Which is not useful if those users are people who try out the platform and then abandon it, or worst bots for state actors.

Right now i don’t see any movement in the amount of donations (patreon, liberapay). so i am not kinda skeptical this will end up being meaningful growth.

They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don’t think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn’t guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.

Using custom libraries sounds like a problem that is easy to miss. sure the super diligent developer will be fine but its like saying there is no point in linters because people just don’t read coding guidelines.

Looks like a few services already have a mechanism like i described in place. e.g. Kubernetes throws a “APIRemovedInNextReleaseInUse”.

Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.

“time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.

Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.

information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.

Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.

We have lemmy apps that still aren’t supporting API changes added over a year ago. We even had one such case last week.

That sounds like something could be improve. is there some sort of warning mechanism in place?

Say when using a lemmy client. the client either specifies its a production build. or if its not then the lemmy server reports where deprecated API’s are used.

Not sure that is the correct approach. break frequently break often seems better (that’s what PHP and java seem to do as far as i can tell, unlike python 3 which caused a lot of drama).

notify a API is deprecated. give some time for users to update to the new API (1 year?) and then remove it.

Of course after version 1.0 there might be less breakage so it won’t be a be problem.

Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.

Also a demo instance would be nice.

This isn’t what i had in mind. i meant more like changing the line to something like:

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, donating money and helping find and fix bugs.

With “donating money” maybe replaced with “funding”.

I think liberapay has that feature.

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs

I feel like people giving their hard earned money for lemmy also should get a show of appreciation.

Why is it not a part of the project itself if you don’t mind me asking? i would imagine plugins are for the more opinionated or experimental features.

Sounds reasonable. maybe take 3 months. spend about 30-50 hours working on this and see you can sustain the motivation to do this. then decide what to do next.

Still, i try to act like an environmentalist and that means not buying stuff i don’t need. also a big part of that money will go to funding manufacturing costs and the development of new products for the same product line. unlike a campaign where a larger share of the money will go to developing a phone (and some of the money will go to give a return on investment to the owner, which is something i am fine with as long as there is no non-profit that can do the same work better).

Also for the CEO or board of directors it will be harder or even impossible to deduce that this signals a interest in a FOSS friendly smartphone.

Very Interesting. any ETA? will it have faster hardware like a faster CPU? will there be a fundraising campaign like kickstarter?

Thanks for the suggestions! I’m not actually looking for any donations though. It probably sounds weird, but I don’t want to derive value from this, or even assign value to it, in the interest of keeping the information as freely accessible as possible. Not too get too ideological, seeking money often causes people to make a good idea bad, or to make a simple process inefficient, to make more money from it. I’m thankfully in a position where I can keep (slowly) working on this project in my free time, while still keeping my head above water.

If you want to not get paid that is fine. but donating is the only way some people will be able to help make this happen. you could hire people using something like fiverr to do some of the boring stuff. money is just an efficient way to store and transfer economic resources. There is a significant difference often between a how a non profit allocates a economic resources vs a company that is owned by pension funds and mutual funds and is just trying to maximize a return on investment. Some of the best open source projects (e.g. blender signal thunderbird etc) hire full time workers.

When dealing with stuff like kickstarter campaigns. some people might not to risk the full amount (something like 600$), they might be interested in donating something like 10$ to help the project put out a product. then read up on reviews and decide if to go for it.