nlnet is the main one that comes to mind.

How much money do you donate?

I am very privileged to have some money left over after fulfilling essential needs. So, I set a fixed amount a while ago, and then whenever I am able to make a saving (e.g. switching to a cheaper phone plan) or get a pay rise (if it ever comes), I'll put some of the gains into donations.

When do you donate?

I remember reading somewhere that many organisations prefer regular donations to one-off donations, even if the regular amount is smaller, since it helps them plan better. So I always give regular donations, even if the amount is smaller to compensate.

I have everything set up as automatic donations in liberapay and OpenCollective. So, it's pretty seamless!

If anyone ever wants to gift me anything, I'll ask for them to consider a donation to a project instead.

Do you have a minimum donation amount?

I try to avoid payments under £5. Below that point, way too much of the money goes to fees. For some projects where I donate a small amount, I donate yearly instead of monthly instead.

How do you decide what projects to support? Do you forego donations if you’ve contributed in other ways?

I don't donate to every project I benefit from, but I care a lot about XMPP and Linux on Mobile, so I donate mainly to projects in these areas. I've also contributed code to some of these projects, but I keep donating as I want to support the ongoing maintenance as well as just individual features.

Do you donate to all equally or do you have some sort of ranking? Is it by amount of use, subjective preference, something else?

I care about XMPP as a whole succeeding, so I donate to many projects I don't even use myself. I wanted to donate to clients and servers for each major platform, so I split the clients like this:

• iOS clients: 1 project
• Android clients: 1 project
• Linux clients: 4 projects
• Server software: 1 project

Then, I donated an equal amount to each platform (so, for example all the Linux clients combined would get the same as the single Android client).

However, since I was donating so little to each Linux client, I decided to gradually increase the amount I donate to those over time.

I've also recently started donating to libraries / ancillary projects in the same space. But I don't have much money left to play with for them, so the amount is smaller :(

Linux on Mobile is simpler as I only donate to two projects, so I just donate equally to both.

So, long story short, it started with some kind of structure, but has become more subjective since then :)

What platforms do you prefer using? Liberapay, Opencollective, Patreon, ko-fi, Paypal, Monero, actual post?

I really like liberapay, especially as it mostly works without Javascript. But Opencollective is pretty nice too. If the developer themselves gives a preference, I'll normally use that platform.

One thing I'm interesting in knowing is - do people generally prefer donating to fewer projects, but with bigger amounts, or vice versa? One criticism of my approach is that, because I am spread quite thin, I risk not really helping any project that much, whereas if I focused on one or two projects, at least those could benefit a bit more.

To be honest, I think the above clients and services like Snikket fit that description.

Now, I wouldn't say they're all on the same level UX-wise as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. But I do think they are 90%-95% of the way there, and in my experience that's enough to convince friends and family to switch over.

In my experience, when people haven't wanted to switch, it's normally not been because of the clients, but because they don't want to install yet another app to talk to someone.

Any new open source software is always a net positive.

But, there are a few small caveats to the way they've done it (depending on how cynical/cautious you are):

• Because Proton are not accepting contributions, they own all the copyright, so can make the code closed source again if they want to (that wouldn't affect the already released versions, but future versions)
• They could likely take down any derivative on iOS, since Apple will always take instruction from the copyright holder, for GPL'd code
• Since the builds are not reproducible, there's no guarantee that the binaries they distribute are built from the source code

How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:

• Android: Conversations
• iOS / MacOS: Monal
• Linux: Dino
• Windows: Gajim

Perfect, now you just have to wrap your program inside a debugger in production!

Yep, that's the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they'd need the permission of all of the copyright holders who've contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

Now: terrorists are terrorists, right wing rioters are terrorists, climate protestors are terrorists and misogynistic people are terrorists.

Soon: asylum seekers are terrorists, people who go on strike are terrorists, members of the opposition party are terrorists.

I support reducing violence against women, but prevent is the wrong tool for this problem. If the government actually want to address this instead of just looking like they are, I feel they should take an approach that actually works. We need:

• More consistent and holistic sex education, from a younger age
• Explicitly teaching about sexual violence, the services available and the punishments for doing it
• Investing in local policing, so that there is bandwidth to look into these cases
• Giving more funding to charities who support domestic abuse survivors
• Training for police, so they actually listen to women when they raise concerns at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until it's too late
• Tougher sentencing for any form of sexual violence

Prevent is both ineffective and discriminatory. It increases government surveillance, and raises the burden on GPs and teachers. The National Union of Teachers want to get rid of it, the Communities and Local Government Committee found a multitude of problems that haven't been fixed, and human rights orgs like Liberty and Amnesty International want to get rid of it too. It doesn't work and in many cases has made things worse.

I'm very sympathetic to this blog post, as it nicely describes why I use XMPP.

But, on a related note, I have noticed an interesting pattern where people talk past each other a little, especially when conflating user freedom and security.

If I'm to generalise, I feel the outlook of XMPP users tends to be more systemic and long-term. We've seen how chat networks come and go, we've seen the dangers of companies promising to serve your interests whilst also being a chokepoint of centralisation. So we tend to de-emphasize papercuts or current issues in clients and the protocol, on the basis that we have the power to fix them if we want to.

I feel that's shown in this blog post - all the points come back to the benefits of user freedom: no one entity controls you, the protocol serves you, you can choose your own clients, and if you don't like it, you can always switch / write your own!

What I've seen is that the people who gravitate towards Signal tend to be more concerned with the here and now - e.g. "how do I get my friend off telegram onto a secure / private service". I feel in many cases that making arguments about federation and the structure of the network won't sway them, as they'll always be able to point to some area where the clients are deficient in the here and now (depending on their interests - papercuts in the clients, different versions of OMEMO being used across the network etc).

I don't really have a solution to this, but I think all we can do is continue to make the clients and servers as good as they can possibly be. I always encourage anyone I manage to migrate to XMPP to send me any annoyances they find in the apps, so that they can eventually be fixed. We need to be ready for when Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp etc. abuse their power, because (as we've seen from the fediverse) that's the only time that "regular people" will care for the arguments that we're making about federation and user freedom.

Different strokes for different folks! I've been fortunate enough that many of my family and friends have been happy enough to follow me.

But I don't disagree with you, Signal has a much more recognisable brand and better user experience. These are things that we need to improve if we're going to get anywhere near the level of adoption Signal has.

How I Got a Truly Anonymous XMPP Account:

• Open my client (e.g. Conversations, Monal, Dino)
• Pick a random server, username and password
• Click register

Sorry, it's a cheap joke, but it still baffles me that Signal requires a phone number, so I felt I had to post it :)

Of course, this is not XMPP-specific either, just my protocol of choice, there are many other open alternatives that also offer such functionality.

I've had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we're all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.