So in the services that I offer there is no such function.
In Friendica I could make a hidden forum that only donors can join but I don’t think it would have the same effect.
No new idea, but I forgot to drop a link to the curated delightful list I maintain for funding resources. I have a huge backlog of stuff to add to the list that may be interesting to take a look at:
maybe you could add to the list which is privacy friendly?
I’ve also been looking for donate sites but I can’t find a good one to host myself and all the offers are full of trackers.
Currently the cleanest is probably liberapay although that uses paypal which I would like to avoid.
The best would be a system with bank transfer: User chooses how much he wants to donate and gives some data and then gets the IBAN when the money has arrived you mark the payment as made and it is displayed publicly.
As I said the list is a backlog and I have little time to elaborate it (and I maintain many more lists like that). Looking too for co-maintainers of that repo, so if you wanna volunteer then 
What I was thinking of was that the more ethical, privacy-friendly, etc. entries would be featured more prominently with more info, while other less attractive / more commercial funding options would just be plain list entries. Another option is to give them badges that rate them in a certain way.
I don’t know if this is the right thing for me, I’m not very good at English grammar.
I think the badge is better
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Yeah, it will also be significantly less maintenance. Anyway, if you come across any project/product not on the list would greatly appreciate a comment on the issue, or a PR 
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yes there I help then gladly, but on the list is already more than I knew so far 
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5 or 10
per year for a user may actually give peace of mind that an instance isn’t going to go down, and that there is room for profit for the hardworking admin if they retain many users.
Yes exactly, the idea is a non-profit commodity server. I want something that can just run even if something happens to the operator. So users have peace of mind about stability and longevity
Have you looked into btcpayserver and lightning? This can make for fast, private, cheap payments.
Yes, I’m a big fan of LN. Would be happy to use that as a source of payments
I basically want self sustaining servers, it’s not for profit, I dont even mind donating money to run them, but want to avoid the single point of failure mode, and also allow (well-behaved) automated bots to run too
The thing I’ve not worked out or understood is how to do is the bureaucracy around it
Is there a server or particular software you want help integrating with? I’ve done test integrations with golang and python.
That’s where it changes so much by jurisdiction. In the US it would involve declaring income/expenses on your taxes with an exemption and I think (but please consult an expert) if less than $600/year profit no need to declare anything.
@weex thanks for the offer but I’ll probably write something lightweight myself in nodejs or integrate with something like:
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I guess the legality of this depends on where your organization is based.
For free software, you could lift off the costs of hosting by using https://eclisps.is if your work enters their criteria – and it should.
Nice to see you here Melvin!
In a more general sense, I think our current scheme at petites singularités is to self-fund infrastructure. But it won’t be sustainable for long and in the coming years we need to come up with solutions: either scaling down our expenses (now at about 150€ per month), sell something, or pool resources with others (preferred solution from our collectivist perspective).
We prefer avoiding crowdfunding since this is a liberal scheme, and we’re talking about public infrastructure. Our view on this topic remains marginal. We won’t be using OpenCollective since this is based in the USA and we are in the EU – and not keen on facilitating yet another warmonger economy.
I am very sad that the new European Commission budget (Horizon Europe) has next to nothing to support free software projects and will be mostly dedicated to consolidating bullshit computing for bullshit chrematistic schemes that pose as an economic regime. It’s very sad to have been working so hard on opening European funding towards the free software community to end up with such a pathetic result.
Hopefully NLnet will remain active in the field, but I fear the EU funding is going to dry up quite fast for the rest of us.
We have a Mastodon server for people in my city, Bonn, Germany. I have been trying to get such infrastructure (not only Mastodon, but also Matrix, Wiki, …) funded by the municipal county. Up to now no luck, but I think this could be a model that could work for part of the servers.
This is not the EU budget. It is the science budget. Some development work on AP may get into the realm of science, but most of our work is not.
The link doesn’t work for me and I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to be exactly
It seems to me researchers could run AP-services specifically for study, and I think it’d be kind of exciting to help in that process, but grant-writing doesn’t sound fun at all.
I’m not sure what to do with the information because the offer is for developers and not for production.
I’m going to repeat my suggestion of the 5-10/year thing. I really think the best place to get money is from those who are enjoying a benefit from what you’re doing. Better to establish that small financial relationship ahead of time rather than wait until it becomes a big hidden burden.
There is just the readiness the problem, currently I have 180 Mastodon users and a few Friendica and how much the other services are used I do not know. And so far there was a total of 13 euros since everything is online.
You could use the announcement feature to share payment info and say something to the effect of, “Help support this instance by becoming a premium member for a year and get a donor badge! Simply send X euros to (link) and dm @admin@example.com your invoice id.” Something like that. Maybe this isn’t really a problem yet, but something to keep in mind.
i think in mastodon there is no way to reward users
besides, it would also annoy me as a user if I would be harassed with “advertisements”