Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.

Concerning the “providing the project for free”… I think that’s too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn’t put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you’d make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.

I think open source is giving and taking. It’s not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you’ve put in. And I shouldn’t expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren’t the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.

And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won’t work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can’t take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it’s at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.

And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers… It’s not a hobby project anymore. So it’s a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you’ve done so far. These come without.

I think you’re doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn’t seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don’t seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don’t need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.

I’m grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I’d like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.