this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Do you think Lemmy is free? Your admin is paying, and trusting you to donate to help out.
Ironic considering the pinned post on .world is the admins asking for donations and pretty much everyone is saying "no"
You misunderstood the pinned post; it’s soliciting donations for core Lemmy development, not for the .world instance.
The core devs use donations to the project to fund their tankie .ml instance, which is why they’re getting pushback. There is zero comparable pushback among the community towards funding .world or other instances.
Functionally there's no difference.
The person I replied argued that you are obligated to donate if you want to keep Lemmy free. Right now the Lemmy developers are asking for donations, and people are saying no.
The developers are openly communist, and if you want to use Lemmy you'll have to learn to live .ml, it's not going to change.
They are openly authoritarian "communists", you don't need to simp for China, Russia or NK to be a communist. But they do and they leverage the .ml Instance to do so. This is the point of contention for most (including myself) donating to them, and it was brought up in those threads numerous times. If they put in place a new admin team that was as unbiased and fair as possible, they would massively increase in donations. They won't though because they know exactly what they're doing with .ml to further their personal political ideology.
To paraphrase one user on one of those threads "Devs should do dev work and not mod work, admins/mods should do admin/mod work and not dev work".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
There is a massive functional difference to anyone with two braincells to rub together.
The core devs can (and should) step in front of a bus (or tank) tomorrow; the core project will just fork, and LW and the other non-triad instances will do fine without them. I’ve had no issue on Lemmy blocking .ml client-side.
The only reminder of the triad’s existence is infiltrator trolls who make alts on other instances to post bad-faith arguments glazing the core devs.
Uh, what a weird message. It's not only unrelated to what I said but it reads like an attempt to twist my words. On top of it, it's totally wrong: Lemmy is free. I can self host Lemmy on a raspberry pi for exactly 0€.
The instance I use... Is also free. I donate because I choose to, but if my friend can't afford to donate they can still use the instance. Nobody is profiting from it.
What I did talk about is products and doing business with corporations. With Lemmy there's no product, whether you pay or not. With SearxNG (which many people self host, and again, is free) you're not the product, regardless of how much you pay.
That's what I was replying to - your comment is way off the mark and very condescending: I don't need to be mansplained that I should donate to the software I already donate to. Note donate rather than pay for.
Dang, where can I get a free Raspberry Pi and internet connection? That sounds awesome!
This is exactly my point. It's like when people call it "free healthcare".
Don't run it on a raspberry pi, run it on the same computer you use to access the Google search you call "free".
My computer isn't free, nor is my internet connection.
When did I call Google searches "free"?