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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Not quite. This is from their OpenCollective Page:
"Lemmy is entirely open source and funded exclusively by donations. The maintainers dessalines and nutomic have been working on it full time for the past years thanks to generous support by the NLnet foundation. Now that this support is coming to an end, the project is increasingly relying on donations from individual users to fund development. Your donation allows the developers to fully focus on making Lemmy better for everyone."
NLNet was sponsoring Lemmy for about 1500 euro per month according to dessalines: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/assets/news/2023-06-17%20-%20Update%20from%20Lemmy%20after%20the%20Reddit%20blackout.md
Edit: I was wrong, it's 45000 euro total, split into several payment milestones: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hezuy1/nlnet_funding_and_lemmy_070_with_new_image_hosting/
https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/
Why did NLnet sponsor the development for years, and now when Lemmy is successful, they stop sponsoring it?
What was the goal of the sponsorship?
The https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/ link goes on about how the internet is preditory today and big tech exploits users, and then at the end:
Yeah ok, so why stop sponsoring the solution?
NLnet paid them for every feature they launched, but with the explosive growth, they've been focusing on refactoring the codebase and making it more scalable, which doesn't count as a "feature" I guess.
Reminds me of the corporate idea of software where new features are more important than quality.
It's like having a garden where you just spread new plants out and ignore the ones that don't feel good where they are.
NLnet offer grants so I would assume when they sponsor a project its for a fixed term, either in time or stage of development or amount of money.
Seems like throwing away money.
I think users aren't smart enough to donate to the Lemmy devs, not enough money at least.
They will donate to apps and even instance owners, but not to the people who make the actual software we are all using.
NLnet aren't crystal clear but I think they see their role as getting something up and running rather than continued funding, which is fair enough. Trying to support a multitude of projects indefinitely isn't really feasible. At some point I feel it's justified to ask users of the project (i.e. us) to support future work.
Lemmy needs at least 3 more years of funding... It just got off the ground here.
I think if people don't donate, this will turn into open source worked on by volunteers, which means a much slower pace.
I absolutely agree, whilst I do monthly donate to .world, I donate more to Lemmy devs at the moment as it 's at a crucial stage of development and financial support is imperative right now. I just don't think NLnet are set up to offer that sort of grant system.
Yeah I agree.
I'm worried actually about this. Donations doesn't really work most of the time, its not a fixed income and won't provide stability for the devs. :/
Imagine if this turns into some kind of open source where random people work on it sometimes. Will be buggy and slow development and lack direction. It may even stall completely.
Well, I'm subbed on .world so it's only fair I pay my way on this instance, irregardless of it's size, the admins put in a lot of work after all. But, yeah, without the Lemmy devs, no instance has actual software to run so funding them has to be the priority, at least right now.
The admin there are awesome, they are working all the time while under attack. But it's bad for Lemmy to be so centralized. I think they should have closed registrations but they clearly have a desire to get all users there.
Couldn't say, but I think when Lemmy rolls out account migration features (like Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey etc) we'll probably see a fairly large amount of people move elsewhere.
Lemmy's at an odd stage of development right now, kinda federates, kinda doesn't. As it matures, so will its userbase and I think any potential centralisation issues will take care of themselves. At the moment, users have to physically move (as I have twice already to help decentralisation only to see the place I moved to become very popular lol).
I'm sceptical they will move away if things work fine on Lemmy.world. This is similar to having default settings in software. Most users never change them.
Maybe, yeah. I could be just being unrealistically optimistic but I do think Lemmy has a higher degree of the sort of people who don't see changing the default settings as a major issue (as oppose to reddit for example).
Yeah it should. We will see.
The problem is both the devs and instances need donations. Just saw a post one instances bills are $2300 a month. No on is going to pay that out of pocket.
Oh boy, the last time I heard about finances (a month ago) it was all well below $100. Lemmy.ml only costed something like €10 a month.
Yeah it's better to keep instance size within your budget.
But with so many users on Lemmy.world, donations could maybe work. Problem is that it's not a fixed income, but the bills are fixed every month.