I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
I’m sure that everyone who was raging at Sync over the last few days, stating that all software should be FOSS have all made significant contributions to the Lemmy devs.
FOSS is pretty bloody great, and one of the greatest things about the modern IT industry. But FOSS doesn’t pay a mortgage.
To be clear: I have contributed to Lemmy, and will likely pay a lifetime fee for Sync sooner or later.
I installed Sync, threw $16 LJ’s way for putting in the work to convert it to work with Lemmy, and then uninstalled lol (commenting from Thunder). I plan on continuing to use FOSS clients for Fediverse stuff, but am happy there’s a healthy variety of open and closed source clients for everyone to pick and choose from.
The rabid “it should be free” crowd here acts like we live in a post scarcity utopia where everything is roses and they deserve whatever they like on demand. The majority of users on this site wouldn’t give a penny to help save their instance from dying.
Reality is that FOSS is basically never given donations (donate to your instance hosts people) and relying on donations is a guarantee that you’ll run a charity at a loss.
Software development is hard work that only a small group of people know how to do (for now: I still hope it’s like 50% of the population in the future but…) And to make independent software full time is a risky endeavor.
You’d have to be off your fucking gord to make FOSS software full time and expect to stay above the poverty line.
Good on you for supporting Sync and Lemmy. I do the same and plan to continue doing so… Cause I want the bad place to Digg it’s own grave with their greed. But that’ll only happen if we’re crowd funding our FOSS.