There are a lot of awesome open source projects that I'd love to donate to, however, I can't afford to donate to all of them.

It would be great if there was something like a charity fund (eg. GiveWell), but for FOSS. So a lot of people donate to it, and it distributes all collected money between some curated projects (most influential/important/promising/underfunded/etc.).

Do you know if something like this already exists? if not, could it potentially be a good idea to do? It seems like the idea of donating to open-source is currently more prominent in the community due to the xz backdoor thing.

One of my financial goals for 2024 is to donate more to charity. I have a couple of major charities that I donate to once or twice a year and love the personal touch of a GoFundMe whenever someone I'm in some way connected to needs help but otherwise I find it hard to get motivated to find charities to give to.

I used to donate regularly to Omaze, a Charitable organization that would count your donations as entries in raffles for the chance to win prizes. I never won and never really expected to but it made giving really fun and allowed me to reach a much wider breadth of charities than if I had done the legwork myself. Omaze is now shut down and while I'd rather not have to admit it, making donating fun or even just easier would get me to do it more often.

Does anyone have any recommendations to get my charitable motivation up other than finding worthwhile charities and manually donating myself?

Hey Tildes, with the renewed interest in the site, it got me thinking that we should hold a fundraiser for the not-for-profit company—which currently consists of just one person—that runs Tildes. It's overdue.

Disclaimer: These are my words as a member of the community. I haven't run this message by the admin before posting. I may have gotten some details wrong.

Where to donate

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

History

A bit of history: The site admin, @Deimos ran the first three years of the site working full-time on it, paid only by donations, plus a $5000 GitHub sponsor match one year, which I'm not even sure was fully achieved, or only just barely.

For that time period 2018-2020, a lowball salary as a software engineer with his experience would have been $100,000 USD per year not including benefits.

If he received $5000 in donations per year (almost certainly an overestimate for more recent years) plus the $5000 GitHub match for the first year—for the 5 years of Tildes' life, that's about $30,000.

The remaining opportunity cost of $270,000 was essentially paid out of pocket by himself, as a donation to the community. Plus remember there are server expenses, legal incorporation expenses, etc. And, y'know, rent.

In recent years he had to take a full-time job because the situation was, of course, unsustainable.

App?

I announced in April that a mobile app is under development. Originally, I was planning to take my time and release a first alpha by the end of 2023.

How about if we struck a deal: get the donation numbers up and I will devote more time to the app, as opposed to splitting my time between it and contract work and other projects.

What's the deal?

• 150 active donors combined on GitHub Sponsors and Patreon—I'll release an alpha by November.
  GOAL REACHED
• 300 active donors—I'll release an alpha by October.
  GOAL REACHED
• 500 active donors—I'll release an alpha by September.

The dollar amounts don't matter.

As of writing, we are at 46 active donors.

What's in it for you, though?

Feeling like I did a good deed, I guess? I'm not looking for a "slice of the pie," to be clear. In some sense I'd be matching your donations with my time, aka opportunity cost.

If I donate, can I bother the admin to work more on the site?

No.

Again, I haven't run this fundraiser by the admin. He will certainly keep his full-time employment for the foreseeable future, and will not magically have more hours in the day to devote to Tildes.

With a sustainable budget, though, a lot can happen in the future. Contracting out work to others, for example.

But the point of this fundraiser is more to make a small dent in the past debt we owe the admin, not making any promises whatsoever on the future of the site and how it's run.

Let's go, my fellow Tilderinos!

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

Enshittification: begone!! Let us celebrate our newly found freedom from crap social media giants and sponsored goons by donating a few dollars to Tildes so they can keep the lights on and the fireworks popping 🎉

I’m feeling generous and want Tildes to succeed and think this is a good opportunity to try to hit the November goal.

If you donate and DM me or comment here with proof, I will match your donation. If you set up a NEW recurring donation, and DM me or comment here with proof, I will match that donation triple on a one-time basis (so, you set up 5 dollars recurring = 15 dollars from me this month).

Services we enjoy need revenue to succeed. If we want those services to exist, we need to fund them. Please consider donating to Tildes.

• Donate via the GitHub Sponsor Page (the best way to donate as GitHub is also matching)

• Donate via Patreon

• Donate via Stripe

The overall donation page is here: https://docs.tildes.net/donate

You can DM me here for proof, or comment in this thread, or on reddit as /u/umbrae if you prefer for some reason (maybe you browse logged out).

How do you all feel about making some UI changes to prompt more donations to Tildes?

For newer users' edification, at the very least we need to pay Deimos enough to keep working on this project full time. If I understand the situation correctly, Deimos has put around 2 years into this project and I know that we are really lucky to have someone as skilled as he is, working on a project as noble as Tildes.

I feel that the current UI which prompts users to donate is much too passive as compared to a normal "call to action." All we currently have is:

_{It has no advertising, no investors, and is supported by your donations.}

The subtlety of that donate link is part of the coolness of Tildes, but I have come across users' comments about how they were not aware of the Tildes Patreon.

So how can we do better without being annoying? What design patterns for this do you like on other sites?

_{edit: phrasing}

Designing, coding, moderating, promoting and doing all the business admin on Tildes must be fairly thankless. But without all this effort we'd not be able to enjoy discussions with each other & share all this interesting content. I don't feel that much appreciation is really shown on here (except maybe miss-voting on all Deimos' comments).

But it is a little awkward, spurious thanks all over the place would just be noise. I thought I'd make a topic especially for people to say thanks in. I'm really enjoying Tildes content and discussion. Plus I'm a big believer in the goals of Tildes as laid out in the docs.

So I'd like to say a big thank you to Deimos and other useful contributors! Thanks for making the site we have to use today and dreaming of the hopefully better possible site we'll see in the future.

I'm also hoping to start a discussion on what enthusiastic Tildes users can do to most usefully help make Tildes good now and better in the future.

A list of stuff we can do:

• Obviously posting lots of good content and interesting discussions. Voting honestly and using comment labels judiciously.

• You can donate and currently we can see Tildes Patreon is at $375 a month. Deimos posted some more figures recently.

• We all regularly get invite codes and bringing in more people who can get excited (and maybe also help) is obviously good.

• The issue tracker and bug reports are all public so you can make suggestions, vote or comment on existing ones and perhaps more usefully see if you can work out how to reproduce reported bugs.

• As of a bit over two months ago Tildes is open source. This means you can track down bugs from the issue tracker or even contribute code for new features.

RFC:

So are other people liking Tildes? What is it you like? Are you excited enough to want to help out?

Also is there anything useful users can do I've missed? In these already mentioned areas what's actually most useful to do? Are some things of negative use? Could Deimos change his process to make more use of community help? Is there anything Deimos could delegate that people would be willing to volunteer on? Gitlab Walmart greeter would be cool but is anyone willing to do it?

When it comes to disaster relief, I often hear the refrain that it is best to donate cash, and donating boxes of things often hurts more than it helps. Is this universally true, or are there situations where donation boxes are actually helpful?

Search results on the subject ("disaster relief donation box vs cash"), all saying that boxes of stuff hurt more than help, due to the logistical costs of shipping, sorting, and storage:

• https://www.cidi.org/how-disaster-relief-works/monetary-contributions-work-bestwhy-cash-is-best/
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/best-intentions-when-disaster-relief-brings-anything-but-relief/
• https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/10/27/thing-bad-disaster-donation/

Tildes does have bills to pay. The donations are open, but I'd like to go beyond the basic donations for a moment.

Right now, tildes has server costs, and also the lead developer (Deimos) is donating his full time to the project rather than working for someone else. He can't do that forever, so if we want him full time, we need to get him paid by the non-profit. In the future, that cost is probably going to expand to larger server costs, multiple developers, possibly community managers and other staff - though nothing ridiculous like reddit with 300 people doing marketing.

When we talked about funding, we wondered if we could get all users to toss in one dollar a month, and if there were enough users (millions) even reduce that to one dollar a year. Now that we have a lot of new people here, I'd like to ask what everyone thinks of those funding ideas, and if they have any other good ideas on how to raise money to pay for whatever tildes' costs are.

Make it possible to donate in exchange for placing a monocle, sticker or gold star cough on a comment. It's karma and it's an instant way to donate to keep the site afloat.

Also donating could give the donater a special sticker on their username like "supporter" or something.