this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You may want to be very open about how much has been donted 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 the 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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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