Hey folks!

I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.

Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.

However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.

Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.

I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.

If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.

Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576

Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!

  • hakase@lemm.eeEnglish
    3311·
    8 days ago

    Most of Lemmy is fine - just avoid the tankie triad of lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear and you should be good to go.

    Edit: And maybe also the instances that haven’t defederated hexbear in particular, since when they show up threads tend to go to shit, as you’re seeing here, unfortunately.

    • person1@lemm.ee
      114·
      8 days ago

      I can certainly see that Hexbear and the other two are very vocal and toxic here. Engaging in some discussion or getting my views challenged is fine, I’d rather not close myself in a bubble, but it’s sad that they would be so quick to insult and ban you. It does worry that they have some of the biggest communities. I wish I could say “oh well the protocol is neutral” but I think that with most OSS projects it matters tremendously who is at the helm; also, another poster outlined quite well that these instances seem to be the showcase for the system.

      • peregrin5@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        7 days ago

        They are only big by number because they are some of the oldest instances. So they have a lot of inactive accounts and communities. The number of actually active users is less than .world or .ee.

        They only seem more active because they are terminally online and have communities that are specifically designed to brigade threads when they don’t like what’s posted.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        I moved to PieFed before it was fully ready, and I’ve been able to personally defederate from lemmy.ml by blocking all users since I did. No admin approval required. That feature alone was worth it to me to put up with the pain of the platform not being ready yet.

        Since then, the platform has greatly improved, and now has many MANY features that Lemmy (and a few that even Reddit) lacks. For example the most recent additions are polls and post flairs. Which tbf Lemmy has plans to add, but features languish in its roadmap for multiple years at a time so I would not expect them anytime “soon”. Tbf Rust is a difficult language to work with, but that’s just all the more reason to love PieFed, written in Python that many more people can contribute to. Which is what has been allowing it to add new features literally weekly as of late.

        PieFed is extremely nice - come check it out! Make an account, and by the time you get through the setup wizard you will already have fallen in love with it.:-)

      • Nutomic@lemmy.ml
        142·
        8 days ago

        The roadmap contains a new feature for extended instance block, which also blocks all posts and comments from that instance’s users. If some feature is not implemented in Lemmy thats not out of malice, but because we really dont have time to work in everything that people ask for.

        https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5578