Yesterday, as part of the discussions related to Lemmy current inability to delete all user content I wrote a proposal: if enough people stepped up to help with funding, I'd take my work on my Fediverser project (which already has an admin web tool that "knows" how to interface with Lemmy) to solve all the GDPR-specific issues that we were raised by @maltfield@monero.town
The amount asked is, quite frankly, symbolic. I offered to work 10h/week on it if at least 20 people showed up to contribute via Github (which would be $4/month) or to signup to my instance (which access is given via a $29/year subscription). In other words, I'm saying "Give me $80/month and I will work 40 hours per month on this thing which so many of you are saying is critical to the project."
So now that we have passed 24 hours, 58 upvotes and a handful of "that's great!" responses, let me tell you how that translated into actual supporters:
- Zero sponsors on Github
- Zero signups on Communick.
Don't take this as me demanding anything. I'm writing this just to illustrate the following:
-
The Tragedy of the commons is real. I can bet that at least 30% of the 60+ thousand users on Lemmy are proud owners of a pricey iPhone, and most of these are okay with paying for an app to use on their pricey iPhones, but almost none of them will even consider throwing a few bucks per year on the way of an open source developer.
-
The Outrage Mill is not a "capitalist" or even "corporate" phenomenon. People were piling on the devs yesterday for completely ignoring "such a crucial piece of functionality", but no one actually stepped up to offer (or gather) the resources needed to have this problem solved. It's almost as if people were getting more out of the discussion about the problem than working through a solution.
-
"Skin In The Game" is a powerful filter. No matter how much people will tell you that something is important to them, the true test is seeing how many are willing to pay the asking price. If not people are not willing to pay $2 per hour of work, then I can assume that this is not really important.
The number of subscribers to this community is already close to half of the total amount of active users on all of Lemmy. Plus, as so many people said before (when complaining about the alien.top bots), the majority of people browse Lemmy by "all". I really find hard to believe that going to other communities is going to move the needle too much in terms of reach.
If I were a scammer, I'd be a really dumb one. Do you really think that it would be a good idea to go through a platform like Github asking for $4/month? Or go through all the trouble to put together a real website, offering services were you pay through Stripe and can cancel or ask for a refund?
Honestly, because I don't believe in the donation-based model. I'd rather have people believing in me and supporting my work by being actual customers of my business offer.