dumbass blue check or waiting for reddit to do the same since the CEO clearly loves him some Elon.
It's upsetting to see the shit-talking because I imagine reading that nonsense is emotionally draining, especially when you're already stressed out with a billion things to do. I've seen you guys active in the lemmy community for years and you've always been wonderful. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates the work you two have put in and are currently putting in. I'm really happy that your project is starting to catch on.
Honestly we're all adults here and we all know how the Internet works. Best to not feed the trolls and ignore them. The more attention you give the more it gives the appearances that their rhetoric has validity. Just move on and let's all focus on making a better fediverse for all
Agreed! I love the laid back feel of this community and not all the hostility you see everywhere else. With growth comes change though, so I hope the spirit of this group endures.
What is the best way to donate to lemmy? According to this article it's Liberapay. Is that true?
Yes liberapay doesn't take any commission.
This is extremely well written. Anyone that supports and wants to see this platform thrive should share this in response to the people spreading nonsense with the goal of seeing it fail and upholding the corporate status quo.
Thank you for doing this
God I appreciate these dudes. I don't envy them one bit right now...
Yeah, very difficult situation, I truly hope they'll find the help they need.
I hope this new influx of people will also bring in a nice influx of nerds who will make this platform better over time. :)
I'm a nerd and I'm here because Reddit has forsaken the nerds and is treating its user base like cattle to be herded. I guess most people want to be herded. That's fine for them, but I want something more, where we make our place for ourselves, to our own liking. Not so that some investors can get richer. I suspect many of you are here for similar reasons.
I would like to contribute, and have the skills to, but unfortunately no time at the moment. For now I am mostly watching to see how things develop, but sooner or later I may just jump in if I find things are moving too slow.
yeah, the 2014 exodus to voat was all pissed off nazis, but now the nerds are pissed off so I think you’re right
I was recently sharing Lemmy to some people and how the entire Reddit blackout is stupid considering everything the platform has done in the past and the mindset of the CEO.
Someone brought up Voat and they were lamenting how that failed, and I decided to check out the WayBack Machine captures for it, and Christ, nothing but antisemitism and racism.
thank you!
Thank you for all your work.
It's not much but I upped my contributions a bit. Thank you for everything you've done for the open, non-corporate internet.
When will we get details about security vulnerability? Is there a formal method for instance owners to stay up to date on those kinds of notices?
Thanks for the work my friends.
It's xss, so users could include javascript code in posts which would be executed in other users browsers. We announce new releases in a couple of places, like the instance admin chat, !lemmy@lemmy.ml community and github releases.
You guys are doing a fantastic work. Congrats on creating such a cool project like Lemmy.
Gang, I'd never pay for reddit gold but I sure as h*ck will pay monthly to support lemmy. You all should too!
Only a very small fraction of the 27000 new members are capable of developing the platform, and many (like me) don't donate directly. However, members might be more willing to donate AI or other IT resources in an 'indirect' way.
There are 27000 members with access to an AI, that can code (more or less). There are also developer agent architectures like 'smol-ai', and 'gpt engineer' etc, that works directly on a code base, that could assist with the development. (https://github.com/smol-ai/developer and https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer)
An AI could run through the git requests and create a list of 'easy' non blocking features to develop/fix, and the members developer architecture could take on one of these issues and do a pull request. Another way is for Lemmy to host such an architecture, and let members donate 'AI prompts', or even API keys (when accounting is possible) for common development.
The tooling/workflow integration isn't quite there yet to be helpful now, and the chance of Lemmy devs getting time for this right now is null.
But how fast could Lemmy development get with 2-300 member AI's working 24/7 on bugs/features ? I'm not a developer, so I don't know how to set up such an AI assisted development workflow. But it could be done, and development speed of ALL open source projects in general would skyrocket with an open to join 'AI developer architecture'.
Hey, we could even have a global federated FOSS AI developer architecture, and people/smaller AI architectures with cool ideas for open projects could request global FOSS AI developer time for their idea/project. I'm sure someone is already working on something like this.
So with no knowledge of any development work as you state not being a developer you think that the best for Lemmy is that the creators should spend time that they already have very little of to setup some AI that will supposedly help them magically?
AI would require a lot of tunning to do anything remotely useful, instead of suggesting something out of complete ignorance, donate so that they could eventually employ more people to help.
'you think that the best for Lemmy is that the creators should spend time'
? No, I specifically wrote the opposite. There's no need for you to be 'pissed of' at anything, but you seem to be very focused on a very small part of the suggestion and misses the point. The 2 AI developer systems i linked to are close to being able to handle small issues from a codebase, and are thus not far from being able to assist. How much is needed for a 'Lemmy' size I don't know and I don't care.
There are other ways of supporting than donating, and for other devs to help out in the above way. If you feel offended about the idea, then ..scram ??
and many (like me) don’t donate directly
But you pay for API keys?
Yes, that would be 'indirectly' just as we pay for electricity and hardware given to Boink or similar distributed computing, but psychologically it can make a huge difference. However, the exact method is imho less important than creating an AI workflow to assist in development of Lemmy et al. API keys can also come free trials, from private servers using https://localai.io/ or similar services with an API/Key.
You're going to learn very quickly that the anti-corporate world of fediverse despises nfts, ai, crypto, and everything aligned with the silicon valley techbro-brained idiots that have taken over the existing mainstream internet. It's going to highlight to you what a bubble reddit is for one specific opinion on most topics.
post it to Mastodon with LemmyDev account
@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml this is a good idea for the users over there to share
