a little more then 24h into the campaign.

patreon increased from $871 to $1,138 (+30%).

liberapay rose from $301 to $393.66 (+30%).

I think it could have been improved further , the text could be a bit longer (I talked to Nutomic and few suggestion were kinda shortened too much IMO). but i think we can overall call the campaign a success. I realize we can tweak and experiment with this for far too long and without A/B testing we could be “fooled by randomness” and make the wrong choices. but we could measure how many people leave the page of the text before we expect them to finish reading to get a indication if it is too small or big. information beats speculation.

Anyway this text is now “field tested” and should probably be used more with maybe minor tweaks (link to it from the website donate page and the pop up).

Is there any evidence the pop up asking for donation is working as intended? , adding randomness to this could make it too hard to debug.

I think what it does prove beyond all doubt if the pop up is working is that the pop up text is not enough. People want a clear and persuasive rational. underestimation potential donors ability to read a short text could be a costly mistake. a quick googling indicates a optimal length of about 1,000 to 2,500 words while the current text stands at about 500 words.

This should probably be documented on the open collective page.

Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don’t get negative experiences you don’t get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.

All those terms, “increasing shareholder value” , “no tracking”, “is billionaire proof” , “no venture capital available”. would be really hard to understand for anyone that is not a hardcore fosshead . even if they will understand understanding the benefits of these properties is not easy . reportedly the average age of a reddit user is 23, how many 23 year old know what “venture capital” and “shareholder” even mean?

Maybe lemmy needs something like a whitepaper or a manifesto.

I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that?

Not really. i know wikimedia foundation did that but it is probably not the best option. googling gives a few results but that’s not really insightful.

And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

I don’t think this solves the problems i mentioned (including in the pull request). donations and working full time are a means to an end. the average response by average joe might be “well they can just get a regular job like the rest of us”.

I don’t we should insist on just having a elevator pitch. sure an elevator pitch is very useful but i know that when i wanted to donate to charities I looked for a decent chunk of information to help me make a decision.

this part that appears inside thunderbird (which seems to be doing very well interm of fundraising) is more like something i had in mind (in term of feeling important)

there is some research about this type of messaging (see risk aversion and fear appeals). naturally it does not feel great because i think the thought that a project is at risk and might need donations is a negative evaluation that will probably produce a negative emotion. but i think it is the honest truth for thunderbird and lemmy and any large scale open source project.

If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.

Add “help design lemmy” next to the title? e.g.

Help Design Lemmy: How to improve the Joinlemmy Donation page?

As i said adding a “learn more” section would be really helpful. right now it sounds like you are not really sure you even want donations. if you won’t believe people should donate and are not willing to explain why people should do it why should potential donors believe it? . so far i didn’t really see a noticeable spike in the patreon and liberapay stats despite many of the largest servers using the newest version (you can enable it to show the version of servers). some projects have a fairly consistent increases in the number of donations for years (e.g. 1 2 3 ) and i don’t think lemmy has less potential. even piefed donations have been increasing organically.

Of course A/B testing will be the best way to prove these claims.

Maybe we could crowd source a list of arguments about why people should donate.

Graphtreon says their API is $760 / month.

didn’t even know they have a API. i meant parsing the HTML with something like selenium, there are probably lighter options. if you will do this once a day or week i can’t see why your API should be blocked (its like some developer repeatedly checking that in his browser).

Patreon isn’t going to do anything for us specifically

They probably make something like 80 dollar a month of you. maybe a tech support representative just needs to input your IP to their system. it takes a couple of minutes for someone who makes about $20 an hour so not unreasonable . especially if you will warn/threaten them that you will remove patreon.

We had this automated, but patreon blocked our IP, so I’ll update it manually rn, and try to do that at least once a month.

Did you try sending them an email or opening a issue asking them to to whitelist the IP? . this is completely unreasonable. you are a paying customer.

graphtreon is making a ton of requests so i think there should not be a problem. or maybe you could parse graphtreon instead.

You could create a repository with just this data and be liberal when giving out access.

Implement donation dialog

isn’t it suppose to pop up for me? i see nothing.

so far no change on the reported donations when comparing to previous reporting which is actually down.

maybe have somewhere a dashboard graph of something like “revenue per 1k active users”.

active users are higher then on march 2024 yet donation are down from 3,9K to 2.3K.