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.

Isn’t basically any software like mastodon where you change the maximum length of posts to be long enough a good alternative? say 1 million words per post.

For group discussions there is piefed/lemmy. And mobilizon for events. for reviews there is neodb.

When i last tried friendica. it was missing the feature which i thought was really good on facebook. seeing what people i appreciate are into by seeing stuff like movies and or even things like meditation or stoicism on their profile page. and maybe reviews of businesses

I might be giving out boomer vibes saying this. but i believe chris rock said it best:

In the old days, if somebody wanted your job, they just worked harder than you. Now, somebody wants your job, they just wait for you to say some dumb shit.

And lets not start talking about richard stallman opinions about child sexuality … (although tbf eventually he retract his statements).

Imagine if he would have got cancelled before the GNU project started. open source would not have been where it is today. and as someone who likes biographies let me suggest that there is a reason they say “never meet your heroes”. but the problem now is you can read about them on the internet. martin luther king cheated a lot, benjamin frankling owned slaves (although at some point he released them) and the list can go on. All people that did very good things.

People might do great things. but they are not infallible . in fact they could spend so much time and thought on achieving great things they might not have time and attention to develop “normal” attitudes about day to day living.

and adding an extra constraint when hiring for a project that is already competing with companies with billions of dollars in budget is not prudent.

Have you looked at the state of how open source smartphone os projects are funded? Seems like not enough people think it is currently important. i saw no bump in funding since the announcement. I would say the best bet is trying to help one of these projects with fundraising and trying to educate or convince enough people it is worth investing in. and obviously donate if you can. Although to be honest even i don’t do that (i think i invest enough in FOSS).

Once i bought a phone i tried to pick one that is friendly for FOSS projects and went with a pixel (which grapheneos recommended). so voting or signaling with your wallet is an option.

I also think something like codeberg. where anyone can be a member if he pays fees that help fund the organisation and democratically elect a board that decides what to fund could be helpful. codeberg has a pretty good organic growth so that is encouraging but i don’t know if there is enough interest in that.

It actually reports about 27K monthly active users and is one of the more popular platforms on the fediverse.

lemmy indicates clearly liberapay is preferred . and it does seem to have an effect because patreon donations went down at some point while liberapay donations went up.

With that said liberapay fees are cited as being around 3.1% and maybe higher. some digital currencies are almost free (nano, ripple) and despite the hate you see i don’t see a rational reason not to offer them as an option.