Encourage users to donate more

[Nutomic]

Lemmy is entirely reliant on donations to function, yet the current amount of donations is barely enough to fund development, and some instances also dont receive enough funding.

To improve this I suggest to display donation links more prominently. Namely on the homepage, below the sidebar text we can show the following:

• Donation info for Lemmy development
• Donation info local instance
• Donation info for current frontend/app

It could also be shown above the sidebar and collapsed by default. For the local instance, there needs to be a new config option with markdown text for the donation info. The backend returns this together with donation info for Lemmy development. Frontends and apps can add their own donation info as well.

Additionally, when viewing a community we could show this:

• Donation info for Lemmy development
• Donation info for instance where community is hosted
• Donation info for current frontend/app

In this case it would be necessary to federate the donation info.

[dullbananas]

Users should be shown an estimate of the server costs that their usage caused

[dessalines]

This is pretty critical, as lemmy won't have a sustainable development future without funding. Even with our ~47k active monthly users, we're not able to fund even a single developer fully. We need to not only fund our current devs, but also grow the dev co-op.

We should consider bunding in dismissible wikipedia style funding status banners into lemmy-ui, that pull the current donation stats from join-lemmy. They're annoying, but they work.

[Nutomic]

Another thing we can do is list on the donation page the people who are receiving donations (dessalines and me currently). With name, avatar, github and lemmy profiles as well as a description what exactly we work on. That would give users more transparency, so they know what exactly the donations are for.