Calling for donations! We’re running Lemmy.World for you to use for free, however the running costs aren’t for free… If you appreciate our services and are willing and able to help out paying the bills, please consider a donation on one of these platforms:
- https://ko-fi.com/fhfworld - Preferred.
- https://liberapay.com/fhf
- https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld - (Either recurring or one-time donations).
- https://patreon.com/mastodonworld - (Recurring donations only)
I’d love to understand the costs associated with a project like this. Do you have a breakdown anywhere of where money goes each month?
We keep a blog but it’s way overdue… but the costs didn’t change much so you get an idea: https://blog.mastodon.world/
I figured it would be a decent amount. I set up a recurring payment via Patreon ages ago and I’m glad I did. My $5 USD/mo isn’t going to change the world, but I hope it helps.
5 dollar a month is amazing, that likely covers for you and hundreds of other people. Thank you!
Goddamn, I thought it was cheaper! I donate already to my instance and dev but I’ll throw what I can your way too.
Hugely understandable. It’s so much rougher than people think for a small project to maintain a consistent blog. Thank you for the posts you do have!
Lemmy.world is a small project?
I was figuring someone would ask about this eventually, and I’d say: yeah. I work on Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of active editors, millions of articles, some ungodly readership, a foundation behind us, a considerable hand in every commercial LLM on Earth, and an SEO that would make The North Face say “Yeah, I’ll perform meticulous, reputation-damaging sabotage for that.”
Likewise, I’ve worked for years on PCSX2, with a team of (I haven’t counted, but) 25 or so. I don’t remember because I never nosed into it, but I think we make less than Fedihosting (at €1300/mo right now for Fedihosting, that’s €15,600/year). Despite currently being one of the most well-regarded emulators out there, everyone knows everyone, fuck knows nobody is turning a profit compared to the timesink, everyone is in it because they want to be there and enjoy the company and the work, and 99.9% of people on fhe street will give you a quizzical look if you point to that as a hobby – born out of not even knowing what the fuck that is.
I don’t know the cost breakdown of what Fedihosting spends on servers, but I do know that there’s probably not a lot of that €15,600 gross per year – if any – left over for the people (at least several; never checked) doing the hours of thankless, delicate work when your whole thing is hosting multiple social media platforms. Beyond that, the Fediverse is pretty small and certainly brings minimal glory. Usually at least some people know what PCSX2 is because they’ve used it. On the other hand, you need to be a very specific type to know what a “Lemmy.World” is (I wish that weren’t the case).
Thanks, this sent me down a rabbit hole reading about the incident :D
If anyone else is interested: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia - The North Face
Wikirabbitholes are fun
I just meant like I thought this was the main lemmy project or something or is this just the most popular/default instance? I thought these guys built the whole lemmy ecosystem
This became the most popular instance bc Lemmy’s devs run their own lemmy.ml instance with a strong tankie moderation angle, and many people don’t like that.
Lemmy.ml is the instance of the lemmy creators I believe
Is that not the instance everyone hates because of their toxic politics, or something? Does that also reflect the Lemmy creators?
I don’t follow the discourse myself, I just keep seeing people make derogatory references to it here and there.
Yup, the lemmy creators are straight up tankies.
I wasn’t necessarily endorsing it. Just pointing the fact out to avoid confusion.
Can you promote this link to the body of the post instead of buried in a comment?
Yes I will put the link in the post later today. I am not home and am not logged in to lwadmin on the phone.
Their Open Collective page has useful information about their budget.
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld#category-BUDGET
Perhaps it doesn’t show everything, but it seems like it shows quite a lot of how their donated money flows.
It seems like that page might not be taking into account income from other platforms though; it estimates the annual budget as being €4,000, despite the official monthly budget (as listed on their Mastodon blog as of last September) being €1,700.