I’m engaging with dozens of servers and hundreds of creators on lemmy, and I’d like to give back to more of them. I built a tool a few years ago called subless(subless.com) which aimed to do something similar for the non-federated internet, and I’d like to make something for the Fediverse too.

Do you think donations should be distributed like content?

I threw together a survey that would really help me understand how y’all are thinking about donations. I’d really appreciate it if anyone could fill it out.

Thanks!

  • @MarkimusEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    I’m not even really sure in what context you would consider a donation as being appropriate.

    I contribute because I want to be helpful, and I feel like I am providing value. I do this for free, with no expectation of return. I don’t need to spend money to push value into the system.

    • @marzhall
      4•1 year ago

      Thanks for the response!

      A buddy of OP here who also worked on subless, for context. From my perspective, already lemmy.world publishes “how to donate” text, as do other servers, so the servers are kind of step one. Then there’s the actual developers writing the software behind them. After that, there’s creators that pop up in Fediverse communities who post their patreon links, ko-fi, etc. These are all people doing serious work that I’d like to support, and is in some cases more than you can just kind of do in your free time. So that’s where the drive comes from, for me.

      • @MarkimusEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        So what are you intending to offer that people aren’t already able to do? A link to a patreon, ko-fi, etc. already exists on creator’s pages.

        • @marzhall
          1•1 year ago

          Great question! The reason for this poll is to ask if people feel that’s enough.

          On a personal level, it’s not - as mentioned above, I hit more services and people I’d like to support than it’s reasonable to do a patreon/ko-fi for each, and it ends up being partially random chance on who gets support. But I’m curious if that’s a problem for other people’s on the Fediverse, and what they think about it if so - or if there are other problems we’re not even tracking on.

          More loosely, the concept we’re playing with looks at the servers you interacted with and splits your monthly budget among them automatically, dropping the manual “will I subscribe to this server’s patreon?” or “will I make a donation today?” steps needed right now. But as far we know right now, that’s just solving me and Punty’s problem - it’d be cool to know other people saw this problem too.