Hi, I’m very recently acquainted with Snowdrift as of just a couple of weeks ago. On most code forges and the FSF member forums, I’m cxd4. (It’s just an opening chess move. Hate when people always capitalize the ‘c’.) On IRC, I’m also DragonCat (was also DrCat, until Dragora GNU/Linux tricked me).
Of said code forges, Codeberg is how I am currently following along on occasion updates to Snowdrift, but it wasn’t really until I read an old discussion over mailing list with Sourcehut about issues like with Stripe and payment backend ethics and payment options.
Coincidentally, within barely a day of that, I began acting on my empathy to support [soon to be BSD] Hyperbola’s ethics problem-solving, including the great lack of options we face everywhere for privacy- and freedom-respecting pay methods. Since I tend to do a lot of research and documentation, I went through a lot of web searching and finally came back full circle and remembered the old name of “Snowdrift” as sounding somewhat familiar.
One factor behind how I donate on Liberapay is to help offset the ratio of monthly Patreon-linked support against the denominator of Liberapay-linked–for projects that are tracking both. Of course, Liberapay is perhaps a little bit more lax than it is perfect or even ethical (ugh, won’t let me link code except for GitLab and GitHub?), but it’s a step up while opportunities to help popularize Snowdrift as an option in real live production come up.
FWIW, I think that code-linking issue with Liberapay is fair to see as just something they ought to fix. You may know that Liberapay started as a fork of Gratipay (originally Gittip) which is now defunct. That effort started just at the same time as Snowdrift.coop originally. Both projects were high-minded in terms of not being for-profit startups with investor issues. Gittip took a lot of short-cuts to launching and got going right away by requiring log-in via GitHub and then added Twitter. Only eventually when pushed for a less-corporate option, they added a log-in via Open Street Map account. Meanwhile, Snowdrift.coop tried to do everything more optimally and struggled to launch (and is still here and still struggling).
So, all in all, Liberapay is the success story for no-investor funding platform, but it having much impact and had a lot of costly adventures to get to the status quo. So, sure, lax to a degree, and that has its results both good and bad. We have nothing against Liberapay really, only we don’t see them solving the underlying problems.
I will say that we have some reasons to look forward to potential progress in 2025, and more community noise and encouragement can be helpful in drawing volunteer attention (we’re all volunteers here). So, thanks for your post!
Awesome! Wow, no I actually did not know the entirety of the Liberapay origins there. I did know both them and particularly Patreon shortcutted their way through making a big opening startup instead of taking the time and hard work to get towards where we’d be looking to go.
As disappointed as I was with the linked accounts options they provide (GitHub and X/Twitter being some of the worst), I have to say, after reading through some of the other crowdfunding websites discussed in Snowdrift’s market research, I have seen worse. Some of them letting you link to Instagram and Facebook accounts for really quick and dirty network effects even less desirable. I was even beginning to consider creating an OpenStreetMap account–without much knowing what really goes on there–just because of its relative freedom over any of the other suggestions in libera.
My idea of converting the ratio over of large, existing services to Liberapay is more along the lines of how in free software progress, we sometimes take intermediary steps in the interest of time such as by supporting mainstream Firefox in the deterrence of Chrome in mass widespread community choice. Both have major privacy and even freedom-related flaws–and Richard Stallman himself has made it a regular point not to compromise or give in to “hush solutions” (which may even be part of his long-term outlook against agreeing on the use of “FLS” vs. “free software”)–but there is also a strategic element to compromise to achieve short-term goals before longer-term ones. Of course, none of this is important as how exciting it will be to start supporting projects on Snowdrift once those options begin.
…And if I may stray one point to the side having just linked to the wiki, I did just remember a question I ran into. I notice there are still some remnants of GitLab being pointed to; I forgot if an issue ticket I read somewhere about migration out of GitLab was still an open thing or not? So, for example, the “Git” link at the footing of snowdrift.coop points to the repository on GitLab.
Yes, of course; I was hesitant because I saw the bullet points in the above issue about some obstacles with getting rid of a few remaining GitLab dependencies like you mentioned.
As long as it’s not premature for me to start doing so now, I will at least make it a point to start sending to there for any (seemingly) accidentally kept GitLab references.
A lot of the issues are out of date; anything attached to a milestone should be reasonably current, but that’s all I would count on. That one would definitely need to be re-evaluated when someone starts working on it. Basically the same deal as the remaining GitLab references: less “accidentally missed”, more “progress has been slow and nobody got around to it yet.” Thank you for helping!