The donation model works for a very few groups, but for the vast majority of OSS and freehosted projects, donations are nowhere close to covering costs.
Even lemmy.world is viable because they only count server costs, and are volunteer run. If they had to cover staffing costs, it would be untenable.
Don’t have any sources, but I feel like I’ve seen that model before and it doesn’t seem to have worked so far for most people.
I have a monthly donation going to the nonprofit running Lemmy.world as it was my server for the longest time, and it seems to work for them?
The donation model works for a very few groups, but for the vast majority of OSS and freehosted projects, donations are nowhere close to covering costs.
Even lemmy.world is viable because they only count server costs, and are volunteer run. If they had to cover staffing costs, it would be untenable.
true that!