There's a bit more detail here. I think I saw something about NLnet funding getting renewed recently. There are other open source contributors too, but these two are the main Lemmy team.
avidamoeba
joined 1 year ago
Why am I feeling it isn't going to be a repeat of the standards-driven co-operative development supported by open source software infrastructure that occurred during the decade and a half after the dotcom bubble.. I have a feeling it would resemble the pre mass computing world of AT&T, GE and IBM.
Am I the only one who feels dotcom vibes around this field?
The links in this post are for funding the two developers who work full time on Lemmy, the software.
The instances are sponsored separately via their own contribution links. E.g. look at the sidebar on lemmy.world and you're probably gonna find them.
For the system to work we need to fund both the software development and the instances. Currently the software development funding is further behind as it still doesn't cover two modest salaries. On the other hand I think lemmy.world is sustainably funded. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
If you're broke, don't give. I think there's enough of us who can afford a few bucks a month and we should get more people to do it.
It's faster to get to the content I more often than not. 🤷
I think the lesson that should be beginning to crystallise in people's minds these days is that we have to pay. If we don't, we get Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc. We get inevitable enshitification. I mentioned Wikipedia because I think paying for it has sunk into many people's minds already. And generally we don't need everyone to pay. If the ones that can afford to spare a few bucks a month, do, it'll be enough.
The Lemmy project - yes. You want to check if your home instance is sustainably funded too. I think lemmy.world for example is well funded. So is lemmy.ca - my home instance.
I think it's only donations to the development team. Summing up the donors across Liberapay, Open Collective and Patreon gives close to the number in the title.
Wikipedia managed to do it on donations only. Federated social media is similar in many ways and I think it's entirely possible that we may get development and hosting to be funded in a similar fashion.
The dev versions of Lawnchair have been pretty decent to me. You can grab them straight from the CI build jobs in the repo. You might need a GitHub login.