This was initially demoed at FediCon 2025, but CrowdBucks is an open source, self-hostable fundraising system that allows people to financially support one another. You use your existing Fediverse account to hold a fundraiser, and can also donate to other people’s fundraisers as well. The form factor is kind of similar to Kickstarter or Patreon.
We really need to figure out the payment system for the fediverse… Good to see someone trying things.
When I put Stripe integration into PieFed I had absolutely zero donations through there, meanwhile my Patreon and Librepay had dozens of dollars in donations. Dozens!
People really really didn’t want to donate directly, for some reason. So I disabled the Stripe option.
Instead, Patreon takes 8% and their only payout method is Paypal so Paypal takes a percentage (5%?) and then when I transfer it to my bank from Paypal there’s a currency conversion so they take another 5%? and then I pay tax on whatever remains…
I wish CrowdBucks better luck than I had.
tl;dr: it uses stripe
Support for other providers is coming. Bandwagon is in a similar situation. The overall goal is to support a multitude of options, so that no one payment solution has a monopoly.
What is Stripe?
tbf not sure if anything the EU makes can compete with it
Klarna is Swedish.
Nasty company though.
Maybe someday GnuTaler, which is a direct bank payment system with full transparency. I think only one bank in Sweden (I think) is testing it ATM.
I’ve said it before, I think there’s money in a service that crowd funds open source donations.
I use so much FOSS that making sure they all get some money is a real first world problem. If I can only give £10 that month what do I do? Rotate who gets the tenner? Give everyone £.20? Then you have to figure out how each service wants funding and organise that.
Instead I could go to FOSSfund select all the software I use and donate £x. That money gets divvyed up and stored with other people’s donations until a threshold is reached.
When enough money is accrued the service makes a substantial donation. The FOSSfund itself is funded through interest gained while holding donations.
Of course I am a naive user that wants good things to exist and has no idea the difficulties in making them happen. Brb, off to vibecode a payment system. I forsee no problems. I will not be taking questions or feedback at this time.
I think https://liberapay.com/ does that?
Holy-shit it does!!! I couldn’t find any of the main repos I want to donate too: Pi-Hole, jellyfin/seerr, *arr, immich. I guess that’s an outreach problem? Getting PromoFaux (Pi-Hole) onto librapay. Pledges seem to help with that.
But Lemmy, Syncthing and Vaultwardern is in in there. I have a tonne of services using MySQL, it’s in there.
Thank you kind stranger, my bank acct hates you.
immich does not accept donations anymore, they “sell you a license” (there was a loot of drama for this…).
jellyfin does not accept donations at all. they say that in the website.
I saw Immich’s licence. I don’t want to dig up old drama though.
I was unaware jellyfin didn’t take donations.
I thought they would both take donations though. Money is money after all.
Remember, Passw0rd1! is a handy filler, meets most password requirements, and is a strong password!
‘Hunter2’ Was my original plan, yours is much better with a special charachter, thank you.
Which is that? All I see is “*******”.
Sweet so now we have OpenCollective, Librepay, and now CrowdBucks. All kind of filling different roles it seems. On going orgnization funding (with transparency as a goal), patronige of a project/group you support (with ease as a goal), and now fundraising (which is generally a limited time activity).
Am I comparing them all pretty well here? Or is there anythjng im missing?
From their website
From people you know
CrowdBucks is created by individual people you know, and not a large face-less corporation
And yet, there are no people shown on the website. How do I do know if I know these people?
