Engagement is what matters, and that’s driven by habits. The protests were disruptive. The switching of apps is disruptive. I see this more as a way to distract and bring up engagement again.

Is it a good idea? Honestly, if they want to succeed I think they should focus on what has become broken with reddit first

Also the Internet Archive? I always wish they crawled more of the web than they did in years past.

Salaries for key people aren’t out of this world given their scale and highest paid person taking a pay cut is a good sign: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767

At some point you have to trust your gut?

Speaking more broadly than FOSS:

The large national nonprofits probably don’t need your money, and the small local nonprofits probably do. At the same time nonprofit can lose sight of their mission, and bigger orgs need admin, specialty jobs, and leadership that are full time jobs that a family could live on. So it’s hard to generalize. Their mission is the goal, not making decisions based on finances.

I look at their finances to get an idea of where they are at. These can be “lagging indicators” if there really is a time sensitive need though.

Examples: Ran into one person who was trying to promote their non-profit rather than solicit donations — when I looked into their finances it was clear they didn’t have the money to get there but had done great work already. Another person who doesn’t pay himself for the work he puts in because it’s all volunteer based and only seeks contributions for his projects.

Not sure about foss specifically, but I’ve had some non-profits prompt me to up my contribution to cover transaction fees. But they seem to be closer to 3%.

A (for-profit) employer used to do gift matching and would also give us pocket money to contribute to the organization(s) of our choosing. It got me into a habit of contributing on a roughly quarterly basis.

I try to identify places where there is actual need so I am not consistent. Some of the big-name non-profits get disproportionate attention, or they spend too much money on fundraising, or they grossly overpay their key people. Other non-profits do good work and are sorely underfunded. It’s not just transaction feels, I find the act of making individual contributions in itself an inefficient allocation of resources.