Between Lemmy.world desperately needing new mod tools, Lemmy.ee disabling image uploads, and the two main Lemmy.ml devs working on Lemmy for less than minimum wage, I want to urge and remind everyone to please Donate!
The Lemmy devs have refused advertisements, refused collaboration with Meta, and focused all of their efforts (and then more) to support the wave of users who left Reddit. The Lemmy devs did this, as they let the work owed to their sponsor take the back seat, to give everyone here today reading this message the best experience possible.
Lemmy is already at 1% the size of Reddit, but only has 2 full time employees. Not only do they deserve more for the gruelling hours they’ve put in, but so does everyone else who’s contributed too.
It’s nice how fast Lemmy is growing, but I think it is a good idea to manage expectations. In the world of free and open source software you can’t just throw money at the problem to make it better. The development of Lemmy will occur at will whenever someone feels like contributing. It’s not someones job to develop Lemmy so it isn’t guaranteed to happen at all.
Edit: Just for clarification I’m not suggesting to not donate. I’m just saying donating doesn’t guarantee development.
It actually is someone’s job at the moment; NLNet gave a grant to Dessalines and Nutomic to work on it IIRC
Interesting news. Thank you for the clarification. Is there any announcement about this?
https://lemmy.ml/post/35293
This appears to be from 3 years ago and only funds to last 6 months. Has there been any additional funding since then?
Found it:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/2363072
They mentioned the current numbers in their AMA in !announcements@lemmy.ml .
From what I remember, they are still being funded at the moment.