HOWTO: donate to fedeproxy via liberapay

FedeProxy is a horizontal community of individuals, therefore not incorporated: it is not possible to donate to the organization because it does not exist. As a consequence each member of the community is responsible for raising their own money and for receiving funds that they pledge to dedicate to the advancement of the fedeproxy project.

As you can see in the liberapay page, the funds currently go directly to individuals (@pilou and @dachary as of July 2021). And people will be added or removed from the list of beneficiaries when the fedeproxy community decides.

The income and expense spreadsheet will show, weekly (as pledged on the liberapay page), if the money that was received via liberapay is actually accounted for. If something is unclear or missing, a discussion should start in the funding category of the forum asking for clarification. This may ultimately lead to a decision to remove someone from the liberapay page.

Here is an example showing how it will go when someone earmarks a donation:

  • Someone adds to the https://liberapay.com/fedeproxy/ account and earmarks it for a particular project
  • An individual who is a beneficiary of the liberapay donations made to fedeproxy add this to the income part of spreadsheet
  • When someone claims the funds, a new topic will be opened on the forum for the community to come to a consensus (because that’s how the decision process starts).
  • When the decision is final the individuals who are beneficiaries of the liberapay donations will send the required amount to the person who claimed the funds
  • Someone will add that amount to the expense part of the spreadsheet, with a link to the topic of the forum discussing the decision
  • Anyone can later verify in the spreadsheet, via the URL to the decision to release the funds, that the donation was used as intended.

This process does not scale, at all. But there currently are very little to no donations therefore it does not matter much and the fedeproxy community can address the problem when it presents itself.

I feel you should have more ways to donate. Personally I have never come across a project that got any real income from Liberapay. Take for instance Codeberg on Liberapay, active for quite a while, having enough money for a cup of coffee once a year for the core team, nothing more.

One issue with Liberapay that increases the barrier is that it does not allow one-time donations, I think. Maybe an additional OpenCollective might be an idea. Or maybe there are some inspiring entries on my candidate list of delightful funding.

I share this observation. But it is important to answer the question “how can I donate?” when someone asks and it is a simple way to do that, with libre software. The income derived from it will always be marginal to non-existent but that’s not too much of a problem. Getting enough funding to pay for salaries requires active fundraising, as you very well know :wink:

Just like SourceHut, OpenCollective is Free Software and self-hostable in theory. But there does not exist any other instance but the one from the authors of the software. And reports indicate that there are essential bits of documentation and scripts that make it very difficult. For instance the work on OpenCollective installation instructions was stalled for more than two years despite attempts to work on it from the authors of OpenCollective themselves.

I explored this list (very useful resource, kudos for maintaining it) but did not find anything that would make a significant difference in the context of Fedeproxy. Do you have something specific in mind?

Yeah, I had some email correspondence with them a while ago, talking about forking their project and how they’d feel about that. This to create a more FOSS aligned and somewhat different derivate (and maybe federated too). They were not negative to it, basically a “go ahead if you want”.

Not really. The entire issue is basically a backlog for me of stuff to be processed for inclusion. Might seek another co-maintainer to help with that. I see a lot of mention of ko-fi on fedi profiles. Don’t know the status of Snowdrift, but they’d be a candidate once they go into production. It seems they have an opportunity for fedeproxy maybe, in their next milestone.

Note: Snowdrift has the most lovely, admirable stance to FLOSS / FLO I know about.

I somehow missed that, thanks for pointing it specifically! I made a note to not forget about it :slight_smile:

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It is possible to create a donation and then to choose Manual renewal and then never renew or create a donation and then wait for the payment to be processed and next select discontinue the donation.

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