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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How is Lemmy going to make money? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[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] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance...) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

I just hope you understand you won't be the one determining what is "more than enough" - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it's going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it's definitely enough to live. And I don't want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to "work for the portfolio"?

No one is talking about "a lot of money" here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a "co-op" all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.

I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don't get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.

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

We wouldn't be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.

Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we're not even close yet), then we'll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Even if you do not want to call your project a business, "we want enough to survive and pay rent" is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.