- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- youshouldknow@lemmy.world
Hello world,
as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won’t start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.
All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We’re currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it’s certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.
We’re looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.
You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
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I donated a few bucks.
I see the controversy in the comments section, but none of us would be here if it wasn’t for the work of the devs.
I remember internet forums in the 90s and early 2000s and I’ve played MMO civilization roleplaying Minecraft servers with IRL nazis, takies, fascists, etc. Some of those communities made 4Chan look like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. From my own experience ml has “character” and so do beehaw and dbzer0. These cultural differences are enabled by decentralized social media. There’s validity to the idea that the sign-up process should capture more of these nuances. You don’t have to look any further than your own instance to find bad takes and imperfect admins and moderators, but they’re still the best of the best because they actually did it and the people talking about them didn’t. Maybe I’m uneducated on this and I’ll change my mind, but as it stands I’m cool until they force tank emojis on .world users.
I do think it’s good that this type of talk happens, as it allows instances to develop a reputation.
I donated! Great job, and I really appreciate your work.
Done, sponsor level on Patreon.
No i will never donate , this format is just jerking off Linux enthusiast, and every time I say Linux in unusable I get negatively marked. Content on this is not so good.its many time repeat of Reddit. There is not a easy way or guide on how to use Lemmy and connect to all differn t forums within or even find them .
In total this format is useful but not encouraging. So no donations
Nah. If the project starves and shuts down I’ll just go without. I’ll never donate money to social media platforms
Lol no
So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy’s primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I’ve experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.
And it boils down to this:
The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.
Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.
Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.
Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication’s reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible… a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.
The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org’s case is this:
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Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev
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Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.
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Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.
If this doesn’t happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.
deleted by creator
To be absolutely clear, on .ml hardly any mods do modding, almost all the removals and bans is by one of 2 admins, dessalines themselves or davel (and occasionally a 3rd admin cypherpunks)
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.
If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.
And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.
You seem to have a good grasp of the problem and have proposed a viable solution. Would you like a one month, one year, or permanent ban?
I wanted to text “here’s your award”, but then I remembered we don’t have awards.
So here is your “hey, that was a great comment! I laughed and it made my day a bit better”- word-award :)
Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…
Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team
lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.
I do agree that Lemmy.ml should never be recommended as the “official” Lemmy instance, but (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lemmy devs don’t do that. They just say “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers“ which is fair to disclose (although maybe that could remove that. Idk). join-lemmy.org doesn’t handle or recommend Lemmy.ml specially.
I think usually it’s random users saying “join Lemmy.ml it’s the official instance” and we need to nip that in the bud… but it’s not Lemmy devs’ fault.
Nine times out of ten I hear people say “join Lemmy.World, it’s the catch-all and de facto default instance”. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen people recommend Lemmy.ml unless they’re already ideologically aligned with Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don’t join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons (edit: reasons I agree with and echo, to clarify).
I’ve mostly seen it recommended by random reddit users, not lemmy users. And to be fair it has decreased as a recommendation as its traffic has also decreased relative to other instances, especially since the reddit exodus.
I mean I’m pretty lefty and some of the .ml folk scare the lymph out of me.
ML isn’t “far left” it leans leftist, but that isn’t what’s scary about it.
ML is hyper authoritarian (support China, North Korea, Russia to varying degrees).
This is due to them being extremely Campist. Campist meaning they’ll support anyone who “opposes” US influence, no matter how horrible they are.
In my opinion true leftists shouldn’t be supporting American OR Russian/Chinese Imperialism. If you’re anti imperialist, it means being against all imperialism, not just one side’s imperialism.
Thank you for saying what needs to be said. Imperialism in all its forms is indefensible, yet I’ve never been able to understand the cognitive dissonance that can condemn Israel’s genocide while simultaneously trying to justify what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
Absolutely I 100% hard agree with this
Then, you’re probably not as lefty as you think.
We’ve had over a decade of political compass memes at this point. Left ≠ authoritarian and right (as we are clearly seeing now) ≠ libertarianism.
Just because I’m a socialist doesn’t mean I support the CCP or other authoritarian governments.
Oh on the contrary. They’re probably further left than they think. And far further to the left than you think. ML is nominally left at best. Honestly most social democracies really get the concept far better.
I started on .ml exactly for this reason. It was the dev’s instance and seemed like the default. Though that was the time of Reddit’s API debacle, so it’s been .au e a couple years now.
… I didn’t stay on .ml once I realized how it was moderated.
Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don’t join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons.
lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.
In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.
The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.
rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement
What do you mean by that?
My read is that they’re recommending that
- Devs only work on development.
- A new, separate admin team be found (or formed) to handle administration for any instance that is dev-owned.
I agree with this. The act of administering a dev-operated instance with live accounts + users while working on the dev team presents a conflict of interest which is a deal-breaker for too many donors.
So, rather than simply asking the community for more donations (which is understandable but doesn’t address the root of the problem), it would be best to incorporate the feedback of the community and do away with the conflict of interest. IMO, another way to resolve this COI would be to disable live accounts for anyone who isn’t a developer in the “test” environment.
I’ve seen a defense presented in this thread along the lines of “we should be allowed to admin .ml because it’s a test instance” — but again, due to the fact that there are live accounts for live users (outside of the dev team) in the “test” environment, this is a distinction without a difference.
I mean you realize the entire reason they created this whole thing is so they could have their little fiefdoms from which to dole out their petty little grievances because people on reddit were mean to them, right?
It’s actually a bit hilarious that people on this thread keep giving half hearted defenses here, and noted transphobe Nutomic keeps popping in and being like “actually no, we really are just assholes.”
Your reading is correct, and in my experience, it makes both the mods and devs happier when their roles are entirely separated. It insulates the dev team from getting distracted and having their time consumed by the social dynamics of site drama, and it keeps the mod team from getting bogged down in technical issues, allowing them to focus on the audience, not the technology.
And what happens if this separate admin team makes decisions which users disagree with? The same debate starts all over again?
Let’s distinguish between the means and the ends. An admin policy is the result of the means by which administrators are selected.
The sticking point for many donors is a question of the means: they are unhappy that a conflict-of-interest exists in the current selection of administrators for a dev-owned instance. This is orthogonal to the subject of administrators’ concrete policies.
Which begs the question: do the devs acknowledge that the COI exists? If so, then is the team willing to incorporate the community’s feedback by closing the COI?
Maybe the team has a compelling reason to hold onto the existing COI (nuance exists); but it cannot be denied that the COI (1) exists and (2) is reducing the devs’ ability to raise community funding. Whether this is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing is a matter of personal judgment. But the facts are what they are.
Side note: if there’s some set of admin policies that the dev team wants to see enacted in .ml, then they could easily select 3rd-party admins that they trust to enforce a policy that aligns with their own values without reproducing the COI that currently exists. Then, if there’s any conflict over those particular policies, that would be an entirely separate discussion.
So you would be fine if lemmy.ml was run exactly like it is now, but without Dessalines or me taking direct actions as admins?
That’s fine as long as the new admin team is not paid for their time by peoples donations. That’s what people are objecting to and stopping them from donating
None of the admin work on lemmy.ml is paid, its all volunteer based.
You would at least have plausible deniability. The bigger issue is that a lot of the modding being done is by administrators and not by moderators. Some are. But some of the most egregious stuff is being done by administrators.
PR 101. If you want to be an official project supported by many and used by many. Don’t have your flagship deployment hard attached to a controversial subject. Which you should know damn well it is. Second don’t have it administered with a Vanguard mindset. It drives people off. Look I’d be happy to discuss failings and successes of different ml regimes as well as Western capitalist and Democratic socialists. Realistically that can’t be done on your instance. Typically any inkling of discussing failures gets outright denied and usually bans are applied.
Go ahead, Rebrand as lemmy.org. Go ahead and have ml communities. They can even be Echo Chambers still too. Even Lemmy.world has ml communities. The reason that I respect @MrKaplan@lemmy.world and the world team. And would happily donate to them if they needed it. Despite possibly not agreeing politically as an anarchist. Is there administration. It’s thoughtful, deliberative, and sparing. Not vanguardist and cliquish. And it’s no coincidence the administrative flaws are shared with political ideology flaws.
This is it. Right now. This is your golden moment. You’re the lead developer for one of the most popular software platforms on a rapidly growing Federated system. You’re blowing up. You’re trying to go bigger. It’s a position that is yours to lose. And it’s your right and duty to choose. Do you want to be a footnote, or do you want to be a whole chapter? Do you want to be a possible big mover and shaker in Foss? Or is it ml Club forever, and long live the vanguard?
Being inclusive is hard, tolerance is hard, that’s why both are so valued. Believe me I know, I’m not perfect. Any deployment that is going to be seen as a flagship should also strive for that if they want support from disparate groups. And that’s just how it is. There is no debate or discussion to have on the topic.
And would happily donate to them if they needed it.
So you are not donating anyway? It seems to me like there is a vocal minority of users who make any type of excuse for the fact that they are unwilling to donate. Instead of being honest about that, you demand from us to make more and more changes, which will piss off other users and will likely not lead to any actual increase in donations.
Lemmy the software’s reputation has become conflated with the reputation of lemmy.ml, which promotes an authoritarian center-left viewpoint that regularly denies documented genocides. This is unpalatable to many end-users.
As such, unless the two are separated clearly and lemmy the organization disavows its involvement lemmy.ml, the overall reputation of the software will degrade, resulting in less use, less money for the developers, and the eventual collapse of the lemmy infrastructure.
Voat is an example of a great software package that became completely tainted by the (developer moderated) site to the point where you can’t mention it in polite discourse any more. Not exactly the same circumstance, and in that case it was taken over by right-wing racists, but the dynamics are very similar.
It has only been conflated because beehaw and then .world MADE the accusation aganst .ml and then decided to conflate it to the program as a whole, don’t act like this is a natural conflation
the conflation existed before .world even existed. it’s the general sentiment i see across mastodon starting around 3 years ago that lemmy, not just lemmy.ml, is a tankie cesspit.
So lets assume they dont moderate in a “tanky way” but instead in a “free speech absolutist way”. Then they’ll be criticized for giving nazis a platform. Lets assume instead they will moderate in a “European centrist way”. Then by American standards they’ll be criticized for being far left still. If they moderate in an “American centrist way”, they’ll be criticized as Trump apologist and far right supporters.
It is impossible to moderate in a politically “impartial” way, except to not moderate at all and create a complete cesspool.
Even if they don’t run an instance themselves but instead choose to cooperate with an instance for the testing, that in itself will be an endorsement and scrutinized.
Lets assume instead they will moderate in a “European centrist way”. Then by American standards they’ll be criticized for being far left still.
That’s a far better situation than supporting genocidal dictatorships. I don’t think that’s a hard standard to hold
It is not impossible, it’s just difficult. You do not have to keep everyone satisfied, only enough of them. All you’re doing here is making arguments for why they shouldn’t change because they will never get 100% approval rating. That’s just idiotic. No one is expecting perfect, they just expect better.
More importantly, neutrality in moderation is generally seen as more acceptable than swinging fully towards one direction. People will complain that you are allowing x or y, but you get much further by permitting that balance to exist naturally and moderating it at its most extremes, then you do buy stamping out one and promoting the other, which is absolutely what they do on .ml
Whoever said that you had to be a free speech absolutist, either? You can believe in free speech and also not be okay with Nazis on your platform.
It’s really not that hard, many internet forums have been doing this for decades. It’s kind of telling, frankly, how the very notion of it seems to elude some people around here.
All of which ignores the point the top comment made: that they shouldn’t be moderating at all. Let whoever they choose moderate that instance, and separate from it entirely. Focus only on development.
But the fact they’re apparently more concerned about the content on that instance than getting donations to support development of the platform is very telling, too.
Thank you for being reasonable about this.
It literally recommends lemmy.ml within the first 3 listings in most cases or even worse, Hexbear
The code doesn’t do any preferential treatment for any instances. You can easily see they are not favored over the others with any statistically significant number of refreshes. That’s the beauty of OSS. You don’t need to speculate conspiracy theories.
That’s the beauty of OSS. You don’t need to speculate conspiracy theories.
The beauty works with software because you can review the code and then compile from source. From there you know without a shred of doubt that the compiled version on your local machine is doing what you saw it would do in the code
That’s not the case with a live website like join-lemmy, sure, the GitHub code checks out, but what guarantee do we have that the code shown on GitHub is what was deployed to the web server without modification? What guarantee is there they aren’t running a modified lemmy.ml backend?
There isn’t any guarantee except trust and I don’t have any trust with Nutomic or dessalines.
The sorting is client side. The code is here and you can literally debug it line by line in your browser to see that it uses random, uniform sorting.
That was always the more plausible scenario compared to the devs maintainig a separate build process to minimally influence sorting priorities, which again, would be easy to disprove using statistical analysis, even if the code was a blackbox.
Could you share a screenshot? I see it defaults to a random order of listings.
Here’s from all topics - English - random
3 out of 5 refreshes and one of the top 3 is always hex, grad or .ml, that’s sus AF
Can you confirm that you are looking at all topics and not the politics option on refresh? I noticed a bug where if you select politics then go back to all topics and then refresh the page it goes back to politics.
There seems to be a bug where the category type doesn’t update in the URL when you go back to all topics after selecting a specific category
Yea, I closed the page entirely when I switched topics, because I did the politics one closed it to make the post and reopened the link to go back for the all topics one
Okay, because looking at all topics+English+random appears truly random on my device (no weight) and hexbear/grad are rarely first. Which is why I was thinking it’s possible that your sort reverted to politics due to that bug I found
It’s particularly bad when you select politics and English, the below were after 4 refreshes with that, choosing all topics and English was more fair, because of the fact theres 600+ instances for it to randomize through, but even then .ml, hex or grad showed up within the top 3 somewhat frequently as if they’re weighted higher.
Yeah, i don’t think anyone who sees the logo of lemmygrad will be like “ooh totally normal instance and a good starting point”. Anyone who knows the concept of tankies quite literally can see the tank in the logo and even people who don’t know the concept will understand the logo as having something to do with communist authoritarianism. Again, there is a god damn tank in the logo.
Interesting, although selecting a politics based server is also an interesting choice for signup lol. Do you have any coding experience? You could try making a PR, the Lemmy devs have seemed quite open to help on the site in the past.
One was already done, and they said they would adjust it so that it would remove instances that were greater than a certain percentage of the Lemmy user base at large. But it only removed .world, even .ee is still listed and they’re the next biggest. Iirc they even said they would remove .ml, they didn’t.
Frankly, I don’t trust them, the only thing I could trust is an independently run join-lemmy, because the devs of Lemmy has shown, repeatedly, they are unable to separate their personal politics from their work
the code is excluding instances with a monthly active user share of 30% or higher: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/5471b9cc7423fc51af3d72a464f740a1ee887489/src/shared/components/instances.tsx#L451-L456. .ee is currently at around 14%. the intention behind this is to reduce centralization, not punish specific instances.
Iirc they even said they would remove .ml, they didn’t.
If you have the receipts, I’ll gladly make a pr for this! Lemmy devs are pretty receptive to issues and PRs in my experience
I do agree that Lemmy.ml should never be recommended as the “official” Lemmy instance, but (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lemmy devs don’t do that.
Yeah you’re correct, they explicitly don’t want it considered the main instance.
You’d think the ban button has been tested enough already…
@nutomic I hope you’re currently taking notes of all of the feedback you’re getting from everyone, particularly this comment. There is a lot that lemmy.ml needs to do to rehabilitate their reputation, and that needs to be done before people will be willing to donate.
If the lemmy devs continue to ignore the feedback from everyone regarding their management of lemmy.ml, their problem is only going to get worse. But if they are open minded about feedback then they have a chance to win people back
I agree with everything you said generally. But one thing I don’t see being mentioned much. That is kind of glaring. Is the fact that when you are developing software etc. You have testing systems and you have production systems. And they are two different systems. You never test on production. And you never use your test server as a production server. It’s a bad idea in general, and there’s no need to. And that really says it all.
The fact that they are using lemmy.ml as a testing and a production server. Isn’t it justifiable, and it isn’t acceptable. Despite the fact that I generally enjoy activity pub, the fediverse and of course use lemmy. Lemmy development will not see a single penny from myself. Nor should it see a single dime of donation from anyone until that’s no longer the case. Which isn’t even bringing up the Cesspool of an echo chamber this joke of a “test server” is
How would you do public testing without making it significantly more expensive?
Many larger foss projects roll out Point releases to a trusted circle of volunteer testers. I’m sure there’s plenty of people running many different sized instances who enjoy being on the latest greatest version of software. If I was currently running an instance. I would probably number myself among them. I do run many servers. Just not currently any for lemmy/mastodon Etc. However it’s pretty common/normal practice.
We have various test servers, but these are not enough to catch all the potential problems in a new release. Lemmy is very complex software, and a minor change can cause performance problems in an sql query and cause downtime for instances. Such problems are impossible to catch on test servers, at least with our very limited resources.
keep in mind they’re a team of just 2 people. It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team
It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team
That has to apply when deciding whether to support them as well, then.
Not to mention that the communities over there have moderators - the devs just insist on taking matters into their own hands, which is a significant part of what makes them so deeply unpopular. They’re choosing to mod like this, when they really don’t have to.
They seem quite popular from .ml users, i only see complaints about them from none .ml users come to think about it. Why should my instance have to listen to your moderation citiques but when I find that your instance is too lax when it comes to the right wing I get told to pound sand “tankie” its not your instance? do we all see this double standard?
The difference, and why it’s not a double standard, of course, being the fact that I’m not going to your instance and asking for money.
Like, think about it for a second - imagine that I actively moderate .world or some “lib instance” where I aggressively ban tankie talking points, and that I also contribute a huge amount to the codebase of Lemmy. If I were to go to the tankie instances to ask for money that’s going into my own pocket, I’d get laughed out of the room. There’s no way they’re gonna cough up dough for someone like that, especially with all of the horrible accusations they make about .world (transphobia, nazis, etc.).
And we know this is the case, because they’re already rioting in the donation threads about Nutonic’s transphobia. And he’s already a tankie. If a literal tankie can’t pass the purity test well enough to get their support, there is zero chance a “lib” would.
Anyway, there’s no right wing content here that I’ve seen, but regardless, I absolutely support .ml users having their instance moderated exactly as they would want. That’s what decentralization and federation is for, after all.
I also fully support the devs using .ml as their testing ground for new versions of Lemmy.
I do not support the devs of the entire Lemmy project actively censoring dissenting viewpoints on a tankie instance. They have a right to moderate their instance however they see fit, of course, but I also have the right to not give them any of my money because of it.
If the devs do want money from us, then, as has been mentioned repeatedly, all they have to do is stop actively moderating .ml themselves and let their mods do it for them, and I believe the donations would pour in.
They don’t seem willing to do that (Dessalines, at least), and so they will continue to receive pennies outside of the Tankie Triad. And y’all would do the exact same if the situation were reversed, and you know it.
Simple as.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I imagine it’s easier to maintain enthusiasm for continued development when you’re also using it to support online discussion the way you want. I can see this being a big deal
But I can still choose where my money goes and doesn’t go
My instance is not asking for money, the devs of the program are, yes they are also on the mod list for this instance however they are clear in the fact that they are asking for this as the only 2 full time developers who. Second they are not posting this on every instance if you look at the poseter they are from .world
Second .world DOES moderate that agressivly, I would argue that they mod more agressivly to their political fraimpoint than .ml does for any reason.
Third they are not just “contributing alot to the code base.” they are doing BY FAR the majoirty of the work, they founded the program, and have not been able to bring on anyone else because as shown above they are barily making enough to scrape by as it is.
I can tell you as a user who has been on there sense the only real alternitives where nitch or beehaw, I have not seen any of this over reaching censorship you claim, now I admit I have a bias of I do go there, my politics are quite left of center, however, the mass censorship that is talked about is not a reality seen by or complained about by the user base
I am also not saying “you must pay them money” what I do find interesting is that there is even before this a large talk about how .ml moderates, dispite its moderation being very well liked and suported by its users, and a change to the style that you are advocating for would be VERY VERY unwelcome within the userbase. The fact that 2 of our admins are also devs, should not give you the outsized right to demand changes in our moderation practices.
I cannot and will not speak for the political beliefs of the devs, but I can tell you that once again as an administration team they are suported, and as for suporting FOSS projects with creators I disagree with, I have donated to Notepad ++, when I used it constantly on windows, the developer is a HUGE Neoliberal, does not try to hide it, I still suported it, because I at the time had the money to suport it and valued his labor in maintaining it.
But this long winded to say, this is still a double standard, that you feel entitled to demand .ml or lemmygrad, or hexbear to change their moderation style, but I a user from .ml cannot request that you change yours. If you don’t want to donate for political reasons just say that, dont couch it in that you want to “liberate” our instance… we by and large like how it is moderated.
this is still a double standard
Nope, it’s not.
I spent the time to actually respond to you in good faith, but if you’re not going to actually address the points I made in my post, I don’t see why I should waste any more time with you.
No money for tankie devs until they stop modding.
I did address it line by line, I do not agree with your argument.
Where I do agree is that if you find communism so distasteful that you cannot suport a communsim sure no one is forcing you to donate
If this was a reach out saying “Lemmy.ml is hemraging money please give us money to keep the instance up” sure I could understand but what they are saying is “we are the full time devs of the project, we cannot provide the project the hours it needs to survive at the current funding level, please help us keep it alive.” and the responce is “Change the instance moderation style if you want money to develop” and I am saying that I find it very wierd that you and .world feel like they should be able to dicate moderation, especialy when the instance is not the issue at hand.
I am also pointing out that I hear the most complaints about .ml moderation from .world users and .ee users, and I was musing that I find it a double standard that you feel like you are able to impose a will on how to moderate when it is largely popular internaly, but we are screamed at if we do the same.
Now I do not know how replying point by point makes this badfaith, was it that I put my conclusion at the end and your reasons did not change my opinion?
They have 5 peoples in the admin team, 2 of them is the dev. If they stop moderating, it will still have 3 on the team. It’s VERY easy to separate themselves from moderating but they still chose to put their resource(time) into it.
They could probably do something like a voluntary self-re-education camp for themselves and change their terroristic views. There’s probably some inspiration somewhere in the world.
Or if not that, get other devs to continue the project and do something else.
Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL
Thing is, you don’t have to federate with .ml. If you think .ml is badly moderated, you don’t have to be part. Tech devs are also entitled to have personal projects that they needn’t do very well; and if .ml serves well as a test server for the software, all the better.
I agree the controversy has driven people away. But maybe that controversy is part and parcel of Lemmy: you either let it be or hide it; is hiding it so much better?
People are being asked to give money to the mods of .ml in their role as devs. There’s even a statement at the start of the thread that says (paraphrased) “yes, some small percentage will go to .ml because it is the primary testbed”.
The issue isn’t federation. It’s being asked to give money to support a place that prescribes values that the donator disagrees with.
You are forgetting another option: Develop new projects that interoperate with Lemmy via ActivityPub. Then use and support those projects instead.
deleted by creator
Oh forsure where will they test new festures with testeds then lmao You paying for it?
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Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy
They should spend more time devving and less time mod actioning wrongthink
Agreed. I’d like to support continued development of Lemmy, but I’m hesitant to do so knowing that part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep.
part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep
If that’s true, that’s misappropriating the donations being that they’re billed as supporting development. Server maintenance and upkeep is important, but do not mislead your benefactors to do so, lest you destroy their trust and stop donating to your cause.
I would like it if both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml could confirm or put to rest if this is true.
Edit: a couple of users pointed out that lemmy.ml is used as a test bed for lemmy development. This is good info, and not something I, personally, was aware of.
The devs need an instance with real users and real load to test changes.
lemmy.ml is that test instance.
It’s a non-optional part of the dev pipeline, that’s why its upkeep is financed by dev donations, too.
So, it is true, and it isn’t misleading supporters, or misappropriating donations.Sounds like that should be more of an incentive to make sure the instance isn’t shit then.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never before seen mention of this; this is the type of stuff that should be mentioned in blurbs like the one above. People who are not aware of lemmy.ml being a test server may find it off putting otherwise.
No, they don’t. In professional software development you have testing systems and production systems. You DONT test on production. You DON’T use testing as production.
They don’t need real users or real load. If they can’t generate/simulate testing loads. They aren’t serious developers worth funding.
If you have a current budget of $1000/month, per dev, you are forced to relax a little on best practices.
This isn’t a professional endeavour, and it won’t be until donations increase by a factor of 5+.If you are a single hobbyist coder working from your bedroom at night in your spare time for a piece of software used by five people. Maybe.
If you’re developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, whom you are soliciting for donations. While telling them that sorry your donations must go towards funding an authoritarian echo chamber as a side hobby. Hell no, to put it politely.
What if you’re working full time, developing a software used by tens of thousands of people, but their donations only amount to a hobbyist contribution?
You are basically demanding enterprise quality from devs who get $1000/month for their 40h/week work.That’s straight up ridiculous.
Or rather, unrealistic.
At this point, if the devs acted economically, they’d simply stop working on lemmy, take a software dev job, and earn 8x more money.
And you are somehow still criticizing them for not doing more, while they are making lemmy possible, for peanuts.You know what? FUCK YOU!
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Lemmy.ml is a test server, it’s needed for development
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Donations pay their salaries, everything donated goes towards their living expenses in general. If they go to the movies, you are also paying for that. It’s the same as a company paying programming workers xyz wage, that’s the price of software labor, but it doesn’t mean all of that money directly goes to the bare necessities for maintaining dev work.
Yet said test server is a toxic cesspit of tankies who actively brigade and harass those who disagree with them : /
Nope you are free to defederate and block if you want to believe your fantasies
There are a lot of Marxists on servers run by Marxists. I wouldn’t call disagreements toxic or brigading being especially worse on Lemmy.ml than other instances.
No, it is notably worse on the tankie triad, I can disagree with someone from slrpnk and they wont send me death threads or mass downvote anything that critical of their views unlike many of Lemmy.ml’s userbase.
I haven’t really seen what you describe, I do think if you’re saying something extremely unpopular in an area getting downvoted is to be expected, though.
Yeah a lot of shitheads there , maybe go back to reddit?
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Consider the following:
- nutomic and dessalines are human beings with finite monetary resources.
- These monetary resources are fungible.
- nutomic and dessalines pay money to run lemmy.ml.
- Thus, some of their finite monetary resources go to running lemmy.ml.
- Much of their finite monetary resources go to keeping themselves sheltered, alive, and presumably accommodated with some basic first-world niceties.
- They raise donations to spend time developing Lemmy because otherwise they would have to be employed either at all or more than they already are so they could continue to be sheltered and alive.
- Consequently, if the devs have literally any expenses that aren’t staying alive for the express purpose of developing Lemmy, you’re financing those too.
This isn’t some scandal if you understand basic microeconomics. Inherently this is true unless nutomic or dessalines stop running lemmy.ml or find a way to run it off of dreams and unicorn farts. They’re not “misappropriating funds” or whatever; the nature of funds is that they’re fungible.
Edit: And it’s not like in light of increased donations, they’d be taking the Lemmy development funds and using them to buy a schwanky new servertron 3000 with kung-fu grip for .ml. .ml was already open-registration, so it’s not like it’s possible for them to misappropriate development funds to open the floodgates and let thousands of new users in who were previously locked out. We can monitor how many users .ml has, and we can audit the software it’s running.
It’s not a scandal that funds are used to run a test instance but it is problematic that the developers hold extreme political views and are very public about it.
That’s always going to limit who is willing to donate.
Exactly. Everyone in here is like “oh, .ml is their test instance - there’s nothing they can do about it!”
Like, you could make your test instance not a cesspool, and then people would be a lot more willing to support it.
Couldn’t they have a designated instance for testing and then have users volunteer to join? Thereby, using the instance solely for testing purposes and to get feedback ?
It could even be a limited amount of users so the server costs wouldn’t be so high. I don’t see why something like this isn’t already in place.
Also, have they laid out the costs? Are they being transparent about how much goes to X and how much goes to Y? Id think that would be best practice.
If i were donating, I’d want to know exactly what my donation is going to. If it’s just going to their ‘living costs’ essentially paying their salary, then that needs to be stated plainly. Not lumped into ‘development’…
Also, what doesn’t make sense to me is why would ppl donate when most instances are so restrictive leading to excessive bans and barrier to entry? It would be like im paying to NOT be able to use a service and am limited.
I don’t get that
Guaranteed they’re just using the excuse of a test instance to push their idealogy.
That would be the normal way of operating. You don’t test on production. It’s unheard of. It’s a bad idea. But coming from leninists, it’s very on brand.
you lost me at
These monetary resources are fungible
because that’s crypto bro talk.
because that’s crypto bro talk.
Fungibility is a basic term in economics to describe interchangeability. 💀 Fucking hell. I’m using it at all because I’m having to get basic enough to describe the microeconomics of how giving money to human beings is inherently donating to everything human beings do, not just specifically what it’s nominally being used for. That you’ve only ever heard it in terms of cryptocurrency isn’t my fault.
This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
Not judging and correct me if I got it wrong. You like Lemmy and want to support it but you personally don’t like the developers of Lemmy?
I don’t like what they’re doing, they are actively using their positions and instances position of influence to push harmful propaganda, misinformation, censor opinions critical of it and all the while turning a blind/lenient eye to what their users do if they consider them to be ideologically aligned with them.
If they actually surrendered .ml admin duties to a more balanced team that actually allowed non-Tankie mods to well mod, I would reconsider donating.
While I consider their “ideology” to be harmful, if they stopped trying to “infuse” Lemmy with it and separated their work from their personal politics it would satisfy a lot of concerns
Yikes, this is big for me. I love Lemmy but I have strong aversions against funding bad politics, even if they aren’t politicians.
What kind of views and ideologies are they pushing? Also are they a couple or something?
Putn is right, ukranians are nazis so all crimes against them are in dact blessings. Baltics are next and all need to die for being under german occupation in the past. Don’t you dare critisize agent kresnov! Etc etc. vile crimes against humanity shit, homophobia and anti lgbtq propaganda.
People who want russia to dominate the world.
Are you saying the developers of Lemmy are of these opinions?! If so, that’s absolutely horrible. I want to support the development of Lemmy, but I want to do the opposite of supporting people like that! I want to take money from people like that!
Feel free to check “MeanwhileOnGrad” yourself.
Just linkifying this for mobile users: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
I’m scared. Is that a community?
Thank you. Seems I was correct then.
How do they exploit their position as devs to push their political agenda? Do they add something to the code that gives them some exclusive benefits?
If you mean they just host their own instance, isn’t it the whole point of Lemmy and what all the other instances are doing? Some even block other instances that do not match their political bias to not ruin their echo chamber. I mean I’m on lemmy.world which probably would be more accurately named lemmy.ultra.left.usa for some time now.
I fully understand you not wanting to support lemmy.ml financially and want to point out that only one donation method is used to help hosting it, all the others will not benefit lemmy.ml exclusively but will benefit all the other instances and lemmy as a whole.
Donating to Lemmy development is a donation to .ml. They make it that way. If you don’t want to donate to an authoritarian instance, then you can’t donate to development. It’s not very complicated.
How so when they specifically say only one type of donations will go to the ml?
I mean we don’t need “some dude said” when we have the devs telling us themselves:
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
https://lemmy.world/post/29114540/16863750
You may not believe them but I don’t see why, it’s not like it costs a lot of money.
I think a more valid point against donations is from the other answer to my comment about devs presenting lemmy.ml as a kinda official instance or as a face of lemmy which is pretty bad for lemmy regardless of your political views.
How do they exploit their position as devs to push their political agenda? Do they add something to the code that gives them some exclusive benefits?
Look at how the .ml instance is positioned. People will hear “That instance is run by the devs and all support and other official development comms are on it” and will automatically gravitate to it and the reputation of Lemmy as a whole becomes tied to it. And other instances are hesitant to defed from it because of that.
So now the devs are in a defacto position of influence, regardless of if they want it or not. Now they have a choice, they can moderate it fairly and unbiased (i.e. not using it to further their personal politics) or separate its day to day operations to another admin team. As another commentator in this thread put it “The devs should do dev work and not mod work, and the admin team should do mod work and not dev work”
They’ve already proven that they cant do the first choice so now the only viable option is the second one, which they’re probably not gonna address.
If you mean they just host their own instance, isn’t it the whole point of Lemmy and what all the other instances are doing? Some even block other instances that do not match their political bias to not ruin their echo chamber. I mean I’m on lemmy.world which probably would be more accurately named lemmy.ultra.left.usa for some time now.
Because of my first point, they tied all sorts of official development stuff to .ml, many instances don’t want to defederate because of that and the perception (it doesn’t really hold when you look at MAUs) that they have the biggest comms on lemmy, it’s almost akin to holding them hostage in my eyes “if you or your mods want official on-lemmy lemmy support, official announcements or access to Lemmys BIGGEST comms then you HAVE to stay federated with us!”
Things would be different if they were just running a personal instance with no official Lemmy anything on it, then it would be much easier for instances to make a defederation decision, just like the rest of the triad
That’s a lie you are free to run your own instance
While I understand the moral objections people have to supporting the developers, I do think its fair to highlight how they do not treat us.
We are not a product here to be exploited and advertised to. They also respect your choice to block ml and not to interact with them at all for the rest. I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO’s hot takes, but they dont share it for this exact reason. Instead they just design their entire product and business around it, which is the enshittification we all know and hate.
People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.
But to maintain that it means putting your money where your mouth. If not to them, to your own instance.
I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO’s hot takes
That’s a really good point.
Also, the Lemmy devs might have authoritarian views but work off of donations while the silicon valley CEOs are some hyper-capitalists with power. The lesser evil seems clear to me.
In a former life I worked in the financial sector. The only reason statesia hasn’t genocided itself to bones already is because all the ceos have been incompetent stumbling over each others’ plans for genocide and (fortunately for us, depending on how depressed you are) kept fucking it up for so long.
Very well said. Everything good in life, will have some aspects that you (the global ‘you’) won’t like.
Lemmy is a huge improvement over corporate social media. Maybe it has some ideologies you don’t like here, but it beats an algorithm that secretly manipulates you.
If I use a FOSS product, then I try to pay for it, even if it’s not perfect. For example, Firefox gets a lot of well deserved hate but without it I’m not sure there would be a realistic FOSS browser.
My experience anywhere on Lemmy that .ml touches has been notably worse than anything I have experienced on reddit.
People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.
We’re also not required to fund those people. I don’t care if they exist, but I will not be party to their bullshit
You’re not required to do anything, let alone directly funding ml. That’s not what I am arguing for. I am arguing for you to support Lemmy despite the chance some of it might go to ml.
It goes the other way too, the developers probably disagree with a large part of the beliefs of people using lemmy, yet they also put in their time to create and foster it, which we never had to pay for either. They did it for the reasons they mention (free spaces, not owned by corporations that suck their users dry), which is separate from their other political positions.
I am arguing for you to support Lemmy despite the chance some of it might go to ml.
They have been up-front about this (surprisingly) - there is no “might.” Donating to these devs is a donation to lemmy.ml, without exception.
Yeah, it’s literally all over this thread, not exactly a secret. It’s kind of a weird nitpick of my comment, considering it’s just a way of phrasing things. If I give an alcoholic some money, I will say “they might use that to buy booze”. Because I am sure they buy booze, but they might use my money to buy some food instead. Not every single dollar you give the developers will go to ml.
I saw somewhere an estimate of 2%. Another estimate was much less.
Certainly more than 2% of Lemmy use goes to people who hate .ml!
Maybe the haters can see it that way: donating to support Lemmy to support Lemmy.world to continue hating on lemmy.ml!
Not true, lemmy.ml is only funded by donations via Opencollective. All other donation platforms go exclusively to developer salaries.
You should delete the app then, if it’s so important to you.
Very well said. In addition, the fact that they hold the beliefs they do makes them extremely resistant to flipping and getting on the enshittification wagon.
And how exactly are bunch of genocide supporters who claim to be leftists (russia is an authoritarian capitalist state) any better than some American oligarchs?
Am I wrong or is the same person making fun of the ridiculous censorship rules on Reddit while enforcing similar ridiculous censorship rules on their own .ml instance?
No ads and no algorithm isn’t free.
Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy’s way. I’m a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.
Comments are a hilarious minefield and a painful reminder of exactly how online leftists can never get shit done. We want FOSS federated social media platforms to escape the tech giants that would happily facilitate a fascist wave if it meant they can serve more targeted ads. But when that platform actually exists in a totally functional and apolitical way, we don’t want to support its development because the people willing to work full time on the project for poverty wages have bad political opinions. It’s so bad that we’d rather support Steve Huffman’s bot farm which is 1,000 times as politically influential as Lemmy will ever be at this rate.
Being Ukrainian it’s not possible for me to donate to supporters of russian genocidal imperialism.
I hope both of them meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
I am personally hoping that the core software will be forked while retaining the Lemmy name. Change it to Lemmy-TSF (tankie scum free). I would donate monthly to a development team that doesn’t include genocide supporters.
I was thinking long and hard about this to form an opinion, but my answer is no.
The final decission point was: I’m from Slovakia, it’s no secret that Russia would love to take us under their sphere of influence. You and your instance is not only supporting this, you’re actively propagating this. In fact, I’m pretty sure if Russian soldiers would be at my doorstep, threatening my family, you and your instance would be cheering. And when I would realize, that I actively supported this, that would break me.
If you’re about to publish your work for free, I gladly use it as long as it’s run by good people like lemmy.world. This way you get no support from me. If I’d pay you, I don’t know what part of my support would end up in .ml instance which I see as a propaganda machine against countries like mine. And even if you say that none of my money would end up there, I kind of don’t want to support you as a human being. I won’t pay your salary so you have energy to do what you do on .ml instance.
If Lemmy as a project dies, so be it. Foss world can always spark successful forks (see OpenElec vs LibreElec) and alternatives like PieFed already exist
