2017-08-16 Donations
Collecting donations for 2017. Iāll start with the regular stuff: I regularly donate $10/month to the EFF, $120/year to the FSF, and ā¬180/year to the FSFE.
As for political associations in Switzerland: we are members of Mieterverband (for tenants) and VCS Verkehrs-Club der Schweiz (for sustainable mobility, unlike the Touring-Club, which is pro-cars).
Today I was listening to another near 6h episode of Dan Carlinās Hardcore History and liked it very much: $10.
Iāve been using Mastodon a lot: ā¬10. Usually I donāt donate to Free Software because I also write Free Software and give it away so I feel it evens out.
The Internet Archive keeps our data alive, hopefully preventing the future from viewing our times a Dark Age. So much content on disks and easily lost in an upgrade, deleted when bills arenāt paid, taken offline when key people lose interest, encrypted because of DRM, itās a sad state of affairs. $25 it is.
Iām not a good Wikipedia editor because whatever I know seems to already be on Wikipedia. Itās amazing. I decided to pay Wikimedia CH CHF 25. I think this is the only one thatās tax deductible, for me.
I want a free alternative to Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. Thus, even though I donāt agree with all their decisions, I decided to donate ā¬25 to to Mozilla for Firefox. Saving screenshots to the cloud? Integrating Pocket? Noooo!
Most of the links I follow on social media seem to take me to the The Guardian and so I decided to pay them 25ā¬.
Plenty of links Iām following will also lead me to the German news site Golem.de and so I decided to pay their subscription of ā¬30/year.
Also donating to MĆ©dĆ©cins Sans FrontiĆØres and the WWF CHF 500 each. And I pay double subscription for the local leftist weekly newspaper, WOZ, CHF 530 in total.
[Note: recent changes at Patreon result in a different fee structure so Iām not at all sure what this means anymore. As you can see in the comments below, I opened a Liberapay account.]
I understand why people might prefer a Patreon to donations via PayPal: easier to plan for. But $1/mo donations means about $5 out of $12 a year are for the middle men, right? 5% for Patreon, and 3.9% (4.7% to France, 4.9% to Germany) and a fixed fee of 0.30 USD (0.35 EUR, 0.55 CHF) for using PayPal from Switzerland to the US, and a currency conversion fee of 3%, resulting in 0.30 + 0.04 + 0.05 + 0.03 = 0.42, or 5.04 USD per year in fees. Well, if you are supporting multiple creators, I guess the fees get split. And you can prepay your PayPal account. From then on, your PayPal fees go down to 1%. All you need to do is make a domestic bank transfer where your name on the bank account *matches exactly*.
ā#Life ā#Donations
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So much talk about the new fee structures of Patreon these days!
- a summary of what happened
- a comparison of recurring payment service providers
- the problem Patreon might be trying to avoid: being a money services business
- a positive article about Patreon growth including this statement: āWeād rather have our GMV be made up of fewer, but truly life-changed creators rather than a lot of creators making a few dollars.ā ā Tal Raviv
- a long statement by Amanda Palmer: āi did not want to build my own island. i wanted to build a hut in an interconnected village, next to my friendās huts, with tons of spce for anyone to set up shop. i wanted to be part of a larger community of DIY artists carving out their own paths, making art directly for the people.ā I also loved her reference to *matreon.com*, āwhere we can support art and smash the patriarchy all at the same time.ā Right on!
- and a long post by Cory Doctorow: āYes, they did something stupid with their payment processing this week. Yes, that exposes how dangerous it is to rely on a company for your artistic living. But the measure of Patreonās success isnāt creating an army of full-time creators with middle-class incomes where none existed before: itās ensuring that the money generated by art goes primarily to artists.ā
recurring payment service providers
being a money services business
Anyway, I set up an an account on Liberapay and transferred 100ā¬. Iāll support the Mastodon devs and my Mastodon instanceās admin, maybe more.
ā Alex Schroeder 2017-12-11 14:57 UTC