Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
The fact that a bunch of folks just went and built this, still work on it regularly and fund themselves through donations is mind blowing to me. Absolute heroes.
Edit: went ahead and donated. Not much but something.
Not to say it's not still impressive, but Dessalines and Nutomic also get grant money from NLNet, or they at least did for a while. Not entirely sure what the status of that is lately. I'd guess donations make up the bulk at this point either way, following the surge in users from last year.
From liberapay you can see that they get like 400 bucks a week. Thats not much for two people who work full time on this. Suspecting they get the same from one or two other platforms still barely makes them a living.
Oh that's nice! Funding 90% of a person sounds kinda funny though. When I started donating it was half what they are getting now so that's cool it's going up.