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?

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
    125·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Venus@slrpnk.netEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        33·
        2 years ago

        We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I’ll make sure that’s in there.

    • ᗪIᐯEᖇGEᑎTᕼᗩᖇᗰOᑎIᑕᔕ@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      26·
      2 years ago

      You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology … eventually.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        21·
        2 years ago

        For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.

    • ToastyWaffle@lemmy.mlEnglish
      19·
      2 years ago

      I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!

      • Riyria@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        2 years ago

        Just downloaded Jerboa last night so I have something to browse when I delete the reddit app during the black out. The collapse/expand tool is honestly something that would have made me avoid the app, so thank you for your service lmao.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        24·
        2 years ago

        Liberapay is simpler, automatically splits payment between devs, and has no fees (other than the payment processor). They’re even funded by their own model.

        Opencollective isn’t as good because you have to submit invoices to get paid.

        Patreon is absolutely the worst because it’s not made for teams, and they take a big cut for essentially just running a wordpress for you with payment buttons.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        35·
        2 years ago

        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.