I know you hate subscriptions. I don’t like them either.
Mobile apps must be maintained and supported forever, and one-time purchases are not an effective method of funding development¹. When one-time sales dry up then developers abandon the app. Subscriptions give them an incentive to keep you happy.
I think the best thing to do right now is to increase the active user count, then worry about conversion rate (basically percentage of users who contribute, which seems not good enough for lemmy)
e.g. fosstodon has about 42,934 MAU and makes about $3,236 (about 13 users per dollar).
for mastodon it’s 2706053 MAU and makes about $33,627 (about 80 users per dollar).
for lemmy it seems like it’s 7.6 users per dollar , but i think that could be higher because the donate button seems almost invisible.
The money thing is definitely an issue… when lemmy’s NLNet grant runs out, we will need to transition to a more sustainable model.
The best option for open source projects like this one to stay alive, is subscriptions (which we already have via liberapay and opencollective). I really like what tasks.org has to say about it:
I think the best thing to do right now is to increase the active user count, then worry about conversion rate (basically percentage of users who contribute, which seems not good enough for lemmy)
e.g. fosstodon has about 42,934 MAU and makes about $3,236 (about 13 users per dollar).
for mastodon it’s 2706053 MAU and makes about $33,627 (about 80 users per dollar).
for lemmy it seems like it’s 7.6 users per dollar , but i think that could be higher because the donate button seems almost invisible.