Let’s start with the biggest news first: Lemmy is receiving funding from the NLnet foundation! The funding is for a total amount of 45.000 €, which will allow /u/dessalines and me (/u/nutomic ) to work on Lemmy full-time for at least half a year.
We have created various milestones for the work we are planning to do. Most of them are about getting ActivityPub federation ready for production. In addition, we will work on:
- better accessibility
- private communities and instances
- reworking search
- creating a
joinlemmy.mltype site - the option to block other users or communities
The details of the milestones will be posted on our github issue tracker soon.
We’re very excited about this opportunity, and can’t wait to finish federation.
In other news, we have just released Lemmy v0.7.0. Most importantly, this update switches to Pict-rs for image hosting, due to various performance-related issues with Pictshare. Pict-rs was coded from scratch in Rust by the amazing @asonix, who also created the ActivityPub library for Rust. We can’t thank him enough for all the work he is doing for Lemmy!
We’d also like to thank the following people for their contributions:
- @iav for their work in building arm compatible rust docker images and builds.
- @ernestwisniewski and @bytesnake for code contributions.
- Many others for contributing translations via the Lemmy weblate.
- Our Patreon and Liberapay supporters who help us devote more time to Lemmy (We’re still very far from these being able to sustain two developers)
- Everyone else who contributes to Lemmy, be it by coding, hosting instances or just using it and spreading the word!
Other than that, since v0.6.0 in January we’ve closed over 100 issues, fixed tons of bugs and added many new features.
You can find the full changelog and upgrade instructions here.
While that’s certainly a positive thing, I feel obligated ask about the nature of this funding? Does it carry with it any obligations from Lemmy/leverage for NLnet?
To add, the projects nlnet helps fund can give you an indication of how cool a foundation they are: stuff like searx, wireguard, meilisearch, matrix, nextcloud, funkwhale, pixelfed…
ayy nextcloud
We Dutch are total chuds, but this is pretty cool.
We gave them a list of milestones that we are going to work on, and then signed a “Memorandum of Understanding”. We will get the agreed amount of money in the form of a donation once we finish a milestone. There is no company Lemmy or anything like that, we are just doing this as individuals.
That’s a really cool system