GoodEye8

I'm simply explaining the grievances people have that is stopping them from donating and what I personally would do in your situation to alleviate those grievances. That grievance is the nature of lemmy.ml which you've either voluntarily or involuntarily let slip into promoting a very specific political agenda that most lemmy users don't agree with. If you're genuine in your desire to have lemmy.ml as something that helps development then it should be apparent to you how the current state of lemmy.ml contradicts that desire. If you can't acknowledge that I can only assume you're using the development of lemmy as an excuse to keep lemmy.ml as it is.

Which segues to the end of my previous comment. If you think that's unfair to the users of the instance then the only thing that you can do is step away. You can always start a new instance or you can work something out with the existing instance owners to get the data and feedback you need to develop Lemmy. And to be clear those instances can't be Lemmygrad or Hexbear because those two instances are also not acceptable for most Lemmy users and wouldn't solve the grievances people have.

At the end of the day it is not my concern if you get funded or not. I have no issue funding the development despite your obviously transphobic stance and Dessalines stance on Uighurs because I am capable of separating your work from who you are. I don't have to like you to support your work so I'm willing to compromise here. But me tolerating both of you doesn't mean I'm going to compromise supporting a platform that is actively promoting an agenda I cannot accept. I've already compromised on tolerating you, how about you compromise a bit to meet half way? If you're unwilling to compromise this is my final alternative to supporting lemmy. Remove yourselves from the project, let someone more reasonable than you to take over and I'll donate to them.

You have to understand that at this point Lemmy is bigger than you and its popularity is growing in spite of you and lemmy.ml. The fact that Lemmy is growing but your donations are shrinking should make that point evident. It's up to you if you're going to adjust to the new reality or stick your old ways and run into monetary issues.

Interestingly that's the exact thing I loved about Hollow Knight. I got so immersed in the exploration specifically because I got lost. On my first playthrough I ended up sequence breaking the game and cleared out deepnest, ancient basin, hive and kingdoms end before the city of tears. I was way out of my depth and I loved every moment of it.

I've given it some more thought. There's no guarantee that money going to the developers won't be used to for the instance they are financing. If I give you money and the lemmy.ml funds are empty, are you going to let lemmy.ml die? Considering you said it is used to test new versions of lemmy and measure performance and test how effective the mod tools are I don't think you would let lemmy.ml die. You'd finance it yourself, most likely from the money that is donated for the development of lemmy. So separating lemmy development and lemmy.ml instance costs wouldn't really change the situation.

But I also no longer think it's inherently necessary to step away from lemmy.ml. I get the value a real instance would give to development, so what I think needs to happen is a shift in what lemmy.ml is supposed to be. If the purpose of lemmy.ml is to support the development of lemmy then the primary goal of the instance should be that. Clearly the biggest issue people have is politics and how lemmy.ml is used as a vessel to push a certain kind of political agenda, which means if the primary goal is to support development then the instance right now contradicts its primary goal. It's dissuading people from donating to the development and it's making the main developers (you in this case) focus on the drama (for the lack of a better word) instead of spending time developing. I think the solution is pretty simple, lemmy.ml should take a hard anti-politics stance. Do a purge and kick all politics off the instance, including instance users who discuss politics on other instances. Have it be memes, technology, privacy and FOSS and gaming and everything else that doesn't necessarily lead to politics. Users who want to take part in political discourse can find instances that allow political discourse, and that includes you and Dessalines. If you want to be political create an alt account on a different instance. Communities that want to be political can find other instances to be in political. You don't need politics to run lemmy.ml. And for the sake of clarity also add to the instance about section that the instance exists to support lemmy development because currently that is not written anywhere.

If you think that's unfair to the current users of lemmy.ml I honestly don't see how you could resolve this situation without stepping away from lemmy.ml.

OG Oblivion was super green. So much that the remaster, despite having natural lighting, looks brown in comparison.

Kinda? He's free to ask whatever price the believes he is worth, I don't have an issue with that. But just like he's free to ask whatever price he thinks is fair it's also fair for the other side to just say "No, thanks". No reason to be upset about it. Or do you think I should side with someone in the top 1% simply because one of the biggest corporations in the world told them no? It's someone with "set for life" money complaining that the corporation with essentially infinite funds didn't want to give him as much money as he demanded. I think siding with either side (based on the information we know so far) is stupid.

I imagine the biggest point are the censorship, disinformation and tankie allegations. These are all documented in this post. Another point worth bringing up is that they are the admins of lemmy.ml, where most of the allegations happen. Lemmy.ml also has something of a tankie problem and one of the devs has said that the donations will also cover the cost of running the instance. So by donating to the devs you're also donating to an instance that possibly has no problem with censorship, disinformation and harboring tankies.

I would be willing to turn a blind eye if I could trust the devs to step away from lemmy.ml and focus solely on the development of Lemmy. But I don't trust the devs enough to actually do that so I personally won't be supporting Lemmy development until someone else becomes the maintainer of Lemmy.

EDIT: just to cover off the inevitable "what will happen if we stop supporting Lemmy. I don't want to go back to Reddit" fear. If Lemmy doesn't work out and it gets abandoned there's always Mbin. Anyone here from the Reddit exodus knows that it's annoying to migrate but Mbin can federate with Lemmy which means going from Lemmy to Mbin is going to be less painful than form Reddit to Lemmy.

Have you considered complaining about Russia ruining international relations with their neighbors, which has led to this situation? It's not like those countries have a fundamental hatred of Russia. They would love it if Russia could be a normal ally because it would be immensely beneficial. It's Russia who can't be a fucking normal ally. It's not Lithuania who is building spy networks in Russia or bribing corrupt officials, it's Russia doing those things to Lithuania. And not just Lithuania, it's all Baltic states and Poland and Russian money goes even deeper into Europe.

It sucks for Russians that Lithuania has done this but it's ultimately Russia's own fault Lithuania had to do this. If there's anyone you or Russians should blame, it's Russia. You can't just push countries around and expect them to not do anything about it.

I would imagine they'd be stupid if they did use AI. I've seen people use AI to "write" technical documentation that I have had to review. That shit goes straight into the bin because the time I spend fixing all the AI nonsense is about the same amount of time it would take for me to write the document myself. It's gotten to a point where I straight up reject all AI generated documentation because I know fixing them is a waste of time.

I imagine legal documents have to be at least as precise as technical documents, so if they're checking the output I seriously doubt they're saving any time or money by using AI.

Verstappen is just a beast. How he finds the pace to out quali McLaren is just unbelievable.

And excellent quali by Kimi, I wasn't expecting him to get this fast this soon. I already had high expectations for him and he's just exceeding them.

I get that his name draws views but I don't think that's a factor going from S1 to S2. It's not like he went from nobody to somebody. He was already popular prior to S1, he didn't get more popular between seasons. His S1 salary probably already accounted for his popularity so it was most likely also accounted in the S2 salary. But, if he thinks he should've been paid more because of his name recognition then that's him pretty much trying to do the same thing he's blaming the accountants for, he would be trying to squeeze out every penny from his popularity.

I don't know about the specific of the deal or what S2 will actually contain, but as I understand S1 set up a new Hawkeye so maybe S2 would've had Renner not as the main character and possibly not doing the same amount of work. If he is going to do less work it would make sense to also pay less. This of course is speculation as we don't know actually know what S2 would've been about or what deal was presented to Renner. All we know is Renners side where he claims it would've been the same amount of work and I don't think I need to explain how that can't be taken as the absolute truth. The rest of what he said really makes me question if he's being completely honest or is he skewing the story to make himself look like the good guy.

But if he is telling the truth it would be pretty fucked up to offer half the salary for the same amount of work.

But will it fuck up my formatting when I add an image?