Besides @dessalines and me who work on Lemmy full time, there are many people who contribute to Lemmy without any financial reward. Those include translators, community moderators, programmers and others. Without them, Lemmy wouldn’t be what it is today.
Because we are funded by donations, we aren’t able to reward these contributors with money in any useful quantity. Besides, not everyone wants to receive money and turn this into a kind of job. So what we can do is try to reward people in other ways. Here are some ideas:
- Code Contributors: We are starting to write changelogs for every release now, and will mention who contributed to the code. We could also include a list of contributors directly in Lemmy, eg in an about page (here is an example from Syncthing).
- Translators: Mastodon credits them by mentioning their names in the changelog. I have another idea, we could show the names of translators directly inside Lemmy, to the people who are using that language version. So if someone uses Lemmy in Spanish, they would see the names of Spanish translators (could be on an about page, or next to the language setting).
- Documentation Writers/Translators: Seems pretty straightforward, we can mention them on the first page of the documentation.
- Mods/Admins: These are different from the previous ones, which are related to Lemmy development, while this is about using Lemmy. Moderating is generally a pretty thankless job, and I can’t think of any projects or websites that reward it especially well.
- Any others that I forgot to mention?
One thing to note is that this shouldn’t cause much extra work for us developers, because then we would have less time to fix bugs and implement features. So it should be possible to automate these tasks (eg with a script that reads the names of contributors from git), or someone should volunteer to take care of manual tasks.
Another thing I am wondering is how to treat contributions of different sizes. Should someone who translates a single string be listed in the same way as someone who does the translation for a whole language? Maybe we could set a minimum contribution size for people to be listed, or order the names by the size of their contributions?
I am curious to read your ideas and suggestions, especially from those who already contribute to Lemmy (or similar projects).
I think these are all great ideas.
Can’t we have like an annual mod-admin day? On which we collectively thank our mods and admins? With high quality memes.
Proposal:
admin-appreciation day = 13 July (because today)
mod-appreciation day = 13 August (because one month later)
Or are there more meaningful dates?
1 one up this, maybe irl stuff too? like Lemmy holidays? idk
Haha. I like it. One day without Lemmy. And then when we come back, we share our holidays pics.
Yes, a day where all moddable tasks are turned off for users so all mods and admins can have a day. You can still view Lemmy, like posts and comments, but no commenting or posting.
Er… if the point is that people are doing these things for no reward, why would you want to introduce rewards? That would completely upset the whole ecosystem.
out of kindness I suppose
What about creating a dedicated thread for that and for every release, all contributors are listed and appreciated. Additionally there could be a static text that mentions all the other volunteer’s who contributed and helped indirectly
