I think the number is much higher if you consider all the people donating to their local server.
Plus your numbers seem off. For example, Librapay shows that there are currently over 300 people with weekly donations. Where are past or one time donors listed?
Patreon is paying out $2k a month, and has over 400 donors.
Your number seems much more like the number of regular donors rather than the total number of donors ever.
The links here are specifically the donation links to donate to the Lemmy devs. So even though they link to Open Collective, that's specifically the Lemmy dev one. There are others for other instances.
Yeah, that's the number of current donors with a regular donation. They have a goal of supporting 3 devs full time from regular donations, and this is showing their progress towards that goal.
Our current donation amounts, summing from the various platforms, and live updated every few hours, are here: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Currently we have 2 full time devs(nutomic and me, splitting ~1 dev salary, as you can see from the above link), and have 2-3 more that we'd like to add as fulltime to our little dev coop.
We're also in the process of getting another year of funding from NLNet (we'll announce this once its finalized), which will go to the new devs we're trying to onboard.
Kinda reminds me of youtuber asking people to suscribe their channels because most of the users watching their videos are not suscribed, it's not gonna change, but in this case, it would be nice if people could donate, i personally can't, i wish, but i can't
How am I supposed to donate to a project that forces me to select the language at the end of each post?
Fucks sake, is it that hard to have a dropdown under settings for the default language?
And to be fair, what's the point? The people running the biggest instances will eventually sell all their user's data to train LLMs anyways. There's no guarantee they won't.
Majority of people in this world speaks two languages or more.
And that's exactly the point, I do too. However most of what I post is English and lemmy should have a "default post language" option to avoid that issue. I'm happy with changing the language to anything other than English on the 20% of the time I'm not writing in English however I'm not happy to have to pick English around 80% of the time. See the problem now?
Since all instances mirror comments on subscribed communities you could simply create your own instance, leech it all and sell to LLMs. No need to go to the trouble of hosting a large instance.
@TCB13@CowsLookLikeMaps I sympathise, but perhaps they could fix that and many other issues if they had more funding. If it was already perfect, they would have less need for funding, I suppose.