Yesterday, as part of the discussions related to Lemmy current inability to delete all user content I wrote a proposal: if enough people stepped up to help with funding, I'd take my work on my Fediverser project (which already has an admin web tool that "knows" how to interface with Lemmy) to solve all the GDPR-specific issues that we were raised by @[email protected]
The amount asked is, quite frankly, symbolic. I offered to work 10h/week on it if at least 20 people showed up to contribute via Github (which would be $4/month) or to signup to my instance (which access is given via a $29/year subscription). In other words, I'm saying "Give me $80/month and I will work 40 hours per month on this thing which so many of you are saying is critical to the project."
So now that we have passed 24 hours, 58 upvotes and a handful of "that's great!" responses, let me tell you how that translated into actual supporters:
- Zero sponsors on Github
- Zero signups on Communick.
Don't take this as me demanding anything. I'm writing this just to illustrate the following:
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The Tragedy of the commons is real. I can bet that at least 30% of the 60+ thousand users on Lemmy are proud owners of a pricey iPhone, and most of these are okay with paying for an app to use on their pricey iPhones, but almost none of them will even consider throwing a few bucks per year on the way of an open source developer.
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The Outrage Mill is not a "capitalist" or even "corporate" phenomenon. People were piling on the devs yesterday for completely ignoring "such a crucial piece of functionality", but no one actually stepped up to offer (or gather) the resources needed to have this problem solved. It's almost as if people were getting more out of the discussion about the problem than working through a solution.
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"Skin In The Game" is a powerful filter. No matter how much people will tell you that something is important to them, the true test is seeing how many are willing to pay the asking price. If not people are not willing to pay $2 per hour of work, then I can assume that this is not really important.
Skin in the Game is about showing that you are willing to accept the risks and costs of standing up to your values. This is a separate thing from "I will only give money to X if they are willing to be subjected to my personal purity test".
I am not saying that donating to me specifically would be a display of SITG. You (and by you I mean "anyone that wants to keep using Lemmy but is worried about potential GDPR violations") could, e.g:
The offensive part of your previous post is not that it makes the donation conditional on a milestone, but just you came as someone who is trying to use money as a way to control my behavior. You basically said "I don't like what you did before, so I will only support you for something that I do like if you disown your previous actions". This is completely removed from SITG and reminiscent of a struggle session.
My apologies if you thought my comment was trying to control you with money, I wasn't trying to hire you. My offer is open to anybody that might just happen to be working on something like that for any reason, they can mention me for my support. The time limit is only so I don't get 10 requests in 2025 from people when I've long forgotten about it.