Ask HN: What projects do you donate to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

279 pointsxeonmc289 comments

With the Internet rapidly undergoing its corpocene mass extinction event, the few initiatives trying to keep the web and the software ecosphere habitable depends mostly on individual contributions.

Traditionally, advertising your charitable contributions might be seen as distasteful virtue signalling for which one has already earned their reward. However, I think in the cultural context of digital initiatives, it’s actually helpful and quite important to show off what you have been donating to, it is a much stronger signal to draw people’s attention to important projects by word of mouth.

Thus, this thread is intended to be a celebration of your personal contributions to initiatives towards digital freedom.

Think of it as an “MyAnimeList for donations”, or a “Goodreads for open projects”, list out which projects you personally have your sights on you think are important that other people also hear about.

Examples:

- the Blender project: a lifeline to rescue creative professionals from the clutches of artistic bear-bile farms

- neocities: promoting a return to wholesome hand-reared digital gardens

- Internet Archive and Wikipedia foundation: for keeping library of Alexandria of collective human memories and knowledge

- codeberg: provides a safe haven for open source development from being confined to a life inside factory farms.

View on HN

Here I am for the millionth time, on HN, reminding everyone of an amazing gift: 2016 report by Nadia Asparouhova - "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure"[1] - Please do take the time to read and share it, it's been almost 10 years since Nadia published this work with the hope of inspiring some change outside of the OSS world, I'd suggest we need her words now more than ever. Thank you!

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

This is super important, and critical reading for anyone commenting on OSS financing.

I've been a product management lead for 2 commercial open-core companies and people drastically overestimate:

- How much code the community contributes (in both cases, >95% of all code was written by employees hired by the commercial company) - How few commercial resources are needed to support the community (running forums, answering GitHub tickets, etc) - How much financial support is actually forthcoming when there's not some "locked commercial features"

As the paper points out, many of these widely used commercial projects receive a few hundred thousand dollars at most in donations (often much less) but need to employ more developers than that financing can support to maintain a baseline capability to address basic bug fixes (including security fixes) once they become "popular enough" to be known by the masses.

With "overestimate how few resources are needed" do you mean underestimate the amount of needed resources?

>> overestimate how few resources are needed

Immediately think of Arrested Development: "It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"

Don't worry, there's always money in the banana stand

I suspect this is because open-core companies are often just 1 rugpull away from being not open at all. Open-core just means if I have some small bug, I might PR to fix it if it's not too hard for me. I am absolutely not doing free work for that company.

Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.

Recommendation: https://nadia.xyz

Thanks for sharing.

For those that are pressed for time, there is a good Executive Summary on page 8 of the linked PDF report:

https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ro...

Thanks for sharing this! Do you have an idea where I can get the .epub version? The button on the page doesn't seem to do anything?

Below I’m listing some of the projects I donate to:

DownThemAll, a browser extension that makes multiple simultaneous downloads from a page easy: https://www.downthemall.org/howto/donate/

Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate

LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

Mozilla Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/

Soundswitch (Windows application to switch default playback devices and/or recording devices using simple hotkeys): https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/

Tab Session Manager browser extension: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/

Tor Project: https://donate.torproject.org/

VLC media player: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html

Wow, I remember DownThemAll from...2005?

If you had asked me, I would have said with confidence "that no longer exists, modern browsers have had this feature one click away for years". But I suppose the truth is they don't, and I just haven't had a reason to use this in a long time.

But modern browsers do have this feature, don't they? I can do this on Chrome and Firefox, at least.

Say a website links to 20 images and a dozen mp3s (and other files not in your interest). How would you without an extension like DownThemAll grab these files all at once?

I use DownThemAll on firefox.

The main feature I use it for is queueing multiple downloads, which I don't believe either chrome or firefox offers out of the box.

Highly useful when downloading from archive.org or other sites which block multiple concurrent downloads.

Seems way less suspicious than jdownloader to me.

Exactly what I thought when I saw that too! I had no idea it was still around. It was a godsend back in the day, but now that internet speeds are a lot faster, downloads are more reliable, and browsers have an 80% solution already built into them, I haven't really felt a need for it in many, many years.

Does VLC even have new releases? Where is 4.0, whose beta I had tried out years ago?

Not aware of their org's other works, but I feel like their most popular product (VLC media player) could be improved. Rather than offloading work to plugin devs (surely less than 1% of users use non-default plugins anyway), they could add features to the core app. I'd like to have dual subtitles with different languages for example.

I, personally, would find it hard to donate to Mozilla knowing the CEO is paid $6 million a year. Compared to the size of the firm that’s a huge amount of pay.

At this point I plan to donate to Ladybird instead. Excited for that project.

Difference between mozilla the company and the organization

Yes but is it not always that simple? You see this a lot. I mean, OpenAI is controlled by a non-profit. There are ways to structure things as a firm deems to their advantage and companies are very good at this sort of thing.

To me it just somewhat communicates a kind-of bad faith in company spending priorities and demonstrates that my donations might have greater impact elsewhere. That’s all.

And the donation goes to the company according to that page.

Thunderbird donations go directly toward funding the Thunderbird project, not the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation.

I think that there is a reasonable argument to be made that, among other reasons, choosing this kind of structure means that precisely this kind of argument can be made to solicit donations to help fund certain parts of the picture yet therefore but indirectly allow more of other income to remain available for allocation elsewhere.

Hence the allocation of that “other income” is still very much a related concern, but with just enough indirection that Mozilla can evade scrutiny of it when it comes to executive pay.

To everyone here: THANKS for donating to projects and initiatives that you consider precious, and worth donating to.

Most of us live a busy life, and it's usually hard to stop for a moment and think of the many things around us that make living better, even if it's a tiny open source project that solves a little, almost unknown, problem, run by some random guy in Hungary or Minnesota or Sicily.

I'd bet that a fair number of us on HN have some form of disposable assets / money, and that a small donation will not ruin our lives. Some of us might have an even larger capacity to donate. It's nice when we find the time to appreciate something, and decide to support it at least with our money, if not with a bit of our time and effort.

Side note: I am worried about robots, and am actively looking for a project that could make robot OS or components or the AI/brain that drives them, more human and less harmful. If you know anything worth exploring, please share.

For robotics, "make robot OS" the first (most popular) donation target would be Open Robotics [1] that develop Robot operative system ROS/ROS2. De-facto standard at least in academia, some startups (for MVP), and institutes.

If you are more keen about the hardware side (imo this side probably require more funding if you really want to keep Robots OS, software can come later) I like Robot Studios work by Rob Knight [2], it's OS afaik, with projects such as DexHand [3]. Recently someone posted K-scale labs [4] as robot OS, but imo looks more like a well-funded SV startup that will go full OpenAI and close everything off as soon they hit R&D traction. (just my own impression from reading their docs & focus, happy to be proven wrong)

[1] https://www.openrobotics.org/

[2] https://www.therobotstudio.com/

[3] https://www.dexhand.org/

[4] https://www.kscale.dev/

Fantastic, thanks a lot for your input. Going to dig in the coming days. Really appreciate it.

I live in Ukraine. So I donate to lots of funds like United24 and Come Back Alive Foundation. I believe it helps stop the war and the aggressor. Thousands die every day...

I will just share some links:

https://u24.gov.ua/

https://savelife.in.ua/en/

https://www.razomforukraine.org/

I also suggest NAFO (https://www.help99.co/) and Car for Ukraine (https://car4ukraine.com).

+1 to help99 (I used to live in Estonia and know the folks behind it and can confirm everything donated makes its way directly to the units)

https://www.saintjavelin.com

I bought a hoody with a Tryzub on it. Hoping to buy more stuff soon.

The only software project I donate to is NVDA[1]. It's an open source screen reader, AKA software that makes it possible for the blind to use computers through synthesized speech.

It's one of the few open source projects (besides Blender and GIMP) that is used directly by non-technical end-users and that has managed to surpass its commercial brethren , both in features and popularity. This is partly due to its extreme, almost Emacs-like hackability and a vibrant plugin ecosystem, which provides everything from better speech synthesizers to accessibility enhancements for other apps.

It has been created by two guys in Australia, mostly in response to the outrageous prices of commercial screen readers (~$1500 for noncommercial use). The situation has gotten better since then, Windows now comes with Narrator, which is... usable, but NVDA is still the top contender for most (non-enterprise) use cases.

[1] https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/

Unfortunate name collision on that one

I do donate to NVDA indirectly via the S&P500

> It's one of the few open source projects (besides Blender and GIMP) that is used directly by non-technical end-users and that has managed to surpass its commercial brethren , both in features and popularity.

Since when has GIMP surpassed its commercial brethren?

I think for gimp it was just meant as an example of an open source project that is used by technical and non-technical users alike, not necessarily that it has surpassed its commercial brethren.

Yes, I've also donated to NVDA... I use interactive-brokers to donate. Which apps do you use?

:)) the two neurons required to get this took several mins to connect.

My neurons are still searching for one another

I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the founders at NVDA. We were integrating it into to our computer kiosks and Michael Curran joined the call and helped guide us on how best to achieve our goal. It is obvious to me that the NVDA team cares deeply about equal access. Their goal is a noble one worthy of donations. We did not have the same experience swimming around the waters of Martha's Vineyard.

I know the other founder, Jamie Teh. Great guy, and probably the one engineer I've ever met who I can communicate with so well that we can do it in shorthand. I refer to our technical discussions as "mind melds."

    - Signal
    - Wikipedia
    - MyNoise.net
    - various Emacs package maintainers
    - Internet Archive

If you’ve never seen https://mynoise.net you should check it out. It’s a beautiful collection of exceptionally high-quality recordings that you can tune to create the perfect soundscape for whatever your mood moves you to.

You weren't kidding! https://mynoise.net/ is really good

Stéphane (the guy who makes MyNoise) goes on trips around the world with his recording equipment and drops a new release every few weeks or so. It always makes me happy to see the little red dot on the menu that means a new soundscape has just dropped. Donating directly helps him gather new sounds.

I think signal is already funded by USA taxpayers.

Wikipedia has a ton of money and for a few decades doesn't really need any donations.

AFAIK given Wikipedia spending they have ~1.5years of runway. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

They will have ~1.5 years of runway forever, since the Foundation tries to spend away any money it receives to justify pressing increasingly aggressive fundraisers. The site offers the same service as 15 years ago while ingesting 10x more money, none of which goes to the content producers.

More info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

There's been a ton of development in Wikipedia "sister projects", all of which ultimately benefit Wikipedia itself and the free content ecosystem more broadly. It makes no sense to say that "they provide the same thing as 15 years ago".

> I think signal is already funded by USA taxpayers.

Are you speaking about Open Technology Fund? AFAIK they've contributed just 3mil, while Signal costs ~40mil a year.

Is the goal of this thread to judge other people's donation choices?

No. But if people are looking for ideas of things to donate to… perhaps it's better to make it known that some do not really need the money.

Wikipedia and Signal both do me tremendous good. I think that's reason enough to donate to them. I don't think an organization/person/etc. has to be in crisis or short on funds to "earn" a donation.

More for the preservation of physical freedom than digital, so maybe unrelated, but anyway ...

Drones for Ukraine https://www.dronynemesis.cz/en

Glad you shared, I was wondering about the same. Many of my donations are going to support various drone campaigns from Estonia in support of Ukraine https://www.help99.co/patches

I'll share the one I contribute to - https://stopify.org.ua/

I like the subscription concept here - monthly donations, set to stop the moment Ukraine wins. Because they need our help continuously, not just after a particularly bloody episode makes the news.

It's ran by ziedot.lv - the organisation that handles most of charitable donations in Latvia.

And the amazing team at https://savelife.in.ua/en/

F-Droid is worth your support. The alternative app store with only FOSS apps is a lifeline for all Android devices, giving them an existence outside of the google monopoly.

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/donate

I do an annual post with my charitable contributions

https://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2024/12/donations-2024/

Projects I'm donating to (not every year):

  - Syncthing
  - Internet Archive
  - Python
  - Let's Encrypt
  - Electronic Frontier Foundation

I used to donate to Software in the Public Interest, The Software Freedom Conservancy and LibreOffice but they use Paypal which is blocking charity donations from Asia/Pacific. The loss of the first two is annoying since it was easier to donate to them than multiple projects.

Important institutions that one may want to consider include:

Open Source and Internet

  - Internet Archive [important would be some pro bono legal help due to the recent turn of events, perhaps]

  - Wikipedia [no need at the moment? Some say "overfunded  compared to others"; has anyone checked?]

  - Ladybird Web browser [coming to you in 2026: the first non-corporate Web browser from scratch; some said it couldn't be done; but those did not know Andreas Kling]

Humanity

  - International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement

  - Greenpeace

  - Amnesty International

  - UNICEF

[It's saddening that I have to add, perhaps open source software is not as urgent this year compared to stopping the bombing and killing of children, so consider how to distribute between these categories.]

wrt Ladybird and Andreas Kling; I contributed a small patch recently (after following Andreas for many years on YouTube), and I have to say that their codebase is incredibly nice and clean for such a large project. Their community is engaging, hyper focused --- it's really impressive. They run a really tight, yet open, little community. I can recommend using the browser, and engaging with the community.

It’s less that Wikipedia is overfunded, but rather they’re spending quite a bit on non Wikipedia projects. If you believe in their wider mission then donate, but giving them more money isn’t going to support the website if they aren’t going to use your donations for that end.

If you have kids UNICEF is doing a great program with Paddington at the moment where you subscribe to donations and each month you get a letter from Paddington in a different country introducing you to a child there, explaining what their life is like and talking about what UNICEF is doing in there area. My son has loved his letters.

> Internet Archive [important would be some pro bono legal help due to the recent turn of events, perhaps]

I have a really hard time with this one. Their current legal situation didn't just happen to them: they made an intentional choice to do something which ~everyone who knew anything about law warned them would be catastrophic and are now facing the catastrophe that they were warned about. They acted like a small activist group with nothing to lose rather than the essential piece of infrastructure that they have become.

I appreciate that the Internet Archive only exists because it took legal risks back in the day and those risks paid off. But from a strategic perspective you really have to stop being an activist organization once you've won enough ground that being ground to a pulp by the establishment would be a catastrophic loss for humanity. At that point it's time to let the little guys with nothing to lose take the mantle and just focus on preserving the ground that you've won.

honest question to all: how do you keep pushing boundaries once you've been successful enough to transition from a scrappy activist with nothing to lose to foundational infrastructure? I get the simple answer is reduced risks, stop doing the things that made you successful, but is there another path? Surely if OpenAI can somehow go from benevolent saviour of humanity to naked profit megacorp we can find a way for the IA to keep taking big risks?

There is plenty they can still do to push boundaries and be activists, but their decision was really quite reckless. At their current level of importance, they need to be progressives, not revolutionaries. They essentially took up arms against the industry using covid as an excuse. Well, I personally despise the IP industry and think that it needs radical reform, if not complete destruction, we have to live to fight another day as well. Unless they really thought covid was truly going to kill us all and wipe us all off the planet, it was a short-sighted move on their part.

Now that's sad, I hope they learned their lesson, and I think we should all step up to help defend them. Aside from donations, I think people should be making a large amount of noise at their elected representatives to start reforming the ridiculous IP framework in the United States. The whole point of copyright and other protections was to ensure that there was some incentive to people to produce content and be able to monetize it. I think it's ludicrous to suggest that you need such an utterly long period with a shark full of teeth to go after people in order to incentivize the producing of content.

Why does it need to be the Internet Archive that takes big risks?

In the startup space it's common for a founder to, after a successful launch, hand off control of the organization to someone else who's better equipped to drive the company in slow and steady mode. If the people in charge of the Internet Archive feel like they're best equipped to be revolutionaries rather than maintaining the ground they won in the past, maybe it's time for them to transition into a new organization and hand off the IA to people who are able to run it in maintenance mode.

I’ve sent money to openbsd.

They might not be popular to use, but the absolute freedom of the software along with how simple it is written makes it an incredible “good” for studying OS design.

I have also donated to the FSFE (European FSF) and the Linux foundation, but we don’t get tax incentives for donating to charity in most european countries. So it’s quite costly.

thanks for your donations... I use openbsd on a daily basis. Like you I love its simplicity. I love how few processes are running at anytime and how easy to tell what they do.

I also donated to the FSFE, they're doing such important work in the EU at this time.

Sending money annually to OpenBSD myself, as the operating system brings me a lot of joy for how integrated and predictable it is. Sending money to Sourcehut, although that is not a donation, and FreeBSD in the past.

In the past I've donated old hardware to OpenBSD [1] and would love to donate to them directly, but they aren't registered as a 501c3 in the US and can't claim the deduction on taxes (yes, I know, I am not 100% altruistic).

Instead I donate to FreeBSD and support OpenBSD in an ancillary way through OpenBSD Amsterdam [2]. Which yes, is also not tax exempt, but does comes with nice OpenBSD VM.

1. https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

2. https://openbsd.amsterdam/

I donate every month to https://freeCodeCamp.org

It was my main learning resource when I was changing careers to become a software developer 8 years ago. It was a very successful career change, both financially and in regards to my satisfaction with my profession.

On a time when expensive courses and bootcamps were all the range, I feel like I wouldn’t have much better than this free resource. Thanks freeCodeCamp!

Every so often, YouTube changes something on their site that causes NewPipe to stop working. Usually within a few days, NewPipe pushes an update that fixes this, and we're back in business. Every time this happens, I donate to their Liberapay.

https://newpipe.net/donate/

Good call, newpipe is awesome. Made a donation now.

NewPipe has a few features that I like, but let's be real: most people use NewPipe for the 'privacy' feature AKA: blocking ads.

At the risk of being downvoted for having an unpopular opinion: but if circumventing ads is your goal, then just get Youtube Premium in instead of paying for piracy.

Because contrary to popular belief, the majority of that subscription fee is actually distributed amongst the content creators that you watch. And for the majority of genres this pays the creator more than regular ad-revenue.

I don't buy merchandise because I don't like waste, so apart from direct donations (PayPal/Patreon), Youtube Premium is my preferred way of contributing my favorite content creators.

LTT actually did a good job explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI

I'd rather donate to NewPipe and to the content creators I like.

instead of paying for piracy

I am not paying for piracy, I am paying for an app that makes YT experience somewhat bearable, and lack of ads is only one aspect of it.

If you want to support your favorite creators, do it through different channels than by feeding the corporate beast.

Google is an evil corporation that I'd rather not mingle with. Blocking ads is a side-effect but it's not the main feature for me.

I think the privacy is more about not giving google a comprehensive view of everything you do on the platform than just not seeing ads. If you didn't want ads, you could just watch regular youtube website with ublock origin, even on android firefox supports it.

Most on HN have already fallen for the dichotomy of scrooge mcduck-style capital vs proudhonist pirates.

Meanwhile publishers are caught between these dueling retards and getting squeezed on both ends. Don't forget the scrapers that will hammer your server until it's offline while swapping IPv6s the entire time

"Why isn't anyone building anything anymore durrhurr???"

Well it's because:

A) Google B) You

- Libreoffice

- Internet Archive

- Wikipedia

- Bandcamp - a bit off-topic but the music industry has become an exponentially distributed winner-takes-all game. I resist by buying underground music on Bandcamp - it's an exemplary web platform, gives generous cuts to the artist, and you own the files. Even if I only listen to the song a couple times it feels good knowing 80% of the money is going straight to talented artists and 20% is going to a beacon of hope on the internet. Money spent on Bandcamp feels good.

I’m the same 3 (band camp occasionally)

My being able to run Linux in a corporate environment doesn’t function well without LibreOffice (even with office 365 online being more prevenlent). Plus it’s a champ at handling csv files.

I will second what you say about Bandcamp which I've also been supporting for years.

They also have Bandcamp Fridays, usually once a month, where 100% of the proceeds go to the artists (granted, there are a lot of labels on BC these days too, but still seems to be underground music in my experience).

A lot of those labels are really good and underground and fully worthy of support too imo. I think the smaller labels are really important to keep alive.

I've donated to Debian[1] for a few years and recently started sponsoring Anubis[2] on Github.

1) Debian: https://www.debian.org/donations

2) Anubis: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/funding/

I contribute to the Embassy of the Free Mind, in Amsterdam. They have one of the world’s largest collections of Neo-Latin books/manuscripts from 1400-1600s. Their library has so many fascinating esoteric works—on alchemy, spiritual practices, Neoplatonic philosophy, natural magic, etc. But, 80% of the library hasn’t been digitized or translated. This digitization and translation is what I’m supporting — and making the works accessible to AI (and through AI).

I somehow feel very motivated to make sure that the intellectual works that inspired the Renaissance, European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are accessible, both to people and for LLM pretraining.

Supporting a project doesn't always mean donating money; contributions can take many forms.

You can offer your time, coding skills, feedback, design expertise, or simply help by spreading the word. In a world overflowing with information, visibility is a valuable form of support.

Choosing to boycott what doesn't align with your values is often underappreciated but can be very impactful.

Personally, I prefer to reshare and promote the projects I believe in. It's not about financial contributions—it's about increasing their reach. Sometimes, that's what makes the most significant impact.

Here are a few projects worth highlighting: Monero, ProtonMail, Briar.

Some more projects: Ricochet Refresh, Session, OpenBSD, etc.

The random kid that compiled the LineageOS version that runs in my phone.

I still don't understand why is making LineageOS compatible with more phone models so hard compared to Linux distros in desktop, so I really appreciate all the work behind it.

Same! I donate to various custom ROM maintainers for my specific device.

Because each of those silly companies making phones cannot be bothered to unify their firmware. At least that is my understanding, since I am not part of the Lineage dev team. But I have been using it for years and had many problems with updates and learn thing or two during the years.

Signal. I use it daily to communicate with friends, family and coworkers. Started donating after this post: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

The PHP Foundation, because while half the world was loudly throwing shade on the language, they were quietly making it good, stable and boring for the other half of the world to get work done :)

I also donate to Composer, PHPStan and PHPUnit. Those tools have been instrumental for the high quality of the PHP ecosystem.

In previous positions I managed to get the company I worked for to set aside a budget each year for contributions to open source projects that were important to us. This was considerably more money than I could afford to contribute personally. And across more projects.

When doing this it is important to communicate clearly if these are one-off contributions or if the projects can expect an annual contribution. Sadly, I didn't trust the bean counters at my employer, so I made it clear that "these are one off contributions - do not plan for future contributions from XYZ Corp". Still we managed to contribute for a handful of years.

(They stopped contributing after I left the company. Actually, the entire division, bean counters and all, was scrapped. And sadly, they did not communicate that they would stop funding these projects. This is unfortunate)

Wikipedia - Not much, but I did donate to it when I was a poor student. It's not a perfect page but nothing beats it in "Exam procrastination by going in to a deep rabbit hole by clicking hyperlinks on wikipedia".

Sioyek - PDF reader. I was happy to find it when it was still very new, and being among the firsts to donate to it. Pretty wholesome to see many have donated, a bit like seeing your favorite indie-band going big. https://sioyek.info/

I donate to KDE, my Linux desktop manager of choice: https://kde.org/

Same. KDE is wonderful. I use it every day, both at home and at work. Absolutely worth donating to.

I give to Save the Children. It's been around since the early 20th century and started specifically to help the most vulnerable people, children, during times of war. Very inspiring story. Very reputable. Most of the money goes directly to the kids for things like food and school supplies.

- ISRG/LetsEncrypt: it's amazing how much if an impact they are having in HTTPS, and that's with a very small number of people and resources.

- PHP Foundation.

- Drupal Association - I started my career with Drupal. Although I rarely use Drupal anymore, it feels right.

I wish I could donate to uBlock Origin, but the developer doesn't seem to accept donations last time I checked.

I think the Open Street Map is also well worth donating, I'm going to pretty soon.

I think the uBlock Origin maintainer generally encourages donating to filter list maintainers instead of

> I wish I could donate to uBlock Origin, but the developer doesn't seem to accept donations last time I checked.

This seems to be the case, and is probably frankly the smart way to go. I imagine if he started pulling in thousands of dollars, he'd get much more attention from the ad industry

> I wish I could donate to uBlock Origin, but the developer doesn't seem to accept donations last time I checked.

I consider this indispensable software, an absolute requirement for using the web today.

AnkiDroid

I can count on three fingers the end-user software products that have changed my life. Linux, VIM, and Anki. They are built on shoulders of technology, but those are the three that I touch.

I'm currently donating monthly (small amounts alas) to :

    - Hologram, an isomorphic web framework in Elixir by Bart Blast  
    - Torchlensmaker, differentiable optics with pyTorch by Victor Poughon

Both projects are to this day small and one-person but they have in common to be new takes at existing problems. Maybe those specific projects will not become the default, but I believe they will influence by showing alternative ways of doing things.

Apache Software Foundation accepts individual donations of any amount that are tax-deductible: https://apache.org/foundation/individual-supporters

Outreachy is another excellent 501c3 that provides paid internships for open source: https://www.outreachy.org/sponsor/donate/

Let's Encrypt provides free TLS certificates to anyone: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

You can find a wide range of OSS projects on OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/search?q=&tag=open+source

I have donated to:

immich: https://immich.app/

beszel: https://github.com/henrygd/beszel

I'm not entirely sure that these fall specifically under the 'donation' and 'digital initiative' categories that OP specified, but these are the institutions and pieces of software that offer their wares for free which I use often enough to give money to/purchase from.

- Octoprint

- Grayjay/Futo

- Internet Archive

- Opensubtitles

- The Guardian

I used to donate to Wikipedia, but for various reasons switched that donation to IA.

I currently donate to:

- Internet Archive, for the same reasons you do.

- LetsEncrypt, because I get a lot out of https

- Ironclad because I want to see more diverse monolithic OS kernels

- Alire because Ada's ecosystem is important to me

I donate monthly to the following:

- Magit, needs no introduction

- Borkdude, a __massive__ Clojure ecosystem contributor

- JPMonettas, for their work on FlowStorm, an incredibly useful debugger/introspection tool for Clojure

- The CIDER project, Clojure once again

- NoahTheDuke, for their work on keeping my much beloved jinteki.net alive and we'll

All these people deserve your money imo

I make a monthly donation to Magit, the git front end for Emacs. One of the few pieces of software that puts a smile on my face every time I use it and I use it 20 times a day.

https://magit.vc/donate/

ElementaryOS (https://www.elementary.io) and The Warning (https://www.thewarningband.com)

https://crdroid.net/

One of the best and widely-supported custom Android ROMs. Has a few features on top of Lineage OS and even GPay works out of the box on a rooted Pixel phone.

Zig - https://ziglang.org/zsf/

I run a non-profit called Tech for Palestine that is pushing for digital and real-world freedom. The efforts to weaponize the tech industry to control our speech are very frequently aligned to Israel as part of a movement to suppress Palestinian liberation.

We support over 60 projects in areas such as media bias, algorithmic/AI bias, protest tech, and boycotting, which are pushing back against these initiatives. Donations are very much appreciated

https://techforpalestine.org/donate/

Great question!

In the past I contributed to rust-analyzer - not much but something huge but at least something.

Nowadays I only contribute to https://quran.com.

Apologies if this ain't clear but I'll give it a shot.

I will donate to anyone, be it a group or one person if they can get all the different ways of reading رواية The Quran:

1. In static digital version, i.e., as PDFs or what have you in the Saudi script. 2. All the Quran's should be colour coded, i.e., tawjeed style mushaf. 3. It should be available online at first then to Android, etc. 4. Along with the Qur'an there should be readings of that style رواية in application. Shaykh Mishary is doing this but I'm quite why he doesn't just release his entire recording out all at once on YouTube.

I just what to say this isn't an easy tasks hence why I haven't attempted doing it. Or I can simply build a well and retire with life.

If something ain't clear let me know.

Regards, - Bana

I donate my time and some money to my local hackerspace [1], and encourage everyone to make a recurring financial contribution to theirs whether they use it or not, especially if it's run as a non-profit/not-for-profit, because we need more Third Places [2] in this world.

[1] https://hackerspaces.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

This is a bit of a different area: but since the last elections, I have subscribed to the New York Times.

I don’t always agree with them, but I feel like I’m strengthening the counter-side.

I enjoy articles from the NYT, but like any media outlet that caters to A1 groups of people, it is a bit snooty and full of out of touch opinion pieces.

IMHO your money is better spent elsewhere if you want to counter the current political atmosphere. Grassroots organisations and your local political parties are more worthy of your money than some big media outlets that are for the most part "bought" by the big fish.

I did too for a little while and loved listening to The Daily, but then I noticed they couldn’t help themselves from being politically opinionated and I was hoping to get independent and unbiased news. I thought it was such a shame, and maybe it’s been like that all along but I didn’t notice it until the last election.

- Homebrew: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations

- Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate

- LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

- Software

Haiku (because I was a first day BeOS user and I still miss that OS every day)

KDE (Daily driver and boy do I hate using Gnome)

Keepass2Android (essential, use it 20x per day)

Bottles (most robust and easy to use way to run windows games on my Linux box for me)

- Other projects:

Wikipedia (I'm don't 100% align with some of the politics internally and externally, as well as their spending on sidehustles, but regardless there's just no substitute)

ScreenScraper.fr (because I like neatly organized retro games)

- Today I learned:

Thunderbird donating to thunderbird only supports Thunderbird, so I'll start.

Internet Archive Even though some of the stuff they are doing is legally dubious, in general I'd say the initiative is a force for good. Considering support.

- What I wish I was able to support:

OpenSUSE I use this distro every day, but I don't have the time to invest in the community other than some well written bug reports and packaging feedback every now and then.

Firefox and MDN docs Oh boy do I have zero trust in Mozilla as an organisation, but the browser and the MDN docs are so fundamentally important to me. Regardless, I just can't bring myself to support the organisation with the current CEO.

Lichess, my favourite open source chess site.

INaturalist, an incredible (community-driven) source of ecology information across the world, tools for identifying organisms, etc.

https://cachyos.org/

The fastest GNU/Linux distribution available. Amazing set of patches, optimizations and specific device fixes. The community regularly finds performance regressions in the latest versions of packages and reports them upstream. Remember the NVIDIA explicit sync flickering issues? CachyOS had pushed the fixed driver before anyone else.

I really like the idea of the fediverse, so I donate to lemmy[0] and the spritely institute[1]. I also donate to asahi linux[2].

[0]https://join-lemmy.org/

[1]https://spritely.institute/

[2]https://asahilinux.org/

Not that I send a lot over, but I sponsor:

- Homebrew (I mean, I use it multiple times daily…)

- Servo (long-term health of the web)

- Mastodon and the instance I use (if you pay you’re not the product)

I've been sponsoring the Gleam language on GitHub for almost a year now. For no reason other than: the community is awesome, Louis Pilfold has done an incredible job creating an amazing community. The most inclusive and supportive community I've ever seen.

https://github.com/gleam-lang/

Signal, Mastodon, noyb.eu, and software libraries that my project depends on.

There’s something that’s embittered me about the subscription model and projects made purely for greed. I particularly enjoy supporting projects fiscally which that are passion projects that they could probably charge more for.

https://www.keybr.com - shows ads if you want to use it for free or you can pay a small fee to remove ads. The code is open-sourced so you can make your own. Helped me get the hang of split keyboards and was money well spent to support.

https://enso.sonnet.io - ingenious idea that has helped me write without loosing focus editing myself. The solo developer guy shares an entertaining blog full of illustrations and rich content. his project is available to download in full from Gumroad for a small one time fee.

If there’s any projects you know of like these please share them!

I'm making a small local MSP. And my monetization model is to imitate the business model of my vendors. If they use gmail for email, I don't charge, and only charge if they buy workspace (which I highly recommend). If they use office365, I charge the same for support (like 10$/u/month).

Now for free stuff, they have to pay by donations, if they use Roundcube for email, there goes a shekel or two, if they use Linux, gotta pay up, wordpress? Yup, drama notwithstanding, here's a buck.

It may seem like a disadvantage commercially, but I have faith that having a direct line with these guys and growing a sponsor reputation with upstream projects will pay off in the future.

Now I'm working with a client who had a website that was dead, so her graphic assets pointed to a dead site which was not bueno. I used Internet Archive to help revive the site, so they're gonna have a 'tip' coming their way. Everything has its price and its worth!

In terms of software, I currently donate to:

- Servo: Because I think browser engines are critical infrastructure for the web, and we are in dire need of one that is easily maintained, secure, embeddable, and isn't beholden to Google.

- Signal Foundation: Because our chat platforms and governments are spying on us, and Signal offers an alternative.

I have no issue with projects asking for donation, its all in how you do it though. Do not do it in a way that interferes with my work. Do not make nagware essentially. If your MSI installer has a donate button at the bottom for the entire install flow, cool. If your APT package has links at the end, cool. If your --about has it, cool if your --version has it cool, or in your Help->About menu option, cool. If you change the behavior of your program for "intermissions" that's just wrong and you should feel bad.

The other worse offender is projects like MinIO that removed over 100k lines, to push everyone towards "Pro" which costs 75 thousand a year. What? You had it in the previous version, 100% for free.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095612

Signal, Wikipedia, I'd consider my Obsidian sync a donation. I donate to some podcasts.

Edit: Come to think of it, these are all projects that ask for money, but not often enough to be annoying. I bet I'd donate to KDE (or Gnome or NixOS) if I'd ever get a notification and it's a 1 min click-click-click experience.

KDE, starting with Plasma 6.2, shows a notification once per year[1] and indeed it works[1]. They make donating[3] very easy.

[1]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i... [2]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... [3]: https://kde.org/donate/

It’s not a project per se, but one that I support and don’t see here yet is Public Knowledge[1]. They have a similar mission to EFF, but they do more hands-on lobbying in DC.

1. https://publicknowledge.org/about-us/

Here are the ones I can recall donating to in recent years: KiCAD Arduino tic-80

I'd like to donate to FreeCAD at some point, but the last time I had spare money to do that, I ended up paralyzed trying to figure out what would be the most impactful way to do so. Then Ondsel came and made a subscription the obvious choice (I thought) then they went away.

Ones that I probably should donate to but just haven't gotten to: Inkscape Gimp uv/ruff/ty

There are probably many more. My goal is to at least donate to any project that I make money from, preferably in a similar amount to what I might be paying otherwise. That is an awful lot to track down though, considering how many pieces there are for doing software development. Thus, I've been more focused on media and other engineering tools.

Signal, Wikipedia, Blender.

My salary is paid from donations to Zig Software Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful.

FreeBSD Foundation and assorted other open source and adjacent causes: https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2023-10-25-2%5E18-dollars-t...

I have a personal list with filters by donation method with foss projects: https://hacker.charity

Usually I pick the way I want to spend money at the moment and give them to someone who satisfies the criteria.

I believe all international organizations and projects I support from time to time were already mentioned in this thread.

However, there are also some local (German in my case) organizations I have donated to.

1. GFF - Gesellschaft für Freiheit (anti surveillance and pro digital civil rights in the EU and Germany) [1]

2. Frag den Staat (platform enabling easy freedom of information requests in Germany and their publishing in addition to related digital civil rights activities) [2]

[1] https://freiheitsrechte.org/en/ [2] https://fragdenstaat.de/ (German only)

People donating should do some research about charity fraud, it's extremely common today

I grew up in a household with a professional fundraiser, so I always look up financials of nonprofits before giving or volunteering. It's shocking just how many are passive income schemes for the wealthy.

Raylib and Odin programming language. Both have creators that are passionate and work mostly alone on the projects, neither has a ton of funding, and I think they're both just fun to use, and would like their creators to be able to keep working on them.

• Standard Ebooks

• Internet Archive

• Local libraries

Projects I wish I could donate to:

• uBlock Origin

For uBlock Origin, I tracked down all the folks who maintain the filter lists I use, and donate to them individually if they accept donations.

- https://archive.ph

- https://archive.org

- http://wikipedia.org

As a meta-answer, https://manifund.org was created by some cool people I know, and has some cool projects, e.g., https://manifund.org/projects/building-tooling-to-map-how-id..., https://manifund.org/projects/orexin-pilot-experiment-for-re...

I used to donate to wikipedia, but after seeing how wikimedia spends the money I stopped. Just like Mozilla, they have plenty of money for their core product but spend a ton on other projects that I don't care for.

Can you share links to what put you off?

I don't donate money to projects, instead give my time where I can. I am hiring junior developers when I can afford it, mentor students to work on FOSS projects and contribute to the FOSS community in various ways. I am also supporting a few children so they can go to school. Effectively, I am targeting the long game, raising the next generation of FOSS contributors. So far this is all funded by myself. If you would like to contribute, please contact me. http://codingforafrica.at/

Every month I donate a set percentage of my monthly income to some of these organizations:

Anki/AnkiDroid Firefox Futo keyboard Espanso Expandroid Tubular NewPipe SponsorBlock Zen browser Freetube Linux Mint VLC LibreOffice

I donated to https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge once. Invaluable for working with Wine-compatible VSTs on Linux.

A guy in Brazil who coded up:

https://nodezator.com/

because it was the first Python node editor which "just worked" out of the box when I tried to run it.

Based on a game dev system which was called Indie Python, the main site is now at:

https://indiesmiths.com/

I kick in to Wikipedia via Microsoft Rewards points whenever they are matching points, or if I have a surplus of Amazon gift card money 'cause there haven't been any Kindle book sales I bought into for a while.

I donate to immich even though I still use Google photos since I don't want to host critical infra in my spare time

https://github.com/immich-app

My favorite Android Note Taking App - Material Notes: https://github.com/maelchiotti/LocalMaterialNotes

How do you sync them to other devices? Syncthing?

I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.

I donate the following Projects and Lobbies on a monthly or yearly basis:

Projects

- Thunderbird (daily driver in my job)

- Debian (also daily driver in my job)

- FreeBSD (daily driver)

- LadyBird Browser (first "real new" browser since ~20 years, privacy first, open source)

Lobbies / Organisations

- The Chaos Computer Club (CCC): Advocate digital rights, Public Awareness and Education, Legal and Ethical Guidance (Advantage: Network, Learning, Nice People)

- Any political part you like: ... (Network, Learning, Nice People)

- The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty): Human Rights Advocacy etc.

And I go to Conferences and Meetups and pay for it (also when they are free, since i have some money)

Before also:

- FSF

- EFF

- Tor

- Firefox

I try to make sure that I donate to any dependency that I might want to make an issue for or get support on. It feels rude to ask for help without contributing anything and I like to avoid that feeling.

Every month: EFF, FSFE (FSF Europe), Internet Archive, Gentoo, Ladybird.

Not regularly, but I have donated to:

FreeFileSync, an excellent file sync utility within a network.

https://freefilesync.org/

StemRoller, separate stems (e.g., voice) from songs.

https://www.stemroller.com/

John's Background Switcher, shuffle wallpapers from various sources

https://johnsad.ventures/software/backgroundswitcher/

Wikipedia Foundation

Etc.

I donate a little to: - Lume (https://lume.land/) - Vue.js (https://vuejs.org/) - Serverless Chrome https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome

With that said we are looking at a new corporate structure for my business to increase the way we give back

Directly, occasionally to Ubuntu, Notepad++, JAlbum, Eclipse, Netbeans.

Indirectly, buying ebooks from people on most programming languages ecosystems, graphics, cloud tooling, across all well known vendors.

In addition to some of the big ones already mentioned here I also donate to my local animal rescue. They do very noble work saving injured animals from being euthanized and nursing them back to health. It's also soul-crushing work as they can't always save them in time. Having lost pets before myself, I can't imagine the stress of working in a place where you can expect to lose bonded animals somewhat regularly. I really admire their fortitude.

OpenStreetMap - it is more important than it gets attention :)

https://organicmaps.app/ is the only mobile app I have a subscription (monthly donation setup) for. I deleted Google Maps app. For my daily usage and in my region OpenStreetMap data is good enough. It's a fork of the maps.me app which started to add a crypto wallet feature, I hope with donation organicmaps can stay (crap-ware and cost) free.

- I donated to PyInstaller project in the past. Being able to package Python programs as executable literally made a big difference at work. I am very grateful for that project. But I can't find a donation link on their web site anymore.

- I donate to Wikipedia every year a small amount.

- It is not related to programming directly, but I try to donate to https://u24.gov.ua every month.

I am a card carrying member of the Free Software Foundation.

GIMP - The team is small, and some devs can be funded.

WACUP - DrO is building upon the parts of winamp that were open sourced around the Winamp 3 era and gradually building all the other parts (since Winamp was plugin based this is doable piece by piece).

Other: a couple of artists on patreon.

If I didn't have to work 5 days a week I might devote time to projects like these, since I can't donating some small amount £ feels right.

Musl: I believe it is crucial to have an alternative to libc.

SponsorBlock: A tremendous amount of time is wasted watching ads on YouTube.

I have donated to some open source stuff (GIMP, Wikipedia, Qalculate, Firefox, Signal, Magit), though irregularly. More regularly things like

Unicef

UNRWA

SaveTheChildren

Greenpeace

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders

Amnesty

I don't think there is a way to donate to Firefox unfortunately. Donations to Mozilla explicitly do not go towards browser development.

Food banks.

Yea this. I don't think I've donated to anything that wasn't either food banks or food distribution networks (the layer on top of the food banks) in like a decade+. If you don't count occasional neighbor/friend cancer-charity-run things.

There's a lot of hungry people in the US. I grew up going to elementary school with a lot of kids who didn't eat much at home (free breakfast and lunch at school), and the results aren't pretty.

Once we can reliably feed our poorest as a society, then maybe I'll donate to something else.

One doesn't prevent the other. I intentionally split (not equally) my donations between local/international help to basic human needs, so local shelters and food banks but also Amnesty, normal local politics and targetted philosophical (local provincial party, EFF), some techs that have a huge impact to many people, Thunderbird, Signal etc..

Logseq, although at times I regret it since the improvements haven't been as big as I expected in 3 years.

Still love the software, though

Signal K. Amazing project for us cruisers.

No Foreign Land, not an open source project, but essentially a free cruising guide for the whole world

I love me some Evennia; a Djano/python-based MUD framework. Saved me the trouble of rebuilding a well-crafted wheel & have been loyal supporter for years now. https://www.evennia.com/

Ladybird. Really do want this to succeed..

My first donations were for daily-driver productivity tools: Min browser (https://github.com/minbrowser/min) and fman (https://fman.io/)

I donate to the Ionide project which is a suite of dev tools for F#. Been using them consistently for years. They've only continued to improve over the years!

https://opencollective.com/ionide

KDE, Matrix, and the Internet Archive.

OpenBSD. Erlang Ecosystem Foundation.

    - magit
    - endeavouros
    - sometimes random helper tools when they save my ass
    - some opencollective member group I forgot
    - did give to wikipedia but their 'in your face' style pushed me away after 2 years

I donate yearly to KiCAD, Wikipedia, and Libre Office.

I will probably also donate to FreeCAD and postgres but I have not checked if they accept donations.

I would like to single out KiCAD as the most impressive open source (?) project if you are into electronic design.

I donate those small libraries or tools 1. which obviously not backed by any company 2. I used more than 3 times. 3. Directly to the author.

> Think of it as an “MyAnimeList for donations”, or a “Goodreads for open projects”, list out which projects you personally have your sights on you think are important that other people also hear about.

Sounds like an app idea. Who would use it?

I use cxfileexplorer and I would donate if I could. They're mysteriously mum on company information or devs. For any such project, how does anyone find useful information about security or support or donations?

The Odin Programming Language: Odin is the C alternative for the Joy of Programming.

Not enfough if I’m being honest

I sponsor https://github.com/jart and https://github.com/marcan on github

Years ago I donated to the Sierra Club, but eventually that started to feel off.

Since then the only donations I've made have been in support of the Crystal language.

I should spend some time this week reflecting on this.

I haven't donated yet because I was unemployed, but now that I have a more than decent salary, here are the projects that will be the receiver:

- KeePassXC

- KDE

- Ladybird Browser

- Khan Academy

- qBittorrent

- Actual

I'm planning on having a fixed budget and giving the same amount to all of them.

My list:

Thunderbird

NVDA

Tor

EFF

And no longer:

Wikipedia - they have enough

Mozilla - they don't invest in FF

Considering:

Internet archive

Notepad++

My criteria are mainly what I use in my everyday life and derive value from it. What can bring additional positive change in the world and or can bring postive change to other people who cannot afford to donate themselves.

I donate to PlayFramework (Scala). After EFPL donated the project to the public, the project seems to be revived and become very active again. Glad to see that.

So far I've only donated to KDE

It's my favorite desktop environment and application suite, and I use it both at home and profesionally

Actual: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

Thunderbird/Wikipedia intermittently

I focus on peer-to-peer services, as I think it is the most important focus for free software:

- Radicle - IPFS - torrents and magnet links - i2p - syncthing - PeerTube/ActivityPub

&al

Zigbee2mqtt as they help my house run smoothly.

and I guess NabuCassa / homeassistant, but that's also in exchange for remote backups. Still, I want them to stay alive.

I donate to Zig software foundation. I used to donate to Wikipedia too. Other than that, whenever I can, I try to give to other people and positive initiatives.

Kagi - in the sense that i paid for a year of membership and only did about three searches.

I hear great things, i love the idea behind it, a 65 year habit is hard to break.

I'll be back soon.

Kagi should reach 50K users in about ten days.

> a 65 year habit is hard to break

I'll bite. What alternative search engine have you been using the last 65 years?

Sorry, PowerToys boots on start up and flips my 2 and 6 keys around.

Sometimes i dont notice until mid morning.

Last time i donated, in january, it was to VLC.

I wanted to donate a bit every month but didn’t manage to get the habit.

I want to donate to projects like XFCE and the Free Software Foundation.

charity, not an internet/opensource project : I lend money through https://kiva.org

I’ve (irregularly) donated to Zig, Janet, Blender, Godot, and Raylib. Outside of software, I have also donated to EFF (electronic frontier foundation).

- Internet Freedom Foundation (India) https://internetfreedom.in/

European Digital Rights: https://edri.org/about-us/

I regularly donate to:

Lichess (5-10$ every 3 months)

I also donated to these projects in the past:

DESEC

Homebrew

sharkdp (fd and batcat)

I give to:

- The EFF

- tridactyl: https://tridactyl.xyz/

- the ACLU

- the mastodon instance I use as primary

- ad hoc to magit.vc

- a bunch of non-tech

I stopped donating to the ACLU when they got involved in the Depp/Heard situation. I supported them for many years.

not technical but might I throw my hat in the ring for https://www.unrwa.org/.

There are major forces in the world trying to shut them down through defamation and they badly need funding to continue helping people in gaza.

A couple of open source projects in Open Collective.

It changes over time but currently Vue and FastEndpoints (the C# http toolkit).

Asahi Linux (https://asahilinux.org/)

Wezterm, the terminal emulator I use daily

I contribute to the D Language Foundation.

I rarely donate on the internet because it’s hard to verify the authenticity of many causes. Unless I know someone personally or the situation is something I can trust, I find it hard to commit. I feel that donations only truly carry meaning when they are directed towards something real and tangible. For me, it’s more about going to the ground and understanding the situation firsthand before making any decision.

Then just donate to the projects that you use maybe? Certainly there are some OSS projects that don't need our help (Chromium, for example), but there are lots that do:

- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others

- Anki

- Recoll

- FSF

- Virtually all community driven linux distros

If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".

Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.

Internet archive VLC(VideoLAN) Inkscape

- Signal - Mastodon - Internet Archive

Flexspin: a Multi Language (C, Spin, Basic) compiler system for the Propeller II Microcontroller

- Kitty terminal. My daily driver.

- Wikipedia

- Used to donate to visidata and will probably again, if I need it for work again

Thanks for your VisiData donation! Donations like yours continue to motivate us to continue to maintain the tool, and in fact we're putting out a new release in the next few weeks.

The Mastodon instance I'm on.

I've been donating iTerm2 for 2 years every month and that makes me feel good

- The Godot game engine - Magit - Nebula (if a curated YouTube alternative counts)

https://fsf.org

Dokku. Still the easiest way to run a bunch of web apps on a single VPS imo.

coolify It's great to have easily self hosted alternative for variety of services

https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify

Linux weekly news

OpenBSD

Sourcehut

Off the top of my head EFF, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, SDF, Neocities.

Signal, the Internet Archive, and a steadily declining amount to corejs.

I regularly donate to a universal basic income project here in Germany.

but is it a voluntary donation?

Yes

Not really internet-related, but I prefer donating to local initiatives run by people I trust, usually directed to improving people's lives (health, education, etc). These projects are not "famous", but have a noticeable impact, and are IMO wiser in their spending than some huge non-profit organizations (e.g. they don't spend money in huge bonuses, or in advertising campaigns to get more money).

Jellyfin. Signal. The two core services in my life I value the most :D

I donate to XMonad because it is finest of wms and the one I use.

ADEGA, is a local nature association with base in Galicia (Spain).

No projects. Using GitHub sponsor for individual OSS contributors.

Outside of charities, I donate to a few projects: - Openbsd foundation (I use openssh all the time :))

- Corejs + babel (donated after reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859766

- Magisk . I root my Android phone because I believe that if I buy a device I should actually own it.

- Scummvm I believe in preserving computing history and scummvm does great work making older games accessible

- MisterFPGA. Instead of giving my 3 years old son a tablet, I've decided to set up MisterFPGA for him with an Amiga core for him to do kidpix and scummvm to run Adibou and the humongous games. I like the idea of him having access to a relatively simple system like the amiga where he can learn how computer work without having access to internet and learning to passively consume.

- Valetudo. I love having a robot cleaning my house. I do not love having something with a camera that's not purely local. Thanks to valetudo, I can use it without worrying about my privacy.

- Not directly a donation but I buy a yearly license to crossover to support wine development

- Calibre

- Syncthing

- The developer of Karabiner

- Internet Archive

- Free Software Foundation

I used to give to the following:

- Wikipedia (but stopped when I realized that they have more than enough donations and that I should focus on other worthy causes)

- Mozilla (but stopped when I saw the CEO increase her salary while firing and stopping important projects. I do not want a repeat of the IE monopoly with Chrome and as such I want Firefox to succeed but I have completely lost trust in Mozilla's management)

Solid list there! I love Calibre and ScummVM. Is Scumm still under development though?

It still sees active development, they keep adding new engines regularly. One of the engine I'm excited about is Macromedia Director [1] which they added initial support for in 2.5.0. That's a big endeavour though so will take time until they add everything needed for full compatibilities with a lot of games.

They've also just added support for some of the Dynamix games like Willy Beamish and Heart of China[2] which I absolutely loved as a kid (despite their rather rough edges)

[1] https://obscuritory.com/essay/macromedia-director-in-scummvm... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2018/05/the-dynamic-interactive-narra...

Exercism and Sonic-Pi.

Wikipedia.

Also F-Droid (Android apps), ACLU, Doctors without Borders, PBS.

LMN, Signal, Internet Archive, and I _think_ wikipedia.

I stopped contributing to Signal when I found out about the MobileCoin.

EFF and Internet Archive

Sometimes to feddit.org over OpenCollective

Gentoo Linux

SPCA (and other cat shelters) in various places

* Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr * Jellyfin

Wikipedia, a hundred a year or so.

Thunderbird and Radio Paradise

- Wikipedia - Internet Archive

I donate to Signal and OpenBSD

- Codeberg - Signal - Vivaldi

This is my current list of monthly donations, loosely organized:

Content creators

- Sci Show https://www.youtube.com/scishow

- Escape Artists (short fiction podcasts) https://escapeartists.net/

- Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections

- The Bible Project https://bibleproject.com/

- Liliputing https://liliputing.com/

- Radiotopia (99% Invisible & other podcasts) https://www.radiotopia.fm/

- PBS (local station) https://thinktv.org/

Online Services

- Internet Archive https://archive.org/

- Wikipedia https://www.wikipedia.org/

- Snopes https://www.snopes.com/

- MetaBrainz Foundation https://musicbrainz.org/

Justice

- Equal Justice Initiative https://eji.org/

- Innocence Project https://innocenceproject.org/

- International Justice Mission (IJM) https://www.ijm.org/

- Institute for Justice https://ij.org/support/give-now/?

Advocacy

- Right to Repair https://www.repair.org/

- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) https://www.eff.org/

- Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) https://sfconservancy.org/

- Free Software Foundation (FSF) https://www.fsf.org/

Making the world a better place

- Partners in Health https://www.pih.org/

- World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/

Software

- ESLint https://eslint.org/

- FreshRSS https://freshrss.org/

- Open WRT (managed by SFC) https://openwrt.org/

- Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) https://www.mozilla.org/

Ad-blocking

- Pi-hole https://pi-hole.net/

- osid.nl domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/sjhgvr

- Peter Lowe's domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/blocklist

- Steven Black's blocklist https://github.com/sponsors/StevenBlack

- Ajayyy (SponsorBlock) https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Local (Troy, OH)

- Health Partners Free Clinic https://www.healthpartnersclinic.org/

- Brukner Nature Center https://www.bruknernaturecenter.com/

Past ones include VLC, Retroarch, mGBA, UNHCR, and some more local things

Thanks! You're the best.

Thanks for making the internet a better place!

Oops, too late to edit, but I typo'd the name and put down the old patreon link for the https://oisd.nl/ blocklist - it's now https://www.patreon.com/c/oisd

Pypy

- KDE

- Wikipedia

Zulip

Signal

Pi-hole

F# Weekly

Pony

Zellij

Notepad++ Paint.NET NetBSD

archive.today (that's a different thing than Internet Archive)

lichess, it's one of my favorite open source projects.

Signal and lichess

a browser and a long-running podcast.

The two that come to mind are:

- reticulum.network, as I want the code to get audited as soon as possible - many youtubers that fight against enshitification and for spreading critical thinking mindset.

- Internet Archive

- Kiwix

- Singlefile

- Home Assistant

- Zulip

- Asahi Linux

- OpenZFS

- Django Foundation

And a handful of YouTubers / patreon ppl.

- Signal

- OpenBSD

- The Pirate Bay

- Wikipedia

Django.

WezTerm

Neovim

local cat shelter

- GiveWell

- QubesOS

- FSF

- Institute for Justice

Wikipedia

- Lazygit

- WezTerm

- Signal

> With the Internet rapidly undergoing its corpocene mass extinction event

What? This is news to me. Also What does it even mean?

I think it's about Dead Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I think it means all the little websites are disappearing and getting replaced by giant corporate social media platforms

tabby typora

django

z-lib

webpack and babel

It's mostly what I use daily or a lot (except one these are not recurring; I will try to make these recurring once I am financially there again):

- https://objective-see.org/support.html (For https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu et al)

- https://www.thunderbird.net/donate (I hope none of it goes to Mozilla or Firefox. I also hope https://thundermail.com brings something than I can instead pay for, if I can or will decide to afford, instead of intermittent donations)

- https://www.borgbackup.org/support/fund.html (I would want to support https://restic.net as well as I use it so much but they never setup a way - it has been discussed :/)

- https://syncthing.net/donations

- https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations

- https://cryptomator.org/donate/

- https://www.patreon.com/db4s

- https://github.com/sponsors/qarmin for https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

- https://github.com/sponsors/garethgeorge for https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest

- https://keepass.info/donate.html and https://keepassium.com/donate (Mostly the latter) (I had actually moved to StrongBox which did a U-turn on FOSS and then sold to another company. At that point I came back to KeePassium. The KeepPassium author actually took a stand a went FOSS as a principle. I think this is worth noting.)

..and few more.

… …

# The ones I support by paying for one of its services bust mostly because its FOSS app:

- https://vorta.borgbase.com

- http://ente.io (But sadly not for long; because I really can't stand a non-native "photos" app. I just can't! Otherwise it's a great service!)

Hey, one of the folks working on Ente here, thanks for supporting us!

Are there any interactions that you find annoying within the app? It'd be great if you could specifics, we'd like to explore what is feasible within the bounds of Flutter.

Thanks again!

Hey, first of all if was bad or annoying I would not have began to use it. It's not bad, it's actually good generally speaking and from the functionality point of view. You have done a great job considering you had to deal with one of the most private data on two platforms who are very sceptical about giving data access and in their own different ways. Not to mentioned the kinds of feature you all offer while keeping things e2ee is simply great.

It is more about aesthetics and personal preference point of view. Being mobile developer doesn't help either. The thing is you end up noticing everything that a non-native app misses and skips. Small clunks .. the way something loads and how the transition happens et cetera, some textures, corners, icons, the general UI design philosophies like some shades are simply not going to be the same in a non-native app (unless one is doing pixel to pixel matching which would defeat the purpose of picking a multi platform way to begin with).

Discussing so called "drawbacks" would be doing a disservice to your excellent product and also to your goal. I am sure you had a reason to pick up a common codebase (maybe speed; small team or something else - doesn't matter) and it's really a fine product. It's just about my personal preference.

Thank you for these fine FOSS apps and good luck!

(I still be using Ente Auth fwiw - because there are no better alternatives, let alone a better native alternative :-) 2FAS could have come close but it's not there at all)

Thanks a bunch for the feedback!

We chose a cross-platform framework to keep the team small, longevity is important for a company like Ente.

Also, we understand moving to native is inevitable. We should have sufficient engineering bandwidth to invest in a rewrite towards the end of 2026. Hopefully you will give us another shot then :)

Thanks again!

I think most everything in this post is wrong. The internet is not dying, and neither are websites or products distributed on it, for money or for free. And we can do without virtue signalling in any shape or form - and why do it here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com