Lemmy needs more donations

So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy's primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I've experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.

And it boils down to this:

The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.

Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.

Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.

Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication's reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible... a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.

The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org's case is this:

1. Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev

2. Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.

3. Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.

If this doesn't happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy

They should spend more time devving and less time mod actioning wrongthink

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613

I'll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.

While I understand the moral objections people have to supporting the developers, I do think its fair to highlight how they do not treat us.

We are not a product here to be exploited and advertised to. They also respect your choice to block ml and not to interact with them at all for the rest. I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO's hot takes, but they dont share it for this exact reason. Instead they just design their entire product and business around it, which is the enshittification we all know and hate.

People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.

But to maintain that it means putting your money where your mouth. If not to them, to your own instance.

Am I wrong or is the same person making fun of the ridiculous censorship rules on Reddit while enforcing similar ridiculous censorship rules on their own .ml instance?

Comments are a hilarious minefield and a painful reminder of exactly how online leftists can never get shit done. We want FOSS federated social media platforms to escape the tech giants that would happily facilitate a fascist wave if it meant they can serve more targeted ads. But when that platform actually exists in a totally functional and apolitical way, we don't want to support its development because the people willing to work full time on the project for poverty wages have bad political opinions. It's so bad that we'd rather support Steve Huffman's bot farm which is 1,000 times as politically influential as Lemmy will ever be at this rate.

No ads and no algorithm isn't free.

Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy's way. I'm a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.

ITT: a mighty showcase of the divide-and-conquer strategy by psyops.

Instead of realizing that our goal as an alternative community to Reddit is first and foremost to... well duh, to build a community and keep it thriving, people here are infighting, preferring to subdivide themselves into tankies and non-tankies.

If Lemmy eventually fails and no other project with a similar feature-set can show up in time, we end up killing the existing momentum.

If that happens, all of you shall remember this very moment, and bravo to the psyops people (be it from the government or corporate) because you won yet again.

Donated. Though because I am living in a third world country it's just a measly ~25 dollars.

I was thinking long and hard about this to form an opinion, but my answer is no.

The final decission point was: I'm from Slovakia, it's no secret that Russia would love to take us under their sphere of influence. You and your instance is not only supporting this, you're actively propagating this. In fact, I'm pretty sure if Russian soldiers would be at my doorstep, threatening my family, you and your instance would be cheering. And when I would realize, that I actively supported this, that would break me.

If you're about to publish your work for free, I gladly use it as long as it's run by good people like lemmy.world. This way you get no support from me. If I'd pay you, I don't know what part of my support would end up in .ml instance which I see as a propaganda machine against countries like mine. And even if you say that none of my money would end up there, I kind of don't want to support you as a human being. I won't pay your salary so you have energy to do what you do on .ml instance.

If Lemmy as a project dies, so be it. Foss world can always spark successful forks (see OpenElec vs LibreElec) and alternatives like PieFed already exist

I would never donate so long as that donation supports lemmy.ml

Based on the general community sentiment I've seen and your reports of barely breaking even here, you can either break from the tankies or watch lemmy die without enough funds.

For those with decision paralysis, Liberapay is a great choice. They're a France-based non-profit which is itself run off of donations which it crowdfunds on its own platforn (pretty based tbh), and the site itself is FOSS.

Of some note unfortunately is that donations for development also go to the maintainer-run instance .ml – whose tankie position is to expressly deny genocides like the Holodomor and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs by China – but the costs of development versus the costs of just running the server are completely disproportionate in favor of development. With that in mind, being ideologically purist here enables much greater evils, and I think Lemmy has easily given me more than this value: donated $20 (edit: upped to $30 for drama reasons).

Fuck the lemmy.ml devs. I'm not going to donate to a group of people who have clearly targeted me over and over again across multiple accounts with petty bans for gently questioning their authoritarian orthodoxy.

Donate to forks like piefed or mbin. Let .ml reap what it sows.

Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.

These money will go to two people who created and actively maintain and promote an instance pretending the brutal murder of Ukranians is not happening but also necessary, and deleting and banning contrary opinions.

No.

Give up your admin/mod roles on .ml, be neutral developers, then I am happy to donate.

I used to put up $50/mo to Hexbear, until they banned me for defending the DSA.

So far, the politics on this community have been dogshit. But the moderation has been generally fair, friendly, and functional. To you, I say, Shut Up and Take My Money. Thanks for letting me continue my shitposting habits, even if we've agreed to disagree.

More than happy to monetarily support this amazing open source project with monthly contributions! Thank you to all the devs involved in running this platform

Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.

The purity testing and holier-than-thou attacks going on in these fundraising threads are truly counterproductive. We're not strong enough as an ecosystem and community yet to be able to afford this luxury. If this is coming from the left, I think you should consider the larger goal here.

Donated, I'd rather be on a foss platform that can defederate/block bad faith interlocutors than a corpo platform that forces their anti user pro monetization shit on everyone who uses their platform.

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that's happening.

I've made my donation today for the first time.

I find it helpful that we have been keeping people full time, funded by donations. I would hope this model grows, expanding into for example specific features getting their own bucket of money, as we can voice our support for things that can get lost in a backlog.

I'm not sure I've seen how to contribute the old way, by donating time and performing tasks. Not my case, but how would someone get started on that?

I just logged into Liberapay, and then I saw their profile pictures. Remembered I can't donate to tankies (inb4: I didn't say communists) any more I could maga supporters. or IDF apologists

lemmy.ml:

Hey but they're not that bad! Nutomic responded in this thread:

I certainly dont praise or support civilians being displaced from their homes.

Isn't it wonderfully vague? You know who expressed the same sadness about displaced people? guess (I can't find a source/misremembered? my bad)

You can remove all ambiguity by saying who is the unequivocal aggressor responsible for the gruesome death of thousands of young men and civilians in Ukraine.

How's the denazification going, guys?

I fkn love this community! Just set up yearly dono for 60

Toss a coin to your lemmy maintainer, oh valley of shitposts

Just donated a tenner, keep rocking. Also, fuck spez.

No. Not until the people who want to genocide everyone who does not speak russian are gone from the project.

I donate one euro a month to lemmy.world. It's not a lot but I'm not rolling in cash and I feel like the service is worth paying something for, even if I can only contribute a nominal amount. But I feel like they should have an option to take an entire year's worth of donations at once would be more efficient than a monthly withdrawal.

As it currently stands, a monthly bank transfer of 1 € is taken from my account and I feel like a significant portion of that is going to be taken by bank fees, whereas if they took a single annual transfer of 12 €, they would keep a much larger percentage of the money.

I'm not donating a single bit of whatever currency to .ml. Pick one or the other: dev costs or your own personal soap box cost.

Just threw in a couple bucks! Loving Lemmy, it lacks the stench of capitalism that reddit fell victim to. Thank you to everyone who makes this place work!

Now I'm supporting lemmy and voyager development. Worth every penny.

Became a free member on patreon when i first joined lemmy. Completely forgot to actually up the tier. Recurring donations are now on, thanks for the reminder!

Can't you lobby with the EU too to fund you since there’s a real need for European social media alternatives to challenge the dominance of US platforms? Will deffo donate!

I donated a few bucks.

I see the controversy in the comments section, but none of us would be here if it wasn't for the work of the devs.

I remember internet forums in the 90s and early 2000s and I've played MMO civilization roleplaying Minecraft servers with IRL nazis, takies, fascists, etc. Some of those communities made 4Chan look like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. From my own experience ml has "character" and so do beehaw and dbzer0. These cultural differences are enabled by decentralized social media. There's validity to the idea that the sign-up process should capture more of these nuances. You don't have to look any further than your own instance to find bad takes and imperfect admins and moderators, but they're still the best of the best because they actually did it and the people talking about them didn't. Maybe I'm uneducated on this and I'll change my mind, but as it stands I'm cool until they force tank emojis on .world users.

I do think it's good that this type of talk happens, as it allows instances to develop a reputation.

Is it possible donate to Lemmy development without contributing to Lemmy.ml?

The comments are a full microcosm showcasing why Lemmy will stay underground and it will never overtake reddit

Nah.

ml can shit itself and rot. So can the rest of Lemmy if that's not a price that's worth being paid.

Currently donating $5 a month to lemmy.world. I'll continue for the foreseeable future.

Lotta no's based on people who can't stand being in a room with other people just because of different political beliefs. I don't follow .ml's philosophy, and I don't care. Take em, leave em. Whatever.

They aren't why I'm not on Reddit.

Remember why you're here. If you can't handle discourse with people who see the world differently then go back to Mastodon and save us your intolerance. Discourse is the lifeblood of a site like this, different opinions are part of being human. Grow up.

but t-they support such and such genocide!!

Then protest them louder. Don't bring the rest of us down over it, not that it isn't mostly sensationalist to begin with.

Ah shit. I'm currently a starving musician. I'll scrape you off some of the next gig.

I donated! Great job, and I really appreciate your work.

Done, sponsor level on Patreon.

Nah. If the project starves and shuts down I’ll just go without. I’ll never donate money to social media platforms

Is it possible to donate a server instance?

i.e. Reserve one for 12 months on Digital Ocean, Hezner, etc and transfer ownership

Lol no

No i will never donate , this format is just jerking off Linux enthusiast, and every time I say Linux in unusable I get negatively marked. Content on this is not so good.its many time repeat of Reddit. There is not a easy way or guide on how to use Lemmy and connect to all differn t forums within or even find them .

In total this format is useful but not encouraging. So no donations

I'm skint sorry