cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/16660104
Consider supporting Lemmy development or donating to your local server if you have the means. Peace!
I’m assuming 1172 is a count of donations to official mainstream servers. I have definitely contributed to my local server.
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.
I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It’s that the best way to support the project?
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 know for a fact that DB Zer0 could use some love, and their admin has created a lot of extra tools that have helped the Fediverse manage abusive instances. If your instance is well funded, but you would still like to donate somewhere to show your support, I highly suggest you check them out.
Their donation links are in their sidebar.
I believe they prefer Libera pay over the other options last I had checked
It’s quite nice running it myself
Ugh! Can’t they just monetize the sale of our personal data and push nauseating ads every other post… like any other respectable post aggregation platform?
Ads they won’t (At least I believe so.) But I won’t be surprised that some data harvesting companies have servers set up to collect all the data, aggregate, and sell it. Lemmy is an openly federated platform after all.
sell it
Sell it? For what, 0 dollars? If anyone wants the data, they can just set up an instance themselves.
The data is freely available. Just like open source stuff.
The vaule of the data totally relies on the aggregation process. It involves grouping, categorizing, and linking the unstructured data into a relatable and structured format. For example, A data harvesting company can use their own existing data and link a Lemmy user to a known identity or the probability to a known identity, using techniques like NLP and statistics. That’s value.
Data most of the time are free, but there are also datasets sold for a price.
The Lemmy devs are a bunch of tankie weirdos, so I’m definitely not going to give money to them.
Yeah they have made it clear they don’t want me around, on top of that. Donate to instances, not the devs.
Thanks. I was about to post that I haven’t yet decided whether to donate to my instance or the developers. I might just go with your opinion
Edit: although after reading, I’m not entirely sure. Part of supporting freedom to discuss is also supporting freedom to discuss things you disagree with or even things that are genuinely hateful. I do tend to end up more on the free speech side than the cancel side. The posted thread from archive at least the complainant moved on: we need to be able to vote with our feet like that
Lemmy.ml is the devs instance, and they have a habit of banning anyone who even slightly differs from their opinions. Basically, if you’re not a tankie like them, they will likely ban you.
They’re not interested in free discussions.
But they just personally don’t want that on their instance while they create the lemmy software that allows for everyone to speak their opinions.
They have an extremely low bar for censorship, and I have already seen signs that they will abuse their role to keep their finger on the scale. For example, they selectively federate mod logs, and seem to be running a custom build which allows them to do this. What other forms of fediverse trust are they willing to compromise for ideological purity?
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just looking at mod logs across instances? There have been about a billion little things that have slowed or stopped content from sharing properly over the history of this system so far—how can you be sure there is malevolence on their part and not simply a bug that hasn’t been patched?
Spoiler: They don’t. They are also not letting the absence of facts hinder them from claiming stuff to be true. Subsequently they worry about why their comments are being moderated.
Slight correction: Lemmy.ml is their reach-out and diplomacy instance. Their actual instance is lemmygrad.
I guess their diplomacy with me was to follow me around and downvote everything I posted until I just abandoned my original account.
Exactly they only harassed you instead of sending you straight to permaban gulag. Took me all of four or five days to get banned from lemmygrad and that’s without even posting in their communities.
Trust me, the Lemmy devs do not support freedom of discussion.
Yeah, they donated their spare time to give you a decentralized platform where you could criticize them because they want to stifle “freedom of discussion”… That the lemmy.ml instance is heavily moderated on stuff like imperialist propaganda is a non-issue for freedom of expression due to the nature of federation. The devs do not even want their instance (lemmy.ml) to be the biggest, but actively promote joining other instances.
You confuse your right to express your opinions with the privilege of someone else providing you a platform for you to express them on. The devs provide the former without obligating themselves to be the ones to give you the latter.
You’d have a better point if the rules against “imperialist propaganda” were more evenly enforced to include all forms of imperialism.
But at the end of the day, when given an opportunity to reflect their own values in the way they run their instance, they have chosen a very restrictive framework to that end. I don’t know how you can come to any other conclusion. It is clear that their development effort is not done to protect any speech besides what they have deemed acceptable, and as far as I am concerned, they have repeatedly shown that they will happily keep their fingers on the scale to whatever extent possible. This is why they will ban people for commenting on other instances, and then not federate the mod logs, etc. These things should absolutely be seen as evidence that they will exert control beyond their own instance if they can.
A lot to unpack here…
include all forms of imperialism
Being mainly concerned with global economic imperialism does not imply acceptance for more traditional imperialism.
reflect their values
Instances are independent and federated, hence do not need to reflect the values of the project as a whole in any way. These properties of decentralization are the values of Lemmy.
I’ve seen the rest of your claims before and you have been asked to present any facts contributing to them elsewhere. Seeing that you still have not responded to them, I will refrain from discussing it in depth for the time being.
I get the impression that your bar for “evidence” are lowered due to some personal experience. To actually engage on a point you made, modlogs have been a mess for a while and there are good reasons not to federate all details of content moderated (such as child porn). It seems weird to me that you contribute this to an agenda of the devs trying to control other instances when they were the ones that gave the other instances their independence in the first place. These actions also do not further any such agenda in a meaningful way. The much simpler and probable explanation is that engineering stuff like this is hard.
It’s extremely easy to see that the modlog on .ml specifically doesn’t match the modlog on other instances, and for issues which have nothing to do with csam. This whole dismissal of it “being a mess” is a pretty convenient excuse for the people who are literally implementing these features. We also know that they never seem to show any admin actions, though this could be attributed to them using alts to moderate. Still kind of shady, but I guess marginally less so.
If .ml admins would care the explain why their build sure seems to behave differently in a few key areas, then it would go a long way towards assuaging these fears. Or perhaps, if they took concerns about their heavy handed moderation more seriously, they would indeed get the benefit of the doubt in regards to their broader intentions.
You are confusing freedom of discussion to using an specific instance with specific rules. Lemmy is clear proof of what you say is not true, and you are incorrect in your deductions of what/why and who.
I’ll hang into my cash and hope for a fork by some non-tankie devs.
I’d bet my life savings they’re already funded by the CCP/Kremlin.
… Can I have your reasoning? Just because they are communists doesn’t mean they are foreign agents, all it means is that they are authoritarians. Besides,idue to lemmy’s federated nature the governments would be better off infiltrating or straight up buying larger social media companies
A lot of them aren’t actually communists, that’s a facade. I have no problem with most communists, it’s a wonderful theory and I get along much better with them than actual capitalists. In fact, I suspect a lot of them aren’t even people, they’re LLMs.
Lemmy.ml is a mouthpiece for the CCP. They aggressively spread CCP talking points. I abandoned an old account because they followed me around and downvoted everything I posted. This was right after the reddit exodus so I was posting positive, funny memes to help Lemmy grow. They’re very quick to delete and ban people who disrupt their echo chamber, and in my experience they almost never argue in good faith. A lot of them seem like bots, if you talk to them you’ll get weird, non sequitur responses.
Lemmy is a easy target for propaganda, there’s very little oversight.
not every idiot on the internet is funded by the ccp
Of course, but when someone is involved in leadership of a community that constantly spreads CCP propaganda and organizes to maliciously downvote people who push back against it, it’s quacking like a duck.
I just want Reddit back, it was much better. But it’s dead.
Its been dead ever since normies found it and took it over. Around when /r/wtf turned into into a G rated Disney movie to appease advertisers or soccer moms, etc.
I know, it’s such a shame.
I think it’s a symptom of Lemmy’s core premise - where do I direct funds as the “common” user (read as less technically sophisticated)? To access and engage with Lemmy I…
- use an app…
- that channels a specific server…
- contained within are individual mods that maintain communities and curate content…
- and all of that lives within the larger “world” of Lemmy as an idea
There are many hands in that chain. Your dedicated users can handle negotiating that decision maybe, but the “common” user cannot - and this post is trying to discuss Lemmy at scale, so you’re talking about that “common” user.
Again, it’s counter to the founding spirit of Lemmy, but we’re missing a centralized path to supporting all of the distributed hands doing work on this idea. Not an easy problem to solve, but one that should be acknowledged.
I’ve subscribed to patreon in the beginning, and one of the perks was supposedly access to a private group with the devs on discord or matrix, forgot which one. After 3 months and a few questions on how and where to gain access that went completely ignored, I stopped. Not because of the money; but because empty promises don’t sit well with me.
Edit: They still list “access to the development chatroom” as a perk, now even in the $1 tier. Used to be only from $5.
I’m a monthly donor :)
Seeing your comment I was like, oh I know this guy. And then I remembered you are the one building the lemmy frontend I use. Thank you :)
Me too! It feels great, honestly. Highly recommend.
I’m poor af alright?
I had no idea it accepted donations, if not for this post I would have no idea where to do it. And still not sure how it works and where the money is for exactly. Is it like sponsoring servers for 1 particular instance?
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.
That’s useful thx for the intro.
I think it’s enough for the big picture, and it enables me to make several follow up questions such as
I had no idea this was in the hands of 2 people. Do they really make a living primarily on crowd sourced funds? Exciting and scary for the future of software in general!
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.
53k monthly active users is way less than I expected. But makes sense with how slow things are here.
Need more bots
Said no one ever.
How would bots help? No one wants to interact with a non human
Using this as my opportunity to brag that I have been a donor since the Reddit exodus! Hopefully I am donating to the right place:
The official Liberapay link now points to https://liberapay.com/Lemmy/.
Aren’t they a tankie
Have a look at their profiles and decide for yourself.
yeah that’s the main dev of lemmy, but there’s a separate lemmy liberapay too now (both are ok probably)
Yeah I’m definitely not gonna donate money to people who are publically and proudly communists.
I might donate to my local instance though. They seem like cool cats.
Nothing wrong with being a communist. Being a tankie on the other hand… Fuck them
Nothing wrong with being a communist.
That might be debatable.
Being a tankie on the other hand… Fuck them
This is not.
Communism is a political philosophy which in and of itself does not advocate for oppression. There is indeed nothing wrong with it, at least if you advocate for freedom of thought.
The Stalinist version of authoritarianism has been conflated with communism by american (mostly) media during the cold war. It is however a very specific ideology.
Apologists for authoritarian regimes, whatever their political leaning, deserve no platform or tolerance. Plurality of thought however is needed and essential.
Yeah. And for
tankies, sorry, “communists”, the Lemmy devs do whine about money an awful lot.You know there is money in communist nations right? The Soviet Ruble was a thing. This comment reeks of “You criticize society, yet you participate in it”. The Lemmy devs need money to survive, especially in a cutthroat capitalist world. I don’t find it hypocritical within their beliefs. Criticize them for their waving away authoritarian actions, for spreading propaganda, or silencing wrongthink on their instances, but I don’t think it’s fair to come at them for wanting to be fairly compensated for their labor, that’s Marxism 101.
The end goal of communist theory is a stateless, moneyless society. The fact that no country has been successful in transitioning to such a society doesn’t matter here, the end goal remains the same, when speaking about theory.
I personally maintain the major downfall has been putting one person in charge. That’s never gone particularly well, even in capitalist democracies. I’d like to see a country try it out with a council at the top, preferably 9 or more members, but always an odd number to prevent ties.
Also they all failed to establish a proper democracy first, and therefore fell into authoritarianism
Unfortunately executive power tends to coalesce in a single person whenever an emergency situation occurs. Rome tried rule by committee like what you’re describing but gradually slid into dictatorship because of various forces that are basically just human nature.
The Six Nations pulled it off for 15,000-25,000 years. That’s just based on the limited archaeological evidence and oral history, but still. I don’t think it’s human nature so much as a lack of viewing war/violence as a failure of society. The Romans outright celebrated their generals, and many other societies have done so as well.
I’m sure that having the major religion of the last couple millennia in Europe being based on a god of war from the bronze age collapse era didn’t help us any either.
Communists are people who live on a commune.
A commune is a group of people living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities.
On one end, a group of friends who live in a house sharing food and living space, you can absolutely call them communists. And the other end of all the bad shit. Same with capitalist, where there’s multiple angles of it all.
That bad shit is tankie, where its authoritarian communists.
I hope I helped.
Communists are people who live on a commune.
That’s perhaps not a commonly(hah) agreed definition of the word.
I know people like to shit on the Reddit gold concept. But I still think it makes sense and is one of the least obtrusive ways to raise funds sustainably.
And it was fun to let people know how much you appreciated their comment ot post.
That wouldn’t really work in federation, unless the reddit gold mechanic is tied to that specific instance.
Yeah no, after seeing how they treat their users and mods… I’ll stick to funding my instance.
I give $1 a month on patreon, hopefully that’s enough cause I’m broke AF.
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 a dollar more per month than most of us, including myself, will ever give.
