GroundPlane

You are not missing the point and bring up something my jaded views keep reminding me about. It is important to not believe too much in your efforts so as to stay grounded and not be too enthusiastic and get disappointed when downturns inevitably appear.

I'm battling between two approaches about data collection: the tedious manual entry on behalf of devs or the fully automated scrapping a la other existing efforts in the field

The solutions you linked are interesting but ultimately neglect the most important aspect in my opinion: discussion among stakeholders. They also tend to use bitcoin, which has proven it could not gain enough traction to be mainstream yet.

Taking the core principle of Kivach and making it viable in state-backed currency, using the platforms devs have already set up for payment would be a great leap forward. We need to get something going and build support from a critical mass.

Why is Kivach not more widely used? We should tackle these questions and try to improve it.

You are indeed a good motivator! The reason I did not want to make this post at first is that I need everything: people to brainstorm with, people that can carry the project, people with the skills to create a prototype, people who can convince FOSS projects to get on board, and people willing to encourage others to donate.

Overall too much labor, skills and connection for one person. I believe we would need a team of 10-15 volunteers, some already involved in projects, to put something up

Think Flattr where devs have a say in who gets what. A whole lot of problems to solve, but potential to be a central platform that devs actually want to join and advertise because they trust it

That would be a nice option for web-based stuff. I guess the whole difficulty is to get a list of projects and to publicize it widely. I also believe donations should be stupid simple or they will never take off.

The main difference between your idea and mine lies in who decides where the money goes. I do not think end users should decide 100%, because that ignores a lot of critical under-the-hood software. Users must however have a completely transparent report of who gets what. I guess at that point they should be able to adjust it to their whims, which circles back to your point 1.

Among distribution rules to be discussed, one of the first points would be who is eligible. I would not want corporations to be supported by these donations, but some companies actually focus on FOSS as a service and I could see them getting in on it. I would exclude devs employed at a company getting paid to contribute as well.

I think this would not drastically change the status quo. Today, corporations contribute to FOSS, but mostly to make sure their hardware or other software is well supported. They will still have that incentive if there is a central donation system that excludes them.

That's sort of what is preached here. However, no one is gonna bother making a complete list of projects and dependencies. And we still have to define what is the even distribution among Lemmy and its dependencies for example, hence the need for a democratic structure

Thank you for the input. I guess it would be hard to track community engagement. Also, whatever is done with the donation is up to the project maintainers, in any case. Accepting the pull request in your case is also a great deal of work given the amount of spam they can create, so it is still fair in some way. No one will get rich off of donations anyway

I did, and I was intentionally hopeful when I wrote that. I stand by the latter part of the argument though. I've seen enough situations where splitting money was not a problem as long as a common interest was there and the decision process was flear and fair

The effort behind that list is great and it does help people out. But I don't think many people will look at it and decide to donate. This is part of what is to be solved here

Oh yes there will be drama. But I would gladly help sort it out if there was enough interest and I think I wouldn't be alone in that endeavour.

It's always better to distribute poorly than not distribute at all

Stupidly simple doesn't seem to be able to fix the problem here. We need to find the simplest way that can help. How would you make it simpler?