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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "donations". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Tildes fundraiser June 2023: Encourage an app developer (me) to work on a Tildes app faster, by donating to Tildes (not me)!

      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....

      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

      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!

      313 votes
    2. July 2023 Tildes Fundraiser

      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...

      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 🎉

      79 votes
    3. Added a page showing details of Tildes's financials, as well as a monthly donation goal

      On the home page of Tildes, there's now a monthly donation goal meter shown at the top of the sidebar. The "(more details)" link in the box goes to a new Financials page, which shows the current...

      On the home page of Tildes, there's now a monthly donation goal meter shown at the top of the sidebar. The "(more details)" link in the box goes to a new Financials page, which shows the current expenses and income for Tildes for this month.

      This is information that I've always been meaning to make public, and the original announcement blog post even mentioned it as an intention. So far it only includes the current month, but I'm intending to add information about past income and expenses eventually as well.

      The Financials page should mostly explain itself, but I want to talk a little more about the goal specifically and why it seems to be set unrealistically high. To be clear, it probably is unrealistically high at this point, but I think it's important to be honest about where the next "stage" in Tildes's sustainability is, and how far away from it we currently are. I could have set the goal to a lower number to make it more achievable, but that would really just be arbitrary and wouldn't represent any meaningful threshold.

      The first important milestone was making sure that all the actual expenses were paid every month, so that keeping the site up wasn't actively costing me money. We're long past that point and almost always have been, which is great on its own—so many businesses and sites never reach that "break even" point and are forced to shut down, but there's absolutely no danger of that happening with Tildes. For how small and young the site is, it's amazing that we've already reached that goal.

      The next milestone, which the current goal represents, is making it so that I'm not effectively donating my time to continue maintaining and developing the site, which means being able to pay myself enough that I can think of Tildes as a "real job". As you can see, we're still pretty far from that point right now, but I think it's a good reminder (especially to myself) to have the meter showing it. As I said in another comment recently, there are other things I should probably focus my efforts on more that would help, and this will be a prominent reminder of that.

      I also want to mention that the overall situation isn't quite as bleak as the goal makes it look. There have been multiple incredibly generous one-time donations made over the last year and a half that you won't see in the current month's numbers, and that's absolutely made a huge difference. I'll try to get the historical information added before too long so that the picture is more complete.

      Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions, and thanks again for all of your contributions, whether they're actual donations or just being active and contributing to the site in that way. It's all important, and I greatly appreciate all of it.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      95 votes
    4. The donation goal for November has been (more than) reached! Let's talk a bit about how to handle "extra" donations

      As noticed yesterday, the donation goal meter in the sidebar made a huge jump upwards yesterday due to an extremely generous (and anonymous) donation of 0.3 BTC. Again, if that person is reading,...

      As noticed yesterday, the donation goal meter in the sidebar made a huge jump upwards yesterday due to an extremely generous (and anonymous) donation of 0.3 BTC. Again, if that person is reading, thank you!

      When I added the goal and Financials page about a week and a half ago, I explained that I thought it was probably too high to reach yet, but it was intended to show the progress we're making towards the point where the site is truly fully sustainable (and that progress is already great for the site's size).

      But now thanks to that generous donation, we've already surpassed the first monthly goal, which honestly wasn't something I was expecting to happen for a while. Because of that, I want to talk a bit about how we can handle the "surplus" in cases like this.

      My general feeling is that when it reaches the next month, any amount above the goal should probably "roll over" to the next month, starting us out at a higher point than the normal baseline from monthly recurring donations. For example, as of right now we're about $574.10 above this month's goal, so December will start out with that much in addition to the monthly contributions. This feels the most fair to me in terms of keeping the impact of larger donations and ones made after already reaching 100%, so that people don't feel like some of their donation is "wasted" or that they should wait until next month to donate so they can help with a goal.

      There are definitely some edge cases with this that might get weird, but they mostly only come up with extremely large one-time donations or constantly surpassing the goal, and those are both problems I'd be happy to have.

      I'm also probably going to tinker with the design of the goal bar a little over the next couple days to be able to show progress beyond 100%, since just having an unchanging full green bar there for the rest of the month would be boring.

      Let me know if you have any thoughts about this overall—it's a pretty minor concern overall, but I thought it would be good to have a thread about it anyway, partially as a celebration of hitting the first official goal ever set so quickly.

      As always, thank you very much to everyone that contributes to Tildes through donations as well as all the other ways (being active on the site, promoting it to others, helping with the open-source code/repo, etc.). It's hugely encouraging to me to have so many people helping support the site already.

      79 votes
    5. Today and Tomorrow, I will Match Donations to Tildes up to $500 total, and will match recurring donations 3X.

      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...

      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.

      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).

      55 votes
    6. I've been accepted into GitHub Sponsors - if you have a Patreon pledge or other recurring donation to Tildes, I'd really appreciate it if you could move it over

      When GitHub Sponsors was announced back in May, I applied immediately, and have just recently been accepted. This is now, by far, the best way available to make a recurring donation to Tildes:...

      When GitHub Sponsors was announced back in May, I applied immediately, and have just recently been accepted.

      This is now, by far, the best way available to make a recurring donation to Tildes:

      • They aren't currently charging any fees, even for payment processing.
      • They're matching up to $5000 in contributions for the first year.

      On Patreon, about 10% of every donation is taken between processing fees, Patreon's own fees, and PayPal (for transferring the money out to the bank). Even without the matching, donating through GitHub instead means that 10% more of your money (all of what you're donating) will come to Tildes, and until we exhaust the matching it's more like 2.2x. For example, a $5/month donation on Patreon results in Tildes receiving about $4.50, but through GitHub it will be $10.

      So if you have an existing recurring donation (or would like to start donating), I'd really appreciate if you could do it through GitHub Sponsors. Tildes is a non-profit, and its only source of income is user donations—there's no advertising, no investors, and I'm not selling your data or anything else (and none of those will ever change). Donations are what makes it possible for me to keep working on the site. For some more info, please see the Donate page on the Docs site (which I'll update soon with info about GitHub Sponsors).

      The page is here: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos

      A few quick notes:

      • I believe you'll need a GitHub account to sponsor through here, but it's quick to create one.
      • You have the choice of making your sponsorship private or public.
      • You have to choose one of the pre-defined "tiers", but I tried to create ones that match the most common donations. If you need a different amount that isn't available, let me know and I can probably add it. I still have a couple of slots left for more tiers.
      • If you're currently donating through Patreon, please remember to cancel your pledge through there if you move it over to GitHub. The next Patreon payment will happen on November 1.

      I'm also working on a couple things to make the amount that's currently being donated to Tildes public, and I hope to have that available later this week (and hopefully with a much higher number because of the GitHub matching!).

      Thanks very much, and if there's anything confusing about the process or if you have any questions, please let me know.

      114 votes
    7. Let's talk about possible UI changes to make donating to Tildes more obvious.

      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...

      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

      32 votes
    8. Tildes can now receive Basic Attention Tokens (from the Brave browser or BATify extension)

      We've had a few topics related to the Brave browser lately, and at some users' urging, I've now set up and verified Tildes to be able to receive the Basic Attention Token that it allows you to...

      We've had a few topics related to the Brave browser lately, and at some users' urging, I've now set up and verified Tildes to be able to receive the Basic Attention Token that it allows you to allocate to sites that you visit often. Outside of Brave itself, there's also an extension called BATify that seems to allow you to use BAT from Chrome or Firefox.

      I'm not sure if this will ever be a significant source of donations for the site, but it's probably good to have it as an option anyway.

      I haven't tried Brave myself yet, so I can't endorse it personally, but quite a few people seem to like it and it just had a major update last week that made it Chromium-based. If you're thinking about trying it out, I'd appreciate it if you could download it through this referral link:

      https://brave.com/til524

      I don't know the exact details, but it should give Tildes about $5 USD in BAT for each user who "downloads the Brave browser using the promo link specific to your web site and uses the browser (minimally) over a 30 day period".

      I'll add some info about this to the Donate page on the docs site as well, and if anyone that knows more about Brave/BAT than me (which is a very low bar) notices anything wrong or that I should change, please let me know.

      56 votes
    9. Tildes and Deimos appreciation & how can we help?

      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 &...

      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?

      42 votes
    10. Let's talk about that annoying thing we all don't want to think about: funding.

      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...

      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.

      66 votes
    11. Tildes Monocle (aka sticker AKA gold)

      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...

      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.

      12 votes