Sure people might downvote here but engineers care about facts. have you tried testing this in real world setting? working with moderators? what feedback did you get?

Right now this is experimental. you can’t just use AI and automatically expect it to always do a better job then the established methods.

What i am worried about is that the federation system is already kinda hard to understand. New users who are not hardcore fediverse nerds (Like me and probably the rest of the people answering this post). Could start thinking “what the hell is going on?!” and might think lemmy is obtuse and drop it.

Lemmy could at some point benefit from a UX study where new users volunteer to be observed while the software is first use (software companies sometimes do that). maybe that could verify there are no problems . adding a searchable FAQ and a introductory tutorial (saying something "this will take about 5/10/15 minutes) could help.

Also lemmy has some kind of plugin system. this actually sound like something where a lot of people will want to experiment with different methods (maybe even benchmark them in some way). maybe open an issue asking for the ability to extend sorting with plugins?

tildes.net is pretty good. i augment my use of lemmy and reddit with it.

And there are a ton of them listed here if you want to spend more time doing market research (and share your conclusions if you find anything interesting).

Have you looked at the state of how open source smartphone os projects are funded? Seems like not enough people think it is currently important. i saw no bump in funding since the announcement. I would say the best bet is trying to help one of these projects with fundraising and trying to educate or convince enough people it is worth investing in. and obviously donate if you can. Although to be honest even i don’t do that (i think i invest enough in FOSS).

Once i bought a phone i tried to pick one that is friendly for FOSS projects and went with a pixel (which grapheneos recommended). so voting or signaling with your wallet is an option.

I also think something like codeberg. where anyone can be a member if he pays fees that help fund the organisation and democratically elect a board that decides what to fund could be helpful. codeberg has a pretty good organic growth so that is encouraging but i don’t know if there is enough interest in that.

It actually reports about 27K monthly active users and is one of the more popular platforms on the fediverse.

lemmy indicates clearly liberapay is preferred . and it does seem to have an effect because patreon donations went down at some point while liberapay donations went up.

With that said liberapay fees are cited as being around 3.1% and maybe higher. some digital currencies are almost free (nano, ripple) and despite the hate you see i don’t see a rational reason not to offer them as an option.

Any github or codeberg people can star?

Also if so many people want it. starting to fund raise money might be good. paralives is already making good money and because it is closed source there is a incentive to make modding harder (so they could sell improvements). Plus this sounds really hard and labor intensive. being able to work on it full time could help you stay motivated. even seeing people giving money might help you feel the work is really appreciated and its not just cheap words.

For user tagging. see this . its implemented on the server side but not on the UI side. give it a thumbs up maybe it will help the developers prioritize it.

Its like restaurants . you could go and some menu items you like and some you won’t like. asking for a recommendation from the waiter is a pretty good bet.

also the wayback machine works with the fediverse observer. so you can look here

I am not noticing anything on fiverse.observer. so i guess some glitch on fedidb?

Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.

That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).

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.

Wouldn’t it be better if this was a peertube plugin?

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.

In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.

There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).

There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.

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.