Lemmy - Donate
join-lemmy.org

This is a follow-up to my previous post asking for design suggestions for the new donation dialog. It gave a lot of valuable feedback which is why I’m making another similar post.

This time it’s about the donation page on join-lemmy.org (linked above). What can be done to improve the texts and design? For a start I already changed the text to the same one from the donation dialog. Here more space is available, so a longer text with more details could be written (possibly below the donation buttons).

What do you think about the available donation options? Do they work for you or would you prefer to donate through a different platform? On the other hand it is possible that the number of available options is already too confusing. Would it help to add a short description for each button?

Below are lists of contributors, translators and sponsors. They haven’t been updated in two years and no one complained, which indicates that they don’t serve as motivation for people to contribute or donate. So I would remove that whole section which will leave a lot of free space. What else can we put there, maybe a list of reasons why people should donate?

By the way I plan to make a recurring series of posts like this. The next ones will likely cover onboarding for new users, the reports page and more. If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.

Edit: The changes are now deployed, but you are welcome to make further suggestions.

  • @nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    1•3 days ago

    “Help Design Lemmy” sounds good, thanks for the suggestion. I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that? And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

    We provide Lemmy as free and open source platform without any tracking or advertising, and work every day to improve it. Yet we also need money to pay our bills and provide for our families. Only 2% of Lemmy users donate, so we need your donation to keep this model working. Thank you for helping to create a new form of social media.

    • @wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1•18 hours ago

      I looked around for some info about A/B testing but it seems relatively complicated to setup. Do you have any tools to suggest for that?

      Not really. i know wikimedia foundation did that but it is probably not the best option. googling gives a few results but that’s not really insightful.

      And I can see what you mean about the text sounding unsure. What do you think about this one?

      I don’t think this solves the problems i mentioned (including in the pull request). donations and working full time are a means to an end. the average response by average joe might be “well they can just get a regular job like the rest of us”.

      I don’t we should insist on just having a elevator pitch. sure an elevator pitch is very useful but i know that when i wanted to donate to charities I looked for a decent chunk of information to help me make a decision.

      this part that appears inside thunderbird (which seems to be doing very well interm of fundraising) is more like something i had in mind (in term of feeling important)

      there is some research about this type of messaging (see risk aversion and fear appeals). naturally it does not feel great because i think the thought that a project is at risk and might need donations is a negative evaluation that will probably produce a negative emotion. but i think it is the honest truth for thunderbird and lemmy and any large scale open source project.