Should Antennapod begin accepting donations?

Project management
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I did a minor edits and 2 additions.

“Core AntennaPod Team Members”

  1. unforseen expenses
  2. fixes issues that are highly voted on vs just the most issues fixed
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I realise this is a bit contradictory to what you have shared (as we can’t foresee the unforeseen), but what kind/type of unforeseen expenses were you thinking of? E.g. would buying equipment to debug a Chromecast issue fall under this?

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I was thinking of things like legal lawsuits, hosting fees thst that spike due to high loads, or the hosting provider leaving and we need to switch.

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You can also donate a part of the donations you received to fyyd.de or other services/libraries you use in AntennaPod.

I’ve added hundred of podcast to Fyyd, some of them before the availablity in iTunes or Google Podcast, and then spammed “you can find it on an app that supports fyyd like AntennaPod” :smiley:

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Hi all!

I am a Antennapod user for a while now and after the latest redesign I felt obliged to join this wonderful community. I am happy that the community is talking about donations and what is next.

I agree a lot with starting slowly, probably with stickers etc. But I can also see @ByteHamster slightly restrained about accepting money (when it is a lot I guess?) and I hope he gets more comfortable with that soon though. Having a strong community oriented project for podcasts is important and Antennapod is in a great position to be leading the way. :slight_smile:

@keunes - I just joined the forum an hour ago and I can still edit the donations guidelines. While I don’t expect anyone to do anything bad intentionally, I am a bit worried for the possibility of someone new to the forum removing or editing out some part of it accidentally leading to unnecessary complications. Just wanted to give you a heads up in case you haven’t noticed this. Maybe a higher privilege necessity to edit it might be better? Not sure, I am still catching up on things here. :slight_smile:

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@thevenin Nice idea. Same for gPodder and the Podcast Index. While discussed here, IIRC they weren’t added to the list yet - would you mind doing that?

@inkspreads Welcome to the active community! Always happy to hear the redesign efforts paid off :slight_smile: If you want, you’re very welcome to also reply to this thread: “How are you part of the AntennaPod community?”
About the editing of the wiki post: I thought it required trust level one, but even if it doesn’t, it’s ok: the edit history is saved so if things go wrong we can roll back. And once it’s finalised it’ll move to a more static space (the website).

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@inkspreads you already are trust level 1 :slight_smile: It can be reached by:

  • Entering at least 5 topics and
  • Reading at least 30 posts and
  • Spending a total of 10 minutes reading posts

So, congratulations - you already did that :slight_smile:

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I’ve added it to the list. Thanks!

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Make sense. Thanks for clarifying @keunes . :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

Spending a total of 10 minutes reading posts

@ByteHamster - This was the point I was making, anybody who could be a newbie to the forum could edit and possibly make a mistake after just being in the forum for 10mins. But I think it is okay now that @keunes have clarified that we could rollback. :slightly_smiling_face:

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While I like the idea of donating to other services that are used in AntennaPod, I am wondering if there are legal implications of that. Can we really pass money around or could this be considered money laundering?

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Are you receiving money from illegal activities? :slight_smile:
I don’t think it’s money laundering. You should receive illegal money and donate them to someone else, but you don’t do this.
Wikipedia says “The overall scheme of this process returns the “clean” money to the launderer in an obscure and indirect way”. You won’t receive these money back.
I know may podcasts that donates to other projects they use or support.

Anyway I’m not a legal expert, so I can understand if you don’t feel comfortable doing this.

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I want to add my two cents as well.

In addition to accepting donations I think it would be a great idea to offer a voluntary subscription via Google Play or maybe the option to set up a recurring PayPal payment from within the app. Give the users the option to contribute financially if they want.

If it was up to I’d make the subscription 5€ per year. I think this is the perfect amount to support the ongoing development of apps as this roughly equals buying an app once year. That’s reasonable to me.

I like that you don’t want to hide features behind payment. I don’t think it would be bad but I like it better your way.

As for the use of the money: Use it for yourselves. Shirts and stickers are nice but I’d rather know the core team gets something for their work. Money is a though topic especially when the people do their work for “fun” or ideological reasons. How you would distribute the money fairly is up to you. I don’t have solution for that.

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Hi all,

It’s been open for quite some time, and personally I’m happy with everybody’s contributions, as well as the result! Does anyone have any comments? @ByteHamster is this what you had in mind? If so, do you think we can move to the next step? (checking what would be required to start receiving donations)

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Who’d have thought accepting donations could be so tricky?

Are there 3rd part libraries / projects etc. that Antennapod relies on, and where you’d like to see some changes or bugfixes that would make your life easier.

If so, you could suggest that users donate to bounties in those projects as a way of seeing the features you need come about more quickly.

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That’s a rather intriguing idea that I’d not previously thought of! Thanks for sharing and thanks for joining the conversation here. I noticed on another thread that you recently joined.

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Dear all,

Some great news: we are now accepting donations! Please do NOT share this news widely yet (e.g. on Twitter or Mastodon, or in a blog post).

Before we do so, we first want to see if/how this works. If you have any comments, suggestions, or ideas, please share them. Specifically about

  • how donations on Open Collective work
  • how we can submit expenses and accept them
  • which (one-time and recurring) ‘tiers’ we might set up

With your input, we can think if and how we should announce this more publicly.

Key point here is also that we actually don’t need so much money, as we have few expenses. Other forms of contributions (like code, translations, ideas, design work & user support) are much more valuable to the project. We want to make sure we get this point across in our communication.

As part of this process I’ve also rewritten out Donation Expenses Policy, and disabled the wiki editing. Comments specifically about the policy are now welcome there :slight_smile:

So if you happen to read this and want to contribute, you can find us on Open Collective to give it a try. Open Collective Europe is our fiscal host - meaning that donations in euro will be the most beneficial and that 6% of our income goes to this financial host.

Thanks!

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@keunes to avoid too much donation maybe you should fill budget with at least adding server costs and if there is something to pay to google play store ? So users can see if donations are needed.

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Actually I had added that, but apparently I forgot to hit ‘publish’ :slight_smile: Thanks for noting! Should be there now.

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The donation process worked really well.

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Great, thanks for reporting back. And thanks for our first-ever donation on Open Collective :partying_face:

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