Add Donation Dialog

[Nutomic]

I am one of the Lemmy maintainers and work on the project fulltime together with Dessalines. Our work is funded by donations, but these are gradually going down and don't even cover a single dev salary now (see join-lemmy.org). That's why we added a new donation dialog in 0.19.11 which is shown once a year to every user:

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Many people use Lemmy exclusively through apps, so we would greatly appreciate if you could add such a dialog to your app too. The logic is relatively simple:

• From the /api/v3/site response, check my_user.local_user_view.local_user.last_donation_notification
• If the date is more than one year ago, display a dialog like the one above with buttons Donate, Close
• When Donate is clicked:
  • Open https://join-lemmy.org/donate
  • Close dialog
  • Call POST /api/v3/user/donation_dialog_shown to hide dialog until next year
• When Close is clicked also call the donation_dialog_shown endpoint

To test this functionality with a 0.19.11 instance, run the SQL query update local_user set last_donation_notification = '2024-04-07 09:05:06'; which shows the dialog for all local users. You can reuse the code and strings used in lemmy-ui.

Thanks for your consideration!

[aeharding]

Hi @Nutomic thanks for the issue!

I'd love to integrate some sort of donation for Lemmy (it would also be cool to get something for instances, too). F-droid and PWA should be straightfoward.

My main concern is how to do this on the app stores. Since Apple wants their cut, and even donations need to go through the in-app purchase API.

If you hear what other app devs are doing to implement this on Apple App Store and Play Store, please lmk!

[Nutomic]

The same thing was mentioned in the mlem repo. As mentioned in my last comment it may work via OpenCollective.

I also opened an issue regarding instance donations.