If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do
also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao
I’m not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
charge 10 doge per upvote
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.
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.
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 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.
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)
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they’re been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don’t think we’ll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
The real donation is the infrastructure maintained by the many server admins.
