I can replace them if you can suggest better alternatives. Anyway Lemmy users seem to be older than Reddit users, and those who have spare money to donate should know these normal financial terms.

I rewrote the text again, have a look and let me know what you think. Also made some more design changes the donation page.

“Help Design Lemmy” sounds good, thanks for the suggestion. I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that? And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

We provide Lemmy as free and open source platform without any tracking or advertising, and work every day to improve it. Yet we also need money to pay our bills and provide for our families. Only 2% of Lemmy users donate, so we need your donation to keep this model working. Thank you for helping to create a new form of social media.

Not sure about the question mark, but the icons are a great idea! Here is how they look with different colored buttons:

Not sure what you mean, I can see these without login:

Right, I removed the asterisk and added a dotted underline instead to indicate hover text. The text with 4 months left is an old leftover, Ive removed it. Also made the text bigger and changed the button layout (though it looks too green now).

Thanks for the suggestions. I changed the first sentence to “Lemmy is an open source project developed by volunteers and provided for free”, and changed the hide button text:

Edit: Also shortened the title so it fits in a single line:

Thanks, changed the link.

Edit: Nope that broke the thumbnail, uploaded it to Lemmy directly now.

Works correctly for me. Are you using an app?

Sounds like another issue with programming.dev, because here it’s working fine.

Turns out the size limits for animations that we set on lemmy.ml also apply to proxied images. I would think its only for local uploads. Removed the limits now to get it working. Thanks for letting me know.

I live in Spain, the cost of living here is much cheaper than Germany or especially the United States. I also dont need luxuries, and have enough money saved to last for a while. If donations are not enough I could always work for some company, and spend less time on Lemmy.

Youre welcome! Im not really an animal person, but I choose dogs.

African or European swallow?

It seems some people simply need some target to hate on. Hopefully they will learn to accept different opinions when they arent being manipulated by for-profit social media anymore.

The upload function is mainly meant for images, like others said its better to use external sites for video uploads. Integrating upload to those remote sites seems like a lot of work for little benefit though.

Exactly, the more time goes by the better Lemmy will get. For sites like Reddit or now Digg its much easier to do marketing and get a quick user growth, but when they have problems then users will move to Lemmy.

You can export your settings, community follows etc and import them in another instance. Moving your existing posts and comments doesnt work well with federation.

This is currently work in progress.

The stack is great, I wouldnt want to change anything. Postgres is very mature and performant, with a high focus on correctness. It can sometimes be difficult to optimize queries, but there are wizards like @dullbananas@lemmy.ca who know how to do that. Anyway there is no better alternative that I know of. Rust is also great, just like Postgres it is very performant and has a focus on correctness. Unlike most programming languages it is almost impossible to get any runtime crashes, which is very valuable for a webservice.

The high performance means that less hardware is required to host a given number of users, compared to something like NodeJS or PHP. For example when kbin.social was popular, I remember it had to run on multiple beefy servers. Meanwhile lemmy.ml is still running on a single dedicated server, with much more active users. Or Mastodon having to handle incoming federation activities in background tasks which makes the code more complicated, while Lemmy can process them directly in the HTTP handler.

Nevertheless, scaling for more users always has its surprises. I remember very early in development, Lemmy wasnt able to handle more than a dozen requests per second. Turns out we only used a single database connection instead of a connection pool, so each db query was running after that last one was finished, which of course is very slow. It seems obvious in retrospect, but you never notice this problem until there are a dozen or so users active at the same time.

With the Reddit migration two years ago a lot of performance problems came up, as active users on Lemmy suddenly grew around 70 times. You can see some of that in the 0.18.x release announcements. One part of the solution was to add missing database indexes. Another was to remove websocket support, which was keeping a connection open for each user. That works fine with 100 users, but completely breaks down with 1000 or more.

After all there is nothing I would do different really. It would have been good to know about these scaling problems earlier, but thats impossible. In fact for my project Ibis (federated wiki) Im using the exact same architecture as Lemmy.