Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Here's information from the AMA recently about lemmy dev salaries:
Unfortunately the user donations are just barely enough to pay our salaries, by my calculations the income from Liberapay, Patreon and Open Collective is around 4000 USD per month. Luckily we still have some NLnet funding left, and should be able to work on those milestones now that things have calmed down. I hope the user donations will increase so that they can pay us proper salaries. Maybe even hire additional people, but that seems very optimistic now. It would also be good if we could find other funding sources besides NLnet, as its not clear if they will fund us another year.
I don't know where they're based, but if they're here in the US, that amount of donations would cover about half of one dev ($4k * 12 = $48k; a low developer salary in the US is ~$100k), meaning we need about 4x the donations just to fund development efforts. That is, if we want to retain two full-time developers instead of having it change into a traditional open source project with mostly community contributions.
Just some data to back up that point. I don't know how much the current developers would consider sufficient to stay with the project longer term.
It's nice how fast Lemmy is growing, but I think it is a good idea to manage expectations. In the world of free and open source software you can't just throw money at the problem to make it better. The development of Lemmy will occur at will whenever someone feels like contributing. It's not someones job to develop Lemmy so it isn't guaranteed to happen at all.
Edit: Just for clarification I'm not suggesting to not donate. I'm just saying donating doesn't guarantee development.
It actually is someone's job at the moment; NLNet gave a grant to Dessalines and Nutomic to work on it IIRC
Interesting news. Thank you for the clarification. Is there any announcement about this?
This appears to be from 3 years ago and only funds to last 6 months. Has there been any additional funding since then?
They mentioned the current numbers in their AMA in !announcements@lemmy.ml .
From what I remember, they are still being funded at the moment.
How do I give a one-time donation? And not a monthly donation.
I did a custom amount annual donation with manual renewal on librepay, that seems to be the easiest. Otherwise you could send crypto to one of the wallet addresses they linked.
Yes, that is the best way. Liberapay is also great as it doesn't take any commission itself (although if you actually use liberapay frequently, it would be a good idea to also donate to them!).
I don't typically like to feather my own nuts but...
Been donating 4.20/week since early June
o7
Thanks for the quick link, just donated.
Just threw in couple bucks, thanks devs
I’m already donating :)
I will say that I would be a lot more willing to donate if the soft ban on Ukraine news was lifted.
Tell me more? I see Ukraine news. Usually browse by top 6 hour or hot.
Ah it's just lemmy.ml with the soft ban. The main "dev" instance.
What is a soft ban?
An unenforced or inconstantly enforced rule.
Ah ok, thank you. Yeah that would be a barrier to donation for me too. Seems odd.
It doesn't if you know the politics of the developers of lemmy. That doesn't seem to impact the software though, only the instances they manage, so just use another instance if you don't like those rules.
I donated some money, but do the links in the "donate" link support Lemmy.ml or Lemmy.world or both?
I subscribe to mostly Lemmy.world instances, and have a Lemmy.world account. Which community makes the most sense for me to support?
I subscribe to mostly Lemmy.world instances,
you subscribe to communities on the lemmy.world instance. Ultimately, lemmy.world doesn't exist without the efforts of the developers behind Lemmy, so that's definitely more important imo.
Thanks for the correction. I'm still learning the jargon. At least I didn't call them subs.
https://join-lemmy.org/support goes to the Lemmy developers not to any particual instance though lemmy.ml is hosted by the Lemmy developers. Each individual instance have their own support methods in the sidebar.
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