this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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What actions of the developers are you talking about? I’m not trying to start a fight, I’m honestly out of the loop or whatever.
I imagine the biggest point are the censorship, disinformation and tankie allegations. These are all documented in this post. Another point worth bringing up is that they are the admins of lemmy.ml, where most of the allegations happen. Lemmy.ml also has something of a tankie problem and one of the devs has said that the donations will also cover the cost of running the instance. So by donating to the devs you're also donating to an instance that possibly has no problem with censorship, disinformation and harboring tankies.
I would be willing to turn a blind eye if I could trust the devs to step away from lemmy.ml and focus solely on the development of Lemmy. But I don't trust the devs enough to actually do that so I personally won't be supporting Lemmy development until someone else becomes the maintainer of Lemmy.
EDIT: just to cover off the inevitable "what will happen if we stop supporting Lemmy. I don't want to go back to Reddit" fear. If Lemmy doesn't work out and it gets abandoned there's always Mbin. Anyone here from the Reddit exodus knows that it's annoying to migrate but Mbin can federate with Lemmy which means going from Lemmy to Mbin is going to be less painful than form Reddit to Lemmy.
lemmy.ml is part of Lemmy development as it is used to test new versions before release, take performance measurements and have first-hand experience with the mod tools. If I stepped away from lemmy.ml it would make Lemmy worse and cause more problems for other instance admins. In any case the costs for lemmy.ml hosting are already covered at a much lower donation level, anything you contribute goes directly to developer salaries.
Then you really shouldn't be surprised that people don't want to donate when part of that support goes toward an instance that openly and aggressively supports authoritarian regimes, human rights violations, and genocide denial, and brutally censors any dissenting viewpoints.
The other option, of course, would be to run lemmy.ml in a way that doesn't actively piss off the majority of Lemmy users, but that doesn't seem to be a path you're willing to consider.
Honestly I'm genuinely torn about the situation. I've found such a great place here (outside of the tankie triad, of course), that as much as I disagree with your politics I'd probably donate anyway because of how great Lemmy is as a platform, if only you developed behind the scenes and weren't personally responsible for one of the worst places on said platform. As it is, as long as both a) lemmy.ml continues to be run the way it is and b) you continue to have an active part in that instance's abhorrent behavior, I can't in good conscience give you any financial support.
Would you donate to Lemmy if lemmy.ml hosting was funded separately?
At this point, I'm not sure I would trust the truthfulness of that claim. The hard-core refusal to do so up until this point has been both surprising and unsettling, to say the least.
I would consider it, but being completely honest, this whole event has really soured me on it. I probably just start looking outside of lemmy sometime in the coming weeks 🤷♂️
There was no hardcore refusal because this matter wasnt even mentioned as a blocker for donations until a few days ago. In fact lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
Probably not - for me it's more that the majority of my negative experiences on Lemmy have come on lemmy.ml, so the sticking point really is your involvement with it.
For a lot of other people in these threads though, it does seem like funding the hosting is the biggest deal. If the server costs for lemmy.ml are as low as you say, splitting off the hosting costs separately in some way (like taking donations directly from lemmy.ml that go into their own account separate from general Lemmy donations, for example) probably would see at least some sort of increase in donations to the overall Lemmy project. Especially if you made an announcement that this is what you were doing and maintained an official "separation of finances" position going forward.
If it wouldn't be too much extra work, it's probably worth a shot.
In other words your experience on Lemmy has been mostly positive? Then why dont you want to support the development of this free software? Keep in mind that lemmy.ml is exclusively financed via Opencollective, all other donation platforms go directly to developer salaries.