Encourage users to donate more

[Nutomic]

Lemmy is entirely reliant on donations to function, yet the current amount of donations is barely enough to fund development, and some instances also dont receive enough funding.

To improve this I suggest to display donation links more prominently. Namely on the homepage, below the sidebar text we can show the following:

• Donation info for Lemmy development
• Donation info local instance
• Donation info for current frontend/app

It could also be shown above the sidebar and collapsed by default. For the local instance, there needs to be a new config option with markdown text for the donation info. The backend returns this together with donation info for Lemmy development. Frontends and apps can add their own donation info as well.

Additionally, when viewing a community we could show this:

• Donation info for Lemmy development
• Donation info for instance where community is hosted
• Donation info for current frontend/app

In this case it would be necessary to federate the donation info.

[dullbananas]

Users should be shown an estimate of the server costs that their usage caused

[dessalines]

This is pretty critical, as lemmy won't have a sustainable development future without funding. Even with our ~47k active monthly users, we're not able to fund even a single developer fully. We need to not only fund our current devs, but also grow the dev co-op.

We should consider bunding in dismissible wikipedia style funding status banners into lemmy-ui, that pull the current donation stats from join-lemmy. They're annoying, but they work.

[Nutomic]

Another thing we can do is list on the donation page the people who are receiving donations (dessalines and me currently). With name, avatar, github and lemmy profiles as well as a description what exactly we work on. That would give users more transparency, so they know what exactly the donations are for.

[asudox]

Another thing we can do is list on the donation page the people who are receiving donations (dessalines and me currently). With name, avatar, github and lemmy profiles as well as a description what exactly we work on. That would give users more transparency, so they know what exactly the donations are for.

Maybe also some sort of local badge or reward within lemmy. I know that some people will pay for such badges. But I wonder if this will spoil them within the community.

[dessalines]

I wouldn't have any problem with the flair /badge model, as long as that flair doesn't give you any extra abilities. It's definitely something to think about, and possibly less annoying than adding wikipedia style banners/notifs and funding drives (although those do seem to work well).

[wiki-me]

Just to continue the conversation here (TL;DR: KDE donations went up by at least 7x to 93K this month when KDE added a popup).

I follow the development and i see no task more important or useful then completing this, I think that whatever is worked on should be dropped for this IMO.

If we are worried about a pop up being too annoying we could allow users or admins to disable it (that is what KDE allows).

Reddit seems to be getting worst, i think a lot of people will want to help create an alternative if they will be presented with the option.

[Nutomic]

Thanks for pointing out those KDE blog posts, they are very encouraging! Here are the direct links:

• Asking for donations in Plasma
• I think the donation notification works

I think we should definitely give these donation notifications a try, especially as the implementation is relatively simple:

• Per-user value last_donation_notification_time
• Instance config option disable_donation_notification
• A way to show the donation message to users

For the display part, we could show a dialog in lemmy-ui when last_donation_notification_time is more than one year ago, and user registration date is more than 2 weeks ago. This means that apps would have to implement their own donation dialog (which would allow them to display their own donation info as well). Another option would be to use the existing notification system, eg by sending a private message from a dummy account.

[dullbananas]

For the display part, we could show a dialog in lemmy-ui when last_donation_notification_time is more than one year ago, and user registration date is more than 2 weeks ago. This means that apps would have to implement their own donation dialog (which would allow them to display their own donation info as well).

I think this is the best option.

[wiki-me]

This means that apps would have to implement their own donation dialog (which would allow them to display their own donation info as well). Another option would be to use the existing notification system, eg by sending a private message from a dummy account.

There are people with a lot of unread messages on their email iirc, so for some people it could be easy to miss (going from 20 unread message to 21 unread messages). maybe if lemmy had a different indication for "important messages" like getting banned or a warning from a moderator (i think reddit has those).

but otherwise i think we can have fallback mechanism. the server sends a message asking to display the message, if the client sends "ok got it" ( like it displayed the message or didn't show it because the user disabled it) then don't send a DM. if not then the client didn't implement it and you can send a DM.

getting the resources to compete with tech giants is important so i think it is worth the extra effort.

[Ralimbahere]

Users should be shown an estimate of the server costs that their usage caused

That would be a great idea, the instance admins could set the cost per user.