1mo ago

Donating 5 bucks each to my most used F-Droid apps

It started with me wanting to support Lemmy, my Lemmy instance and Voyager. Then I checked what other open source apps I had installed from F-Droid. It would exceed my budget to donate to them all, so I chose the 10 apps that I most frequently use.

Lemmy
My Lemmy instance
Aegis
DAVx5
F-Droid
Feeder
HeliBoard
KeePassDX
Öffi
Voyager
Honorable mention to AntennaPod. It was on this list, but their contribution page states that their costs are already covered.

This is just my personal list, but I thought it's a nice idea to share it and maybe others will do the same and donate to their most used open source apps and projects.

20 comments

I do this too! $5/month to Fedilab, Wikipedia, OrganicMaps, AntennaPod, Signal, among others. Gotta support open source!

I am doing 5-10$ rounds of donations (4-10 projects each generally) to my favourite projects too on a regular basis. I favor XMR transactions as is it largely accepted those days and fees are appropriate for such low amounts.

Oh dude I love it! I recently donated to Thunderbird. My first Open Source donation (apart from Wikipedia). Feels good. I generally contribute through testing, but once I start earning a good amount, I'm gonna do what you did...

my lemmy instance

I just went through F-Droid and counted out all the projects I have on my phone. At £5 each I'm looking at an annual bill of about £70/year... Bargain.
Thanks for the idea!

Funny you post this, I just bought premium for KeePassDX this morning.

I donate to a few things (eff, fsf, Mozilla, kvaesitso, my Lemmy instance, tasks.org) but want to donate to more (guix, keepassdx, syncthing, eternity, maybe some others).

I didn't know about öffi, thought it would only cover Germany but it supports much more countries. Thanks for the tip!

Wouldn't it be a better idea to donate a big amount of money to a single project rather than small amounts to many projects?
Don't get me wrong, I do support donating to projects but 5 bucks are nothing. Might as well not donate. Donating 50 dollars to one project is much better.
- @squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 5$ is kinda nothing, but his 5$ plus my 5$ plus your 5$ and all the others that donates, it's something
  
  That's exactly my idea. I could have just donated and stayed quiet, but I thought I could inspire others to donate as well.
- I recently heard the idea to donate monthly to one project of your choosing so the developers could rely on a steady income. I think that's a great way of doing it.
  
  That's an even better idea! A steady income is much better than donations that may or may not arrive. Thanks for the idea, appreciate it!
  
  That probably ideal, but it should still be spread out so the "less important" projects still get something.
- Ah, c'mon man. Don't be like that
- This is how some of my friends think about climate change action. Whats the point of doing anything at all if anything you do isn't going to make an impact? It's all about everyone helping some amount, it ads up!
- You do you, but it's better if everyone donates a bit of money to a lot of projects than donating a ton of money to a single project. It's not like a single individual with a normal salary could fund a project alone anyways.
  Let's suppose that 10 people have 10 dollars to give each, and there are 4 projects which they all use: Project A is the most important for 7 people, so they recieve $70. Then comes project B with $20 and C with $10. Project D gets no donations.
  But if we ponderate them by average importance it would be: A=0.5, B=0.3, C=0.15 and D=0.05. If they had split their donations, the allocation of funding would have been way more efficient.
- Disagree, if every user of these 10 apps did this it would end up a lot better for them all than every user choosing their favourite and giving them $50. If they choose randomly it would end up roughly the same, but in general people are going to end up skewing towards certain apps over others when forced to choose a favourite.
  And if doing it randomly ends up the same as splitting it on a large scale, I think this is the more sensible approach personally.
- Donations add up. If everyone did what you're proposing, many projects would likely get no donations. Ideally everyone would donate a small amount to every project they use, which would all add together to be a sizable amount for all projects that are frequently used.
  We aren't all one person. We don't need to all act as if we're one. We should act as if we're a community, because we are. Support all projects, and they'll all get support.

20 comments