This isn’t what i had in mind. i meant more like changing the line to something like:
We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, donating money and helping find and fix bugs.
With “donating money” maybe replaced with “funding”.
I think liberapay has that feature.
We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs
I feel like people giving their hard earned money for lemmy also should get a show of appreciation.
Why is it not a part of the project itself if you don’t mind me asking? i would imagine plugins are for the more opinionated or experimental features.
If its off by default that is a reasonable suggestion.
Lemmy has a similar number of active users and makes about 3K . That money would be good for the ecosystem and could help fund upstream projects (I am sure wine could use the money for example). But they will have to use fundraising methods similar to lemmy to reach that number (popup, good message etc)
The donate page is kinda a mess IMO to be honest. There should be one organisation to donate to otherwise this creates overchoice.
What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.
Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.
Any github or codeberg people can star?
Also if so many people want it. starting to fund raise money might be good. paralives is already making good money and because it is closed source there is a incentive to make modding harder (so they could sell improvements). Plus this sounds really hard and labor intensive. being able to work on it full time could help you stay motivated. even seeing people giving money might help you feel the work is really appreciated and its not just cheap words.
Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.
That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).
a little more then 24h into the campaign.
patreon increased from $871 to $1,138 (+30%).
liberapay rose from $301 to $393.66 (+30%).
I think it could have been improved further , the text could be a bit longer (I talked to Nutomic and few suggestion were kinda shortened too much IMO). but i think we can overall call the campaign a success. I realize we can tweak and experiment with this for far too long and without A/B testing we could be “fooled by randomness” and make the wrong choices. but we could measure how many people leave the page of the text before we expect them to finish reading to get a indication if it is too small or big. information beats speculation.
Anyway this text is now “field tested” and should probably be used more with maybe minor tweaks (link to it from the website donate page and the pop up).
Is there any evidence the pop up asking for donation is working as intended? , adding randomness to this could make it too hard to debug.
I think what it does prove beyond all doubt if the pop up is working is that the pop up text is not enough. People want a clear and persuasive rational. underestimation potential donors ability to read a short text could be a costly mistake. a quick googling indicates a optimal length of about 1,000 to 2,500 words while the current text stands at about 500 words.
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences
Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.
All those terms, “increasing shareholder value” , “no tracking”, “is billionaire proof” , “no venture capital available”. would be really hard to understand for anyone that is not a hardcore fosshead . even if they will understand understanding the benefits of these properties is not easy . reportedly the average age of a reddit user is 23, how many 23 year old know what “venture capital” and “shareholder” even mean?
Maybe lemmy needs something like a whitepaper or a manifesto.
In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.
There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).
There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.
I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that?
Not really. i know wikimedia foundation did that but it is probably not the best option. googling gives a few results but that’s not really insightful.
And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?
I don’t think this solves the problems i mentioned (including in the pull request). donations and working full time are a means to an end. the average response by average joe might be “well they can just get a regular job like the rest of us”.
I don’t we should insist on just having a elevator pitch. sure an elevator pitch is very useful but i know that when i wanted to donate to charities I looked for a decent chunk of information to help me make a decision.
this part that appears inside thunderbird (which seems to be doing very well interm of fundraising) is more like something i had in mind (in term of feeling important)
there is some research about this type of messaging (see risk aversion and fear appeals). naturally it does not feel great because i think the thought that a project is at risk and might need donations is a negative evaluation that will probably produce a negative emotion. but i think it is the honest truth for thunderbird and lemmy and any large scale open source project.
If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.
Add “help design lemmy” next to the title? e.g.
Help Design Lemmy: How to improve the Joinlemmy Donation page?
As i said adding a “learn more” section would be really helpful. right now it sounds like you are not really sure you even want donations. if you won’t believe people should donate and are not willing to explain why people should do it why should potential donors believe it? . so far i didn’t really see a noticeable spike in the patreon and liberapay stats despite many of the largest servers using the newest version (you can enable it to show the version of servers). some projects have a fairly consistent increases in the number of donations for years (e.g. 1 2 3 ) and i don’t think lemmy has less potential. even piefed donations have been increasing organically.
Of course A/B testing will be the best way to prove these claims.
Maybe we could crowd source a list of arguments about why people should donate.
Graphtreon says their API is $760 / month.
didn’t even know they have a API. i meant parsing the HTML with something like selenium, there are probably lighter options. if you will do this once a day or week i can’t see why your API should be blocked (its like some developer repeatedly checking that in his browser).
Patreon isn’t going to do anything for us specifically
They probably make something like 80 dollar a month of you. maybe a tech support representative just needs to input your IP to their system. it takes a couple of minutes for someone who makes about $20 an hour so not unreasonable . especially if you will warn/threaten them that you will remove patreon.
We had this automated, but patreon blocked our IP, so I’ll update it manually rn, and try to do that at least once a month.
Did you try sending them an email or opening a issue asking them to to whitelist the IP? . this is completely unreasonable. you are a paying customer.
graphtreon is making a ton of requests so i think there should not be a problem. or maybe you could parse graphtreon instead.
You could create a repository with just this data and be liberal when giving out access.
Implement donation dialog
isn’t it suppose to pop up for me? i see nothing.
so far no change on the reported donations when comparing to previous reporting which is actually down.
maybe have somewhere a dashboard graph of something like “revenue per 1k active users”.
active users are higher then on march 2024 yet donation are down from 3,9K to 2.3K.
Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.
Also a demo instance would be nice.