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.
FYI: communick pledges to take 20% of the profits from its hosting services and give to the open source developers of the underlying projects. So, the more people signing up to the $29/year package, the more we can support the developers from Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix.
Communick ? What is this ?
Communick is a commercial provider for messaging (Matrix) and ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, PixelFed) services. To get an account at any of its instances, you need to be a paying customer.