this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.
I don't know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That's not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.
I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.
I realized I'd much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called "the magic of thinking big", and one of its points was to ask the question: "What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?"
We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.
I wasn't worried about nutomic and you. We all appreciate what you guys are doing for us ex Redditors seeking a new platform, even more so that you are willing to sacrifice so much personal comfort just to bring joy and entertainment–two luxury goods–to all of us. Most people seeking a job are not in it for ideals though, so it's not completely unreasonable to think that you might need to compete for your work force by offering salaries comparable to what's common in your market.
I think he has a good point. I'm also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I'm now just earning enough to come around. But I'm learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I'm having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.
And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years...), and actually serve the community.
I guess France is not part of central Europe because 80k(even employer cost) for entry level position I never heard about it
Even 4k isn't that easy to get at the beginning
And 4k (employer cost) is in the end like 2100e after all taxes
I don't know about France. I live in one of your neighbouring countries and as a graduate or even undergrad software dev you won't have a hard time finding a job that pays 60k+. 80k+ is rare but definitely also exists.
Edit: And yea all of these are pre tax obviously. The cost of living is also quite high though. For example in some places over here rent for even a small flat is 1k or more.
I live in Italy and here a 50k€ job is considered on the very high end for a senior developer. It means around 2500€/month net and keep in mind that the medium job in Italy is just a bit less than 34k
oh okay, places i thought about it's like 700e for a 3 rooms flat. And of course in France you have healthcare and stuff, but most likely the same in most of Europe
With the cost of living in country in east i think they could find skilled passionated devs, and pay them a fair price, which french companies already do (without the fair price)
I think I'm misunderstanding, €28k for 7 full time workers is more than enough?
It's per month, not per year, so per year they're receiving €336K, which seems more than enough to me unless people are demanding 6 figure salaries which are not really necessary.
Hmm ok, I'm not that aware of how much tax and what general cost of living is in the countries the 7 people are living in, so I guess €4000 (before tax)/month could be enough...
It depends entirely where people live, even inside countries can differ drastically - as an example, I currently live on around £23,000 a year before tax (about €29,000) while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount. This is in the north of England, but if you were to go further south, you would need a bit more most likely.
The discourse on the internet is that you seemingly need some crazy amount of money, but the average wages of places are nowhere near the figures people give, and most people are living alright, even if it's not particularly extravagant.
This isn't to say people should be living on scraps or anything, we're all underpaid at the end of the day, but the usual "6 figures is barely getting by" you see on many (US-centric) places on the internet is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.
Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?
Sorry, it seems you are projecting here. Even if that were true, going with this "we are all underpaid, so others should accept that as a fact of life" doesn't really ring like a compelling point to attract people to work on Lemmy.
The point is not whether people could (or should) live on a salary of X or Y. The point no one should be pricing their work in terms of what they "need to get by" and instead they should be pricing themselves in terms of "how much value does my work produce". When you leave to employers to determine how much you "need", you get exploited.
Yeah but working on an open source anarchistic social media link aggregator, will likely result in exactly these people. I don't see a big problem there, open source is dominated by different kind of people/developers. Compared to "cozy" corporate jobs, the quality of code, in my experience is much more relevant ("code is art").
So it's likely that a lot more idealists, who don't value money that much will work on something like lemmy. And being able to not depend on a corporate job (and being payed for the project you're caring about, also if it's just enough to get around) is a dream for a lot of these people.
The unfortunate reality is, that unless you somehow "force" the user to pay for something, you're likely get way less (money). Open source donators and donations are a fraction of the actual user base, so you have to balance the actual income (by donations) to those people who dedicate a good amount of development time...
The problem with this approach is that the rest of world is not going to be waiting around for a handful of idealists. They are going to use what solves their problem. You can bet that at this moment there are at least a dozen junior VCs in Sand Hill Road looking for investment opportunities in something that be sold as the next reddit and are ready to use their PR machine to convince the masses that this new shiny app is "completely different", "revolutionary" and "learn the lessons from the failure of reddit". You and I may know this is total bullshit. However, when the alternative is just a handful of developers who bans those who come asking for features and act like they don't care about the majority of Joe Average, who do you think they will choose?
I get when people say that they want to work on something and they don't care that their pet project doesn't become big, and I wish we lived in a world where more people could simply work on their things on their own time. But I also understand that if we really want to fight against the Evil Corporations (tm), we need to beat them at their own game. That will involve doing all sorts of unpleasant things like "deal with customers (even the rude ones) by addressing their needs instead of telling them to fuck off" and "how to make enough money so that you can compete in the job market for the best talent instead of depending on Fred who is the only one working on a crucial feature, but needs some time off to study for his finals at Uni".
One way or the other, it'll take time to be on par with the feature set of the good features of reddit (so everything before Steve Huffman got CEO if I remember right), especially in a federated way.
Also I don't think it's at least currently the goal to get the whole reddit userbase onto lemmy (apart from the obvious technical scaling issues that'll arise). It was just an "unfortunate" consequence of reddits announcements that led to the sudden flush of a lot of reddit users onto lemmy. I think it needs (still) quite some time to get federation and the UX around it right (and I'm talking about basic features like user migration). Two people are just not enough, but few very passionate and idealistic/perfectionistic people will likely achieve quite a bit. Because of the announcement a lot of devs will likely contribute to the lemmy ecosystem (which is actively happening right now, if you'll check the repos). Give it a little bit of time. I think a good maintained open source project can actually progress faster and with higher quality than most of the closed source alternatives (since I'm working in that area, a good example is Blender vs alternatives, which as of now has surpassed quite a few "competitors" with way fewer people developing it). You don't need a lot of money for that (although obviously it would be better, let it just be for infrastructure cost).
Also github issues and PRs (or other similar platforms) actually reflect "addressing the needs" quite well. I myself have experienced it a few times and I'm seeing it in a few user-faced apps and repos a lot: I want one particular feature and it's not implemented yet, so either I open an issue, describing my feature request well, or I start implementing it (if it's either small, or a feature that'll likely everyone wants), and often a lot of people want that feature too (visible e.g. via emojis), I think it's even healthier than this layered view between corporations/operator and the user, as the user has to actively think through the feature, invest more (time) into it (even if it's just opening a feature request issue). It's not as easy as contacting the support, and complaining about things (which issues will likely not be communicated to devs the way it should be). Active collaboration is IMHO quite a good innovative driver.
Yeah hence why I said idk the cost of living and €4k might be enough. I also live in the north of England, on (28k but just went up to) 34k before tax but since I live in the city center of a big city, it's not a huge amount.. and I have a housemate
Edit and we're not talking close to 6 figs here, another user pointed out that €4k/month before tax is not even €50k a year so if they're living in a city that costs more than the relatively-lower cost north of England, they're not in good shape.