I talked to a guy that worked in one of the deepest underground mines in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He said one of his bosses, a highly educated libertarian nut job was a flat earther and would debate his workers on a regular basis about it. I told him they should ask for more danger pay because at one point they might drill through the flat earth plain and fall into space … or land on a turtle.
I’m happy to see new users joining Lemmy and every instance out there big and small.
One thing everyone should consider and think of is … funding and supporting the Fediverse.
Every new user should consider and think about supporting the fediverse through a donation as they use this new community in order for it to remain free to use, open and freely available for everyone. We all like to believe that these things can be just free to use without any of us having to pay for any of it. We also like to think that people just magically and without reward or compensation just work in the background for free to keep all this software, hardware, equipment and organization running.
We don’t have have to spend a fortune to keep funding these projects, but we should contribute something to it even if it is a small amount. If thousands of users spend a dollar, then it would add up to thousands of dollars to keep this whole system well funded. I know I’ve chatted with a few of the instance owners and have read what developers have written in the past … many of them have well paying jobs and have commercial work themselves that they do and they enjoy doing the work on Lemmy as either a hobby or passion project. However, I also know that as the popularity of these platforms grow, expenses add up to more hardware requirements, new hardware requirements, software management, security management and even having people monitoring everything online around the clock. Eventually, no matter how you cut it, work, time, effort, equipment all ends up costing money to someone at some point. And those costs only increase as popularity grows.
Donating a little bit and funding even just a little from everyone should be a new norm we should all accept. Otherwise, any new social media we create, no matter how open source we want it to be will slowly just be affected by corporate rot and get taken over again by those who would like to make the most money from it.
Donating to Lemmy.ca (run by the non-profit Fedecan)
https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
Donating to the Lemmy Software developers
https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Donating to The Fediverse Foundation
https://fediverse.foundation/en/spenden/
But also … Donate to the instance you are on and support the people who maintain your instance.