I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I’ve started working on an app that records your app usage, and then at the end of the month splits whatever sum of money you want to donate amongst the apps in proportion to the time you spent using them.

Then it will (hopefully) let you donate to all of those projects with a single click.

Since it’s only halfway finished, I’m posting this to gague how much interest there would be in such an app. Could you could see yourself using something like this? Do you have any ideas for what I should add/change?


*(It also occurred to me that perhaps one way to fix surveillance capitalism on the internet would be if every HTTP get request came with a microtransaction (eg 0.01¢) attached; those without money would gain those 0.01¢ by seeing ads, like today)

  • RiceBowl@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    16 hours ago

    Something that don’t scrape my usage data might be more interesting to me. If there were an app that had a list of open source projects and I could select which ones I use or just want to support and then get provided an easy way to donate to them all or just even their donation links that would be great. Eliminate going through my computer and I think it’s fantastic.