Surprisingly, I hear, by far, the most about gittip from feminist circles; it's easy to explain the reason for using gittip in that context.

It's great that people use gittip for that, but I also think the barrier to understanding gittip is easier for people who support feminist causes than for most other demographics.

I've tried using gittip as a single-donation tip jar for people who fixed or forked broken repos, but having to use the subscription-like format makes that too much of a hassle in most cases, unfortunately.

I assume it's for tax or regulation reasons that this option is not available? It'd have been great to use in my GitHub issues, if someone helps me out with a problem there.