Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.

If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.

And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.

Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…

I wanted to text “here’s your award”, but then I remembered we don’t have awards.

So here is your “hey, that was a great comment! I laughed and it made my day a bit better”- word-award :)

Nine times out of ten I hear people say “join Lemmy.World, it’s the catch-all and de facto default instance”. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen people recommend Lemmy.ml unless they’re already ideologically aligned with Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don’t join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons (edit: reasons I agree with and echo, to clarify).

lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.

In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.

The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.

It literally recommends lemmy.ml within the first 3 listings in most cases or even worse, Hexbear

You’d think the ban button has been tested enough already…

People are being asked to give money to the mods of .ml in their role as devs. There’s even a statement at the start of the thread that says (paraphrased) “yes, some small percentage will go to .ml because it is the primary testbed”.

The issue isn’t federation. It’s being asked to give money to support a place that prescribes values that the donator disagrees with.

It’s easier said than done to separate the dev team and the mod team

That has to apply when deciding whether to support them as well, then.

Not to mention that the communities over there have moderators - the devs just insist on taking matters into their own hands, which is a significant part of what makes them so deeply unpopular. They’re choosing to mod like this, when they really don’t have to.

They have 5 peoples in the admin team, 2 of them is the dev. If they stop moderating, it will still have 3 on the team. It’s VERY easy to separate themselves from moderating but they still chose to put their resource(time) into it.

They could probably do something like a voluntary self-re-education camp for themselves and change their terroristic views. There’s probably some inspiration somewhere in the world.

Or if not that, get other devs to continue the project and do something else.

The platform itself is apolitical. It can be forked and used for any purpose by other creators. Any instance of a different political persuasion can be spun up and maintained separately, as many defederated instances have. This is a result of the project the 2 devs are paid to produce.

Given the name Dessalines, I’m guessing one dev is French though I suppose that’s too much of a reach. Regardless, I think you would be hard pressed to find many developers willing to commit to a project full time when they have to beg for donations from a relatively fickle audience like Lemmy users, just to reach a target of a middling income. Much easier to work for a financial firm building their app that approves predatory payday loans or whatever.

That doesn’t seem like much to me. Maybe not technically poverty but certainly not rich.

Mbin is in PHP. It’s doomed. Weakly typed, garbage collection, effectively deprecated language. There’s no way it’ll ever scale as well as Lemmy.

It’s not only the tech I have an issue with, it’s also the fragmentation. Just like we didn’t need a dozen and half Lemmy clients, most of which would die, it’d be incredibly helpful for more people to be putting effort towards Lemmy. If Lemmy devs refuse to accept PRs, they can even decide to fork. Part of the reason I’m okay with all this is that the current Lemmy devs really don’t have all that much control over it. The biggest pull that they have is that they’ll continue to give us their work. If they prevent as much work as they accomplish, then their influence can disappear overnight.

Rust is a better language. It’s better tech. It’ll scale better. It’s a growing language instead of a dying one. For those less in the know, it’s roughly the difference between using C++ and, well, PHP. Except Rust is straight up better than C++, so much so that the US government has projects to migrate shit from C++ to Rust.

The problem is, Lemmy developers are lemmy.ml maintainers. You can’t have one without the other.

Yes, but the issue is that the lemmy.ml maintainers are the Lemmy developers. The people who created the software, and continue maintaining it, are the same people who created the instance.

It’s the well-known question of if you can, or should, separate the art from the artist. By funding, in its current state, the development of Lemmy, you’re supporting the people running an instance you disagree with. Unless you’re willing to take up the work to fork and continue development yourself, you can’t detach them, you either support both or none.

In a former life I worked in the financial sector. The only reason statesia hasn’t genocided itself to bones already is because all the ceos have been incompetent stumbling over each others’ plans for genocide and (fortunately for us, depending on how depressed you are) kept fucking it up for so long.

My experience anywhere on Lemmy that .ml touches has been notably worse than anything I have experienced on reddit.

You’re not required to do anything, let alone directly funding ml. That’s not what I am arguing for. I am arguing for you to support Lemmy despite the chance some of it might go to ml.

It goes the other way too, the developers probably disagree with a large part of the beliefs of people using lemmy, yet they also put in their time to create and foster it, which we never had to pay for either. They did it for the reasons they mention (free spaces, not owned by corporations that suck their users dry), which is separate from their other political positions.

You should delete the app then, if it’s so important to you.

I got banned on ml for arguing that it was obvious that trump was worse than the Democrats

Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.

Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:

• Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
• Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
• Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
• Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
• Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.

If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.

So use a different instance? You dont seen to have a problem freeloading at least?

I feel that’s missing the forest for the trees in regards to what we’re discussing, though. Enforcing rules is one thing; actively enforcing the suppression of any dissent of opinion is censorship, full stop. It isn’t “curating” communities when you are aggressively enforcing all those communities stay in lockstep to your political views.

But yes, federation helps to mitigate the completeness of that censorship. However, the original devs of Lemmy itself created the .ml instance, so it’s kind of an ironic situation, which is why I bothered replying in the first place to the original comment.

This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.

Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:

• Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
• Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
• Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
• Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
• Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.

If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.

part of those donations go to lemmy.ml’s server upkeep

If that’s true, that’s misappropriating the donations being that they’re billed as supporting development. Server maintenance and upkeep is important, but do not mislead your benefactors to do so, lest you destroy their trust and stop donating to your cause.

I would like it if both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml could confirm or put to rest if this is true.

Edit: a couple of users pointed out that lemmy.ml is used as a test bed for lemmy development. This is good info, and not something I, personally, was aware of.

ethical ads are virtually non-existent. when limiting ads to ethical ads it’s unlikely you’re getting even remotely close to bringing in the necessary funds.

people promoting ads are typically those who expect others to suffer while they themselves are using ad blockers. there are some people who honestly turn off ad blockers, but i wouldn’t recommend anyone to do that for any site, as i don’t consider the majority of ads ethical and it’s also often used as a malware/phishing/scam distribution mechanism.

this is also a vicious cycle of more people blocking ads -> ads getting worse to offset the lost ad revenue -> more people blocking ads. this is what lead to the internet today, where the majority of the internet is basically unusable if you don’t use ublock origin or a comparable solution.

I don’t like what they’re doing, they are actively using their positions and instances position of influence to push harmful propaganda, misinformation, censor opinions critical of it and all the while turning a blind/lenient eye to what their users do if they consider them to be ideologically aligned with them.

If they actually surrendered .ml admin duties to a more balanced team that actually allowed non-Tankie mods to well mod, I would reconsider donating.

While I consider their “ideology” to be harmful, if they stopped trying to “infuse” Lemmy with it and separated their work from their personal politics it would satisfy a lot of concerns

Lemmy devs have a fascist tanky problem.

Yes

I don’t code. Happy to donate to a non-tankie development team (when I get a job offer).

I like the Lemmy concept. It seems to be the most viable alternative to corporate social media (both in terms of size and architecture).