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!

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    I’m not sure why a mobile app should be considered a prerequisite? Some people access solely by desktop, others by tablet, personally I access nearly 100% by Firefox on Android, so I’m mobile but not app, and I know I’m not the only one.

    Anyways, the connection between apps and platform is rather fluid - e.g. at one point many of the apps used by “Lemmy” were intended to work for Reddit, but then they ceased working for Reddit (which is just one of many reasons prompting many of us to come to the Fediverse over the years), and now they work for “Lemmy”. Some also work for Mbin and PieFed too, like Interstellar, and an unofficial fork of Thunder is being tested right now. Though PieFed’s API is still in development, so not many apps currently support it, that’s true.

    I’ve never used Sync, so I’m not positive, but I do know that PieFed has many features that people say that Sync has. But I’ve mainly only used a web browser to access PieFed (and tested it in Interstellar). Also, is Sync still being developed actively? (Or perhaps I am thinking of Connect.) The world of apps is constantly changing, and ones that aren’t maintained may one day stop working for Lemmy too, as the communication with the backend changes.

    Regarding “political views”, um I’m pretty sure it’s a bit more than something like whether to promote trains or cars, it’s EXTREMIST viewpoints like whether genocide is okay or not (the answer, it seems, depends on who’s doing it, for some reason?).

    In any case, it’s awesome to have alternatives. Even assuming total goodwill towards every dev of every platform, it’s good to not have all the hopes and dreams of the entire Fediverse placed into one platform. Like one thing I absolutely adore about PieFed is how it can add new features, which even Reddit was refusing to do near the end. They kept focusing exclusively on their profits, whereas PieFed keeps focusing on improving the end user experience, and I love that! 💘

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Yep piefed seems cool, and it should develop faster than Lemmy since its easier language to be quick in too.

      Will check it out, just for fun. I prefer apps on my phone but of course everyone is different. Sometimes the web version is so good that the app is just a wrapper around a web browser anyway.