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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml naeap @lemmy.ml

best way to donate/keep Lemmy running?

hi all!

so, I guess all the instances and the development itself are in need of some money to be run.

do all the instances need to survive on their own?

I'm not sure how it works in the background, but instances with a small community would still need to be able to mirror all the threads from other instances - if its community requests it
did I get this wrong?

I'm currently supporting the development through Patreon, but I guess sometime in the future l, it would be wise to split this with server costs for the instances.

or do I miss something?

thanks!

10
10 comments

  • If you can't donate then it's really helpful to just post/comment regularly. I think the main thing Lemmy needs at this point is just more content.

    • three idea was more, how the single instances can finance themselves. network traffic and storage need to be paid somehow.

      I'm not sure how the federated system works exactly and how much a small instance would need to mirror or pipe through, when the users subscribe to large communities on another instance.

      so I was wondering, how instances with a small user base can keep up financially - bigger ones can probably live of donations. If a small instance doesn't need much space or traffic, because subscriptions on remote instances are directly handled on the remote instance, than this is probably no problem.

      I'm thinking of setting up my own small server and am not sure what exactly to expect...

      • For me, I wanted an instance that is my own. So I set it up and I pay maybe 10 dollars per month for it. It's not going to break my bank even if lots of users decide to join it. :)

  • Thanks for your support! We currently have a grant through NLnet, but it's likely over after this year, and we'll have to try to be fully community funded at that point. We might do yearly funding drives as that seems to be a good model that's not too obtrusive.

    We'd also really like to add developers to our little coop, one or two especially that have already been making solid and consistent contributions.

    Here's our donate page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

    Liberapay is much preferred, both because it's open source, and because it smartly splits payments among your dev team equally.

    • I imagine a lot of the early adopter Reddit refugees are web/mobile devs. Perhaps it's worth putting a callout to them specifically to help out on the various GitHub projects if they're looking to contribute?

    • As far as running instances, yes please fund your admins and moderators for their time! Reddit notoriously takes advantage of their free labor, but we should be treating our instance runners better.

    • and we’ll have to try to be fully community funded at that point

      Maybe the Sovereign Techc Fund is an option for you? On the applications page they mention "open implementations of communication protocols" and also social networking.

10 comments