I had such a hard time explaining to someone today that there is no universal set of Lemmy rules/politics and you can run your own instance with literally 0 rules
people have forgotten that things can exist outside of the few billionaire/trillionaire closed source walled gardens they’ve become so reliant on
Yeah, I think that’s great. I think it’s awesome that something like Lemmygrad can exist, while also a community criticizing Lemmygrad (there are several) all on the same platform, and without any real central control.
If you don’t want to see certain content, you can block it and move on, while getting the benefits of federation.
I joined communities from a half dozen instances, and I’ll probably join communities from even more as I get better at finding communities.
The communities trying to pillarize the entire fediverse over calling lemmygrad hate speech are, however, not a great thing. Undermining the interconnectedness of the platform at scale by agitating on other platforms that they blacklist or be blacklisted under false pretenses may as well be precision-engineered to negate what is useful about the platform.
liberals crave control over the narrative, which is what they enjoyed at reddit with the site admins putting their thumbs on the scales for their opinions
For those who can’t access the site, the source file from GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/assets/news/2023-06-17 - Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout.md
It’s upsetting to see the shit-talking because I imagine reading that nonsense is emotionally draining, especially when you’re already stressed out with a billion things to do. I’ve seen you guys active in the lemmy community for years and you’ve always been wonderful. I’m sure I’m not the only one who appreciates the work you two have put in and are currently putting in. I’m really happy that your project is starting to catch on.
Honestly we’re all adults here and we all know how the Internet works. Best to not feed the trolls and ignore them. The more attention you give the more it gives the appearances that their rhetoric has validity. Just move on and let’s all focus on making a better fediverse for all
This is extremely well written. Anyone that supports and wants to see this platform thrive should share this in response to the people spreading nonsense with the goal of seeing it fail and upholding the corporate status quo.
For us maintainers (dessalines and nutomic), it has resulted in an endless stream of questions and notifications, which is impossible to keep up with. Previously there were 5 - 10 Github notifications per day; now they have risen to over 100 daily.
That is what i was worried about, Feedback for developers probably correlates with the number of active users , more users mean more feedback (github issues and comments) and more stuff to read, I thought this might not be a problem because i looked at mastodon and didn’t see a lot of issues getting opened in a day, but it’s the comments that could be the real problem, unless you will improve your funding and start hiring more people (even temporarily hiring freelancers) things will probably get worst and you will lose a lot of good feedback.
We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
looking at liberapay , patreon and opencollective my calculation says you are getting about 4465 dollars (2714+217.58*4.345+806) when this comment was written , that’s about 0.15 dollar per active user (assuming about 28K monthly active users).
For comparison beehaw has about 3069 monthly active users and got this month (6/1/2023 -> 6/17/2023) about $3,461.60 ( 1.12 dollar per user, probably better then reddit for most of it’s history).
So i am pretty sure the problem is with getting funding (most people are not aware of the option to donate, or/and are not convinced or incentived to do it). Lemmy should work on it’s conversation rate.
If you are interested, i worked for a while on a guide to help fund open source and got some good feedback on it, maybe you will find it useful.
From what I’ve seen, the fediverse generally is doing a rather poor job of normalising donations from users. If you have some expertise or experience in this domain, and are willing, I’d urge you to just get involved and gather people or whatever you can to create better tools or design patterns or strategies for this.
I suspect there’s trepidation from developers to get to “pushy” with donations and so turn off their user base, and yet they don’t really no how to go about it well and so it just becomes a lost issue when in reality it is central to a “free” fediverse.
I also worry that getting this right earlier rather than later is important. As people join the fediverse, they absorb the culture, norms and design language of the place. The earlier donations are just a normal part of things, the sooner they’re actually normalised.
For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them.
:(
I hope this new influx of people will also bring in a nice influx of nerds who will make this platform better over time. :)
yeah, the 2014 exodus to voat was all pissed off nazis, but now the nerds are pissed off so I think you’re right
I was recently sharing Lemmy to some people and how the entire Reddit blackout is stupid considering everything the platform has done in the past and the mindset of the CEO.
Someone brought up Voat and they were lamenting how that failed, and I decided to check out the WayBack Machine captures for it, and Christ, nothing but antisemitism and racism.
OH BOY VOAT
Yeah. Free speech absolutism does not attract a good crowd, and once you attract that crowd you will not attract any other crowd because the content output they produce is repellant to any normal person.
I spent a bunch of time on Voat as a kid, thinking I could be a free-thinking free speech absolutist who simply disagreed with the things other said around there.
What I observed is a crowd of people of an extreme ideology, who would try and one-up one another with further extremes, moving the overton window within the platform further to the extreme. As it continued, some would hit their breaking point and simply leave due to the toxicity, while others opted to continue the “who can be more offensive” game. The userbase, as it was, was doomed to forever become worse and worse, and smaller and smaller.
I believe that in the later years of Voat, the actually closed down the public-facing site and user registrations. I’m not sure what the Voat devs thought, but it’s pretty clear it didn’t go the way they’d expected as they had to pretty much hide their users from the greater internet.
This is discussed in this video about creating clones of existing platforms.
I went to VOAT in 2020 just to check it out. I kept clicking the random page and I shit you not it cycled through about 20 Qanon/maga subreddits and one random bird watching community.
Can confirm, am a nerd and I already have fixes go to production, and I’ve only been on lemmy for a week or so.
I’m a nerd and I’m here because Reddit has forsaken the nerds and is treating its user base like cattle to be herded. I guess most people want to be herded. That’s fine for them, but I want something more, where we make our place for ourselves, to our own liking. Not so that some investors can get richer. I suspect many of you are here for similar reasons.
I would like to contribute, and have the skills to, but unfortunately no time at the moment. For now I am mostly watching to see how things develop, but sooner or later I may just jump in if I find things are moving too slow.
Thank you and @dessalines and other contributors for your effort. It must be really overwhelming to suddenly have so many new people using lemmy. Being overloaded is to be expected in these circumstances. Please make sure that you don’t overwork yourselves now and set limits on how much work you do.
What is the best way to donate to lemmy? According to this article it’s Liberapay. Is that true?
Yes liberapay doesn’t take any commission.
You guys are doing a fantastic work. Congrats on creating such a cool project like Lemmy.
It’s not much but I upped my contributions a bit. Thank you for everything you’ve done for the open, non-corporate internet.
Thanks for everything, I’m happy to see Lemmy and the Fediverse growing like that.
Removed by mod
post it to Mastodon with LemmyDev account
@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml this is a good idea for the users over there to share
Keep up the good work y’all!
