I’ve heard about the Lemmy devs struggling financially to be able to support Lemmy in the past. A lot of users say they’d support the devs if they shut down lemmy.ml, but it can be hard to quantify the value of such statements.
Thus, a proposal: Some trusted team of admins from another instance, say .world or blahaj.zone for example, should set up an account for people who want to support Lemmy but not lemmy.ml to donate into. This account would immediately donate all the money sent to it, if and when lemmy.ml is shut down. The Lemmy devs could think of it as an emergency fund for a rainy day, and if the financial situation ever gets desperate enough for them, they could shut down lemmy.ml and draw on this fund.
A side effect of the fund’s existence may be that people, now given the choice to support Lemmy without supporting lemmy.ml, stop donating to the devs directly and just put their money in the no-ml fund instead. if that happened, the devs would have no choice but to shut down .ml, but hey, that’s the free gift economy for you.
I think it’s kinda a dick move to hold a fund ransom until something is fulfilled, politician does this and it’s already bad enough. What if the fund being held by said account being misused? What if lemmy dev insist that they will not back down? Would the fund be held until it does, which will likely take forever?
If i want to donate and 100% make sure some of the fund actually reach my goal, i would’ve just donate to them. If i don’t agree with their political view point i will just don’t donate, or donate to piefed which equally need the fund to progress. Having someone else holding the fund for me is very icky, financial-wise.