I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”
This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.
I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.
So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?
Lemmy is open source. Worst case is people fork it and the community has to pay the new developers. But I don’t think it will come to this. Now that the project is rolling I doubt that the devs will risk it. But wouldn’t hurt to donate maybe a extra buck, if you already help your server instance, to finance another independent full time contributor.
Open source and AGPL licensed, we can separate the code from them at any time and we do not need permission.
Agree re: $ towards instance admins; I have a tiny Mastodon instance and it isn’t cheap.