And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to “work for the portfolio”?

No one is talking about “a lot of money” here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a “co-op” all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.

I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don’t get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.

The problem with this approach is that the rest of world is not going to be waiting around for a handful of idealists. They are going to use what solves their problem. You can bet that at this moment there are at least a dozen junior VCs in Sand Hill Road looking for investment opportunities in something that be sold as the next reddit and are ready to use their PR machine to convince the masses that this new shiny app is “completely different”, “revolutionary” and “learn the lessons from the failure of reddit”. You and I may know this is total bullshit. However, when the alternative is just a handful of developers who bans those who come asking for features and act like they don’t care about the majority of Joe Average, who do you think they will choose?

I get when people say that they want to work on something and they don’t care that their pet project doesn’t become big, and I wish we lived in a world where more people could simply work on their things on their own time. But I also understand that if we really want to fight against the Evil Corporations ™, we need to beat them at their own game. That will involve doing all sorts of unpleasant things like “deal with customers (even the rude ones) by addressing their needs instead of telling them to fuck off” and “how to make enough money so that you can compete in the job market for the best talent instead of depending on Fred who is the only one working on a crucial feature, but needs some time off to study for his finals at Uni”.

Even if you do not want to call your project a business, “we want enough to survive and pay rent” is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.

while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount.

Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?

we’re all underpaid at the end of the day.

Sorry, it seems you are projecting here. Even if that were true, going with this “we are all underpaid, so others should accept that as a fact of life” doesn’t really ring like a compelling point to attract people to work on Lemmy.

the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” (…) is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.

The point is not whether people could (or should) live on a salary of X or Y. The point no one should be pricing their work in terms of what they “need to get by” and instead they should be pricing themselves in terms of “how much value does my work produce”. When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.

The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.