I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
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I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it threw me off how short the donation list over $10 is and how many people donate on Patreon (obviously not the only way to donate). Thanks for the donation information!
Because people are cheap and don’t like paying for online stuff. Then they complain about ads. How do people think this stuff works fairy dust and unicorn farts.
I don’t think it’s fair to call people cheap when I’m constantly seeing stuff about how much people are struggling financially. If people had more money to spare they’d care less about throwing it at random things.
I dunno, paying less than $10 is more than enough, definitely more than you could make from ads per person. And the reality is that not many people can afford to throw $10+ on every single online service.
If anything, it might be doable if you could pay, say, $50 and distribute that between everything based on your usage. But then service providers don’t really want that either, they’d rather take all that just for themselves than share with others.
Yeah that sounds about right.
If I understand right, the lemmy devs are already paid to develop lemmy full time. I don’t fully understand the arrangements or who’s paying them though.
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Last I checked, the Sopuli admin said that running his instance cost pocket change, $20-30 a month. That might have been before the explosive growth though.
I do think he had a donate link to buy them coffee though.
They are paidvfrom these donations, afaik.
Not quite. This is from their OpenCollective Page:
“Lemmy is entirely open source and funded exclusively by donations. The maintainers dessalines and nutomic have been working on it full time for the past years thanks to generous support by the NLnet foundation. Now that this support is coming to an end, the project is increasingly relying on donations from individual users to fund development. Your donation allows the developers to fully focus on making Lemmy better for everyone.”
NLNet was sponsoring Lemmy for about 1500 euro per month according to dessalines: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/assets/news/2023-06-17 - Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout.md
Edit: I was wrong, it’s 45000 euro total, split into several payment milestones: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hezuy1/nlnet_funding_and_lemmy_070_with_new_image_hosting/
Why did NLnet sponsor the development for years, and now when Lemmy is successful, they stop sponsoring it?
What was the goal of the sponsorship?
The https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/ link goes on about how the internet is preditory today and big tech exploits users, and then at the end:
Lemmy is an open source tool that helps users discover what the fediverse has to offer as a decentralized alternative to for example Reddit. Everyone can host their own instance of Lemmy, determine their own moderation policy to keep discussion as civil as you would like and let users share, post, vote and interact without any corporate interference, all from the comfort of their server of choice. Search and discovery on the fediverse becomes easier, more fun and social, without forgoing independence and agency.
Yeah ok, so why stop sponsoring the solution?
NLnet offer grants so I would assume when they sponsor a project its for a fixed term, either in time or stage of development or amount of money.
Seems like throwing away money.
I think users aren’t smart enough to donate to the Lemmy devs, not enough money at least.
They will donate to apps and even instance owners, but not to the people who make the actual software we are all using.
NLnet aren’t crystal clear but I think they see their role as getting something up and running rather than continued funding, which is fair enough. Trying to support a multitude of projects indefinitely isn’t really feasible. At some point I feel it’s justified to ask users of the project (i.e. us) to support future work.
Lemmy needs at least 3 more years of funding… It just got off the ground here.
I think if people don’t donate, this will turn into open source worked on by volunteers, which means a much slower pace.
I absolutely agree, whilst I do monthly donate to .world, I donate more to Lemmy devs at the moment as it 's at a crucial stage of development and financial support is imperative right now. I just don’t think NLnet are set up to offer that sort of grant system.
The problem is both the devs and instances need donations. Just saw a post one instances bills are $2300 a month. No on is going to pay that out of pocket.
Yeah it’s better to keep instance size within your budget.
But with so many users on Lemmy.world, donations could maybe work. Problem is that it’s not a fixed income, but the bills are fixed every month.
Oh boy, the last time I heard about finances (a month ago) it was all well below $100. Lemmy.ml only costed something like €10 a month.
NLnet paid them for every feature they launched, but with the explosive growth, they’ve been focusing on refactoring the codebase and making it more scalable, which doesn’t count as a “feature” I guess.
Reminds me of the corporate idea of software where new features are more important than quality.
It’s like having a garden where you just spread new plants out and ignore the ones that don’t feel good where they are.
Y’all just seething bc others are enjoying things. This is just cringe. This is not a zero sum game. You can donate to lemmy devs/instance devs/fav. app devs and whatever else you like too.
And let’s not pretend this is new. You could see a lot of memmy users being excited about their app too. I don’t know what the hell they are talking about. But I’m glad they have an app they like that much.
Just. Let. People. Enjoy. Things.
i dont think theres anything wrong with sync enjoyers loving their app but i have to agree that the iap money would be better spent on actually keeping instances alive
It’s not either or. But I have now stopped donating because y’all can’t get off this topic.
Hate the super-rich, not people with enough money left over at the month that they can afford a nicer way to interact with lemmy as intended - ad free.
That the server needs people with extra cash to support it is exceedingly valid. That’s why I had been donating until literally 10 minutes ago.
I’m not subsidizing people who feel entitled to: Free shit Using free shit to tell others how they should spend (Acting like my money is theirs)
It’s a simple boundaries issue that so many on Lemmy don’t seem to comprehend.
When I stopped my donation, there was “other” then a box to say why. I filled it in. It’s just one donation that stopped, but who knows, there could be more.
I have now stopped donating because y’all can’t get off this topic.
When I stopped my donation, there was “other” then a box to say why. I filled it in. It’s just one donation that stopped, but who knows, there could be more.
You stopped supporting the server you use because some other people (on different servers) commented about another topic entirely? I don’t understand the logic behind that. Are you under the impression that someone posting from lemmy.ca is secretly the maintainer of lemmy.world? What’s the logical connection here for you?
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Thank you for asking and a thoughtful response.
I’m (hopefully obviously) not opposed to supporting lemmy.world or the devs. I don’t expect free stuff.
I have run into more than a couple people who have needed to opine and troll because they have strong feeling about people enjoying Sync.
The lemmyverse has at least one starting point and maybe I’m still learning. What I see is a place begun in a somewhat communist, left leaning, pro-FOSS standpoint. I suspect that demographic is inclined to thought processes I can’t grok.
I understand class resentment (I do; I’m not wealthy (at all)). I understand fatigue with people geeking out over an app that underwhelms a person of other tastes (or means).
That said, I see your distinction. One of the virtues of lemmy is that it’s a loose federation. But people from a variety of servers have argued in poor faith (or just not seen what they’re doing).
I expect disagreement. It’s part of why I’m here: to hear well reasoned counter points and to learn. But it’s difficult to say lemmy.world has been happy about the newcomers. That I’ve seen anyhow.
If making the point that allies are being alienated in ways that matter to us all, helps make a point that we could be friends, then I’ll make that point.
I did end my subscribed support that would have outpaced my Sync spend within a year (you can math that). Lemmy, right now, has an unwelcoming vibe that’s not even a little background. It is foreground. And problematic if this experiment is going to work.
all i said is better spent, not that you’re not allowed to spend money on sync; and you talk about it like you’re forced to pay to browse lemmy without ads when it’s sync that has ads and not lemmy?
Strange comment
I happily supported the dev. Just as I had happily supported the server.
OP mentions sync, you mention sync, I mention sync (eww thats crass), you mention sync… first line comments mention sync in frustrated tones. Are you going to lecture them too?
I know the misrepresent-and-fatigue strategy of argumentation and I’m not going to play. I’ve seen it a surprising amount here on Lemmy and you’re doing it now.
If honesty or integrity don’t mean a lot to you, I’d recommend turning over the soap box.
On topic, again: you, along with others, have persuaded me to cease donations but I don’t retreat like you may hope.
This bastian of class resentment is going to have to adapt or close. If everyone here is what I’m seeing, I hope the person running the server has deep pockets. Or I guess everyone keeps instance hopping until everyone realizes it’s not sustainable and instances aren’t spun up.
I’m not wealthy, in the least, but I don’t expect things for free. Lemmy has taught me I should. I’ll apply that to the servers and development.
Womp womp
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The last I read, the instance was already fully-funded through the end of the year.
Why is the notion that the instance is going under something lemmings keep bringing up? Yes… I understand the model. But it is fully funded - or was. Why are people acting like the instance is about to fail?
Should we start rumors that the instance is about the fail? Or… are recent facts useful, here?
Yes, there are other instances, but the preponderance of Sync users joined lemmy.world.
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Makes sense. No one is entitled to the labor of others.
Applies here, too.
If no one else is reading this, something is fishy with votes. No… not preoccupied with the vote. Preoccupied with what it may indicate. It is, as you’ve indicated, stale.
This is such a bad take. By the same logic, the time you spend scrolling through Lemmy would have been better spent serving the homeless in the soup kitchen or sweeping the streets clean. But yet here you are. Why?
Let’s face it, the “IAP money” you referred to has always been there, Sync dev found a way (and has the balls) to monetize his work to a pretty big extent. And only now are you all sour grapes about it. If Lemmy instances are so desperate for money why didn’t they make an equally big effort to monetize? On the flip side, if money isn’t such a big issue why do you care if Sync is monetizing?
You’re absolutely correct. Anyone can enjoy any app they like and either pay for it or not.
But coming into a thread about ways to ensure Lemmy gets the support it needs to develop and instances get the support they need to keep going to tell everyone how much you love your app is infantile.
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Here’s what OP said:
“With all this talk about Sync pricing…I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!”
How on Earth do you come to the conclusion that that is in any way calling Sync users out?
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I have to assume you’re referring to things I’ve said as it would be pretty stupid to expect me to be answerable for things other people have said.
So, you let me know where I’ve made any comments in the entire thread that are based on Sync being a for-profit app and my lectures about the desirability of FOSS purism and I’ll be happy to talk about them.
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Let me make a list of things that would be “stupid” to take from this.
That you are answerable for what others have said.
Then why did you ask me to justify OP’s post?
That you are among those that were prodding Sync users.
Then why did you try and make me answerable for what other people were saying?
Not whatever the fuck direction that was that you just tried to take it in.
It’s pretty simple. You said:
“because of the sync mention by the OP, there is a preponderance of lecturing coming from the FOSS purist community. It is infantile to expect no response to that”
And clearly expected me to have some sort of ownership of, or participation in, that lecturing. I then pointed out to you that I didn’t believe I had either but if you could find an example of me doing so I’d be happy to talk about it.
Feel free to tell me why my paraphrasing was inaccurate
Because it’s not what I said. I said:
“You’re absolutely correct. Anyone can enjoy any app they like and either pay for it or not…But coming into a thread about ways to ensure Lemmy gets the support it needs to develop and instances get the support they need to keep going to tell everyone how much you love your app is infantile.”
I’m not sure saying someone(s) coming into a thread which is nothing to do with Sync as a piece of software and proceeding to hijack it to be about Sync is infantile behaviour is directly equivalent to ‘standing up for yourself is infantile’. They weren’t standing up for themselves, they’d made an error in understanding what the thread was about and when informed what it was about got annoyed and asked why they ‘couldn’t just use what we want’ or ‘why do you care?’ when as far as I can tell nobody (certainly not me) told them they couldn’t use whatever app they wanted to, its simply not what this thread was about.
I’m new to lemmy. What’s a home instance?
Sync is making it so I don’t need to think think hard. Makes head go ouchie.
I’m new here also but I think it’s the instance where you registered your account in. For example lemmy.world.
Registered your account in, yes, but more importantly - which home instance you’re logged into at that particular moment.
It’s like email, I have yahoo, you have gmail, your grandma has aol. Each is their “home” instance but they can all talk to each other. They’re not in a walled garden and can only talk to themselves like whatsapp or reddit or twitter etc. Fediverse is an open platform and lemmy is a reddit-like part of it. Mastodon is a twitter-like part of it. Sync does do a great job, no need to make head go ouchie.
Much thanks. Me smart!
I don’t subscribe as a rule these days.Subscription fatigue is a real thing but I do make one time payments to regularly used services or apps across the year. I guess it’s like tipping in that respect, I do it when I feel I should.
For Sync, the subscription seemed steep for an app for a platform I’m still only starting to use and don’t use anywhere near Reddit levels (by design I might add) plus the one time payment seems similarly steep. I bought the pro for Reddit about 2 years before Reddit went full ham and was ready to spend the £8 of Google credit I have on it again if it turned out I used it/lemmy more than I do.
The issue I found is that feeding that back on anything like this hit the cult wall and you just get a lot of angry posting about you being cheap or just use the ads etc. Hell, you can see the same posts even in this thread which is only tangentially related to that whole quagmire. I had hoped that lemmy would be less vitriolic and more discussion based even on these kinds of things but I guess people are just tribalistic regardless.
Yeah i think cult mentality is the problem. If someone doesn’t want to pay or cannot pay, it’s their choice/circumstances. If they don’t like sync’s pricing and wanna stick to FOSS apps, it’s their choice. I don’t like to see people pushing around others for their choice of what they think is the best.
I agree that subscription fatigue is a huge thing, and I avoid services as a rule of thumb unless there are real reasons for the subscription, ie ongoing usage based costs.
That said, I view $2 a month as a reasonable subscription cost, and if Reddit had charged that I would have happily paid it to keep bacon reader. It’s only the one time payment cost that is very steep ($99).
I chip in $5/mo for lemmy.world to help pay to keep it ad free and running
It’s like people just can’t shut up about this now. Jfc.
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Like every open source projects, you can donate with money or your time. Both are equally valuable. Promoting the project, helping new users, heck, even being pleasant and help fostering positive environment in the fediverse so new users feel welcomed is actually very valuable (especially given current reputation of fediverse citizens being especially harsh to new users).
To add to this, it can even be as simple as reporting bugs you find, whether that be with the Lemmy code itself or a client you’re using.
I don’t get where this reputation came from? I’ve had more positive interactions on Lemmy in the last month than I had on Reddit in the last 10 years, literally. I feel like this is the internet equivalent of Iceland, everyone must think it is a frozen hellscape, but then you get here and it is actually a really nice place to be.
And that’s totally fine. That’s the beauty of the internet, not everybody has to pitch in, and if you can’t you shouldn’t feel bad about it. There was a time when I was a starving college student and was doing the five finger discount on a very regular basis. We’re glad you’re here regardless.
My egalitarian FOSS is showing lol
You don’t have to explain if you can’t! Don’t feel bad. Supporting yourself should definitely come first. Hope you are doing alright.
FYI if you still want to show support, librepay allows you to give a “symbolic donation” of just $0.01 a week, or $0.52 a year
Yeah, I do wish there was some form of regional pricing going on. Doesn’t seem to be the case if the prices I’m seeing in my (also third world) country are anything to go by.
According to his update I believe he’ll be working on regional prices this week
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You’re absolutely right, major brain fart on my part to assume that’s what the person I responded to meant
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Yeah. If you got 100$ to spare you should be giving it lemmy instead of sync.
The difference is that some users have been using sync for a decade and using Lemmy for only a month. So it’s a lot easier to mentally justify supporting a developer who you’ve been benefiting from for so long.
I have also donated to my local instance, I really hope to see it all grow together.
The problem is that, for that decade, Sync has been benefiting from reddit, and now Lemmy. And reddit/Lemmy were the ones footing the majority of the operating costs so that Sync could be useful.
While obviously not a perfect example, think of it as letting your friend stay in your spare room. And then they decide to run a business out of that room and you have customers coming at all hours of the day.
This is increasingly a concern with the modern internet. All of those super popular streamers and youtubers? They are profiting off the content of game devs and other youtubers (ironically, it is the hot tub streamers who are stealing the least content). And plenty of content creators have come out and talked about how they increasingly hate “Reaction” content (Hasan getting special mention for just playing full videos to his chat while he has a piss break).
I am glad Sync is a product people feel is worth paying for. Not my thang, but it doesn’t need to be. But… let’s just say that if the only thing to come out of the reddit debacles over the past few months were “Third party apps need to serve ads or pay for expensive API keys” I would probably actively not care.
Just to be clear. I very much feel that creators deserve to get paid, even if they build on top of the work of others. Maybe less so people who just stream content with no comment while they take a shit but, generally speaking, even just interacting with chat while you play a round of Valorant is “transformative” in my book.
But it DOES suck how many developers, services, and creators are more or less getting screwed over in the interest of “exposure”.
Reddit has benefitted from Sync, and other 3rd party apps, way more than Sync has benefitted from Reddit.
It’s less clear cut with Lemmy, which is supposed to evolve an ecosystem of free tools, so it might be that some day Sync will be benefitting from Lemmy more than Lemmy from Sync… but for now, Lemmy is relatively bare bones, like what Reddit used to be 15 years ago, so any 3rd party app with extra features is still a good thing.
Fortunately, Lemmy has no incentive to go closed source, like Reddit did (let’s not forget Reddit used to be open source while it was convenient for them, then it wasn’t).
Genuine question:
Why did reddit benefit from Sync but Lemmy doesn’t? In both cases, it is a third party app (with premium options or ads that support Sync and not the service it is engaging with) that greatly increases utility for “power users”. So that more or less means that it provides “exposure” by encouraging power users to make the content that casual users will come back to the site for.
And there is the argument that that actually could be bad if the product has no viable monetization strategy but user count keeps increasing but… yeah.
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The 100$ is very much a premium tier with nice to have features. The ad free version is around 20$, which is still steep but you’re paying for lifetime ads.
you’re paying for lifetime ads
You don’t need to pay for that, just go to Reddit. Free unlimited lifetime ads! 😉
Sync is $20 to remove ads no? Where is it $100?
Update: nevermind I see it here for sync ultra
My instance’s owner has a Patreon. I give there. I definitely recommend that others do the same.
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There are three donation options on that page, LiberaPay, Patreon and OpenCollective. Which one take the least amount of fee from the donated money?
Opencollective has PayPal ☝🏻 Best choice for me
Ended up using opencollective as well because of Paypal. But using credit card seems to have a bit lower fee than Paypal. Maybe I’ll use that for the next donation.
Using Credit card with other currencies than euros, my bank charges me fees. PayPal does not, that’s why I always prefer PayPal
They’ve mentioned they prefer liberapay
That’s how things should work honestly. Those that can chip in, should. A beer every so often goes a long way. It’s honestly something I barely notice in my finances too. This time it goes to something I believe in instead of a twitch sub lol.
Yep! The developer of Connect for Lemmy is getting caffeinated on a regular basis by me. It’s a perfect fit for the RIF gap in my heart. ;)
He/She(?) is doing an awesome job and it’s amazing how far this app has come in just a few short weeks. I am trying to keep the dev motivated as much as possible, for sure!
My only gripe is that it’s not open source, but that is OK.
“They”
Agreed, I started donating to Lemmy as soon as I switched, and I’m happy to pay for sync too. I want to support this ecosystem.
Don’t get me started on twitch subs. Supporting a creator you like is fine, but spending 100s of dollars on gift subs is so stupid.
Eli5 gift subs?
Subs = subscriptions.
A sub on Twitch gives you a badge and special emojis on your subbed channel (streamer).
You also have the option to gift (randomly) 1, 5, 25, 50, 100 subs to random followers (users).
A sub costs $5 in the US, you can gift 100 subs ($500) if you want to.
Twitch looking at their top creators leaving for other platforms.
Increasing our revenue share, unilaterally, should fix this.
“Supporting creators is fine, but supporting them more is so stupid”
Ok LUL.
My guess is they mean in the sense of “support creaters as you’d like, but don’t throw all your money into it just for them to pay attention to you for a second”
Well then they probably should’ve said that instead of saying something unrelated to the point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is that what gift subs are? I’ve never understood that. Is it like a tip?
Subs are kinda like tip, except you get something in return. Usually its emotes you can use on any stream on twitch. Some streamers can make other stuff like sub only discord channel but its optional.
Gift subs are exactly the same except you give the benefits to some other chaters.
The person that runs my home instance appears to be from Ohio, I don’t think I can sanction that buffoonery. /s
I’ll kick some money towards them once I get bills for the month sorted.
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Found the Michigander, unless there are other states that also like to banter toward Ohio.
/fellow Michigander
Iowa actually, Ohio banter is becoming somewhat universal I think. A different flavor of the Florida man meme.
Personally, I think the app is absolutely fine without paying for the subscription. I really don’t see too many ads. I get an average of one ad for every two refreshes of the feed when scrolling through, and none of them have been obtrusive. It’s certainly night and day when compared to the ads in the official Reddit app.
Kinda reminds me of spez not wanting third-party apps.
But also reminds me capitalism rapes like Cosby.
I’d rather give to lemmy as a whole. I’d maybe spend 2-3$ one time pay for unlimited updates and use of a sm app.
