Just to note that this exists GitHub Sponsors · GitHub
I added it to Snowdrift Wiki - Other Crowdfunding / Fundraising Services with some notes/summary.
Some misc notes of interest that I wrote in an outside chat about it:
Among my biggest concern from the beginning of Snowdrift.coop was more about big players with big reach getting into this space rather than Patreon etc. Patreon is stuck with having to get a VC exit and liable to any competing platform. Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple tying in patronage to their existing resources reaches a huge market and becomes a default. I mean, the move toward patronage was inevitable, but our goal was/is to frame it to actually serve the public interest.
anyway, it’s absolutely true that we had heavy lifting to do to jump from “Kickstarter exists” to crowdmatching, and the more prominent patronage is in other forms, the less distance from that to crowdmatching in getting people to grok what we’re doing
the most awkward tension comes from the eventual prospect of GitHub doing crowdmatching, but while I worried early about that, I’ve come to realize that most people just aren’t open-minded to anything new at all and aren’t willing to try anything at all that isn’t already proven
if I joined their advisory group and advocated for crowdmatching, they still wouldn’t actually do it. And anyway, I’ve all along joked about just seeing this through until it gets sabotaged or co-opted by some powerful player(s). I’ll just have to wait and see because at some point it’s just out of my hands, we can’t stop that. That’s still a better outcome than nothing.
Overall, it’s probably a good thing. I wish we had the resources to pay for the hours of time that GitHub (Microsoft) paid some employees to build their less-innovative thing. We could probably get more fully launched, but we don’t have that capital.
Anyway, it is what it is, and GitFund (also listed in our wiki review) is probably that much more doomed with GitHub doing basically the same thing officially.