Lemmy Development Update February 2026
Lemmy Development Update February 2026
The charts above show growth of active users on thelemmy.club (left) and lemmus.org which are suggested on join-lemmy.org. It shows that improvements to the official project site really have a (small) influence on user growth. There are also a few new features:
This past month we've been working on lemmy-ui bug fixes and visual improvements, and a few remaining lemmy back end issues to get ready for the 1.0 release. We've closed over 20 lemmy-ui milestone issues, and have only a few remaining. The only major issue left is performance-testing, to ensure all our database changes and optimizations are working correctly.
You can follow our progress with these milestone links:
If you'd like to see the new features and visual updates in production, you can visit voyager.lemmy.ml which deploys updates every night. Please help by testing the new features and reporting any problems.
If you have any experience with web development or want to learn it, consider contributing to lemmy-ui. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap.
If you have experience with Kotlin or Android development, you can help contribute to lemmy's open source android app, Jerboa.
Thank you to everyone who has helped out with testing, development, spreading the word about lemmy, and building communities. Your help has brought lemmy from an idea to one of the most vital pieces of software in the fediverse.
Here are the major changes from February:
Or see the full list of changes at the links below:
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.