HN Explorer

Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

279 points by xeonmc ↗ HN
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.

298 comments

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cuu508
Signal, Mastodon, noyb.eu, and software libraries that my project depends on.
brudgers
Food banks.
dmoy
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.

dorfsmay
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..
raydenvm
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...
[dead] NoOn3
[flagged]
ajdude
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

bergie
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

90s_dev
> With the Internet rapidly undergoing its corpocene mass extinction event

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

binary132
I think it means all the little websites are disappearing and getting replaced by giant corporate social media platforms
neom
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...

eskibars
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.

alpaca128
With "overestimate how few resources are needed" do you mean underestimate the amount of needed resources?
dowager_dan99
>> overestimate how few resources are needed

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

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

jllyhill
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?
f0a0464cc8012
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/

soumendrak
No projects. Using GitHub sponsor for individual OSS contributors.
elevaet
- 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.

acomjean
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.

herewulf
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).

elevaet
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.
isatty
Gentoo Linux

SPCA (and other cat shelters) in various places

WillAdams
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.

zabzonk
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?
CommenterPerson
Wikipedia.

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

busterarm
OpenBSD. Erlang Ecosystem Foundation.
Elaris
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.
d-us-vb
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.

vallassy
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.

slyall
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.
LorenDB
KDE, Matrix, and the Internet Archive.