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How is Lemmy going to make money?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
Please make mod tools a top priority. It's absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.
Hell, even if it isn't strictly a mod tool, being able to do this from someone's profile page would be good.
28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.
I don't know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance...) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.
I just hope you understand you won't be the one determining what is "more than enough" - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it's going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.
We wouldn't be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.
Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we're not even close yet), then we'll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.