Hey people,
We have changed the way we deal with the 200 FOR TROM campaign in terms of donations. Let me explain.
Ideally we wanted to have a simple donation campaign where people can only contribute 5 Euros a month - no more, no less. However pretty much no Wordpress plugin is designed for this, since they are all geared towards selling products or creating campaigns where people can donate any amount. But I wanted to try something new by limiting the amount of money that people can donate monthly. I want to distribute the burden we put on individuals, but also to limit the growth of TROM, as a project, to a manageable "height".
The plugin we were using was not reliable at all and I even had to pay for it (which is ironic since we do not get enough financial support from the campaign itself). Because it is important to accept a wide variety of payment options, and "cards plus Paypal" are the most used worldwide, this plugin tried to combine Stripe (cards) with Paypal into one single campaign. But the plugin stopped working with Paypal and then could not communicate with Stripe anymore, so when a donation was canceled the plugin had no idea.
In short, we could not count how many people are still actively subscribed to the campaign via this plugin, so I ended up having to check in TROM's Stripe and Paypal accounts to see how many are subscribed...and then manually add that number to our donation page. On top of that I cannot pay for the plugin's subscription and therefore I cannot receive updates - and having an outdated plugin that deals with payments is not a good idea.
OK.
These being said it is time to give up on this plugin and rely directly on Stripe and Paypal. If anyone wants to support us they will be redirected to any of these websites where they can complete the payment and manage their subscriptions via them. It is the safest, easiest, and direct way of doing this. If the Stripe integration with Paypal will be enabled in the following days then perhaps we will only use Stripe which can process pretty much any kind of payment, including Paypal.
I hate dealing with these things, trust me.
What will happen to your current subscription?
If you want to cancel it, please contact us or reply to this email. If you want to change the payment method then it is better to ask us to cancel your subscription and then you can do it again. After that you can manage it via Stripe/Paypal. It is simple.
What about the wall of donors?
I would really love to have a "wall of donors", a list of people who are actively supporting this campaign...maybe this is a nice way of thanking them publicly. But right now I do not know how to do that since we use both Stripe and Paypal, and some people do not want their names to be displayed publicly. If Stripe enables Paypal as a payment option then maybe I can do something about this. Sorry! But also...this is not a fashion show and we all understand that. We need some financial support to maintain our projects that are about serious global problems and ways to think differently about "fixing" them. TROM is not a project that tries to blend into this system and find financial support to be "sustainable" in that sense - it is a way to scream and harness the anger towards something positive/educational/informative and helpful. And for that we simply need some financial help.
Lastly.
A big thank you to Marcel who became the 80st donor for our campaign while I was writing this message. And I appreciate all of you very much! We are almost half way there, and that gives me some hope. We have a lot of plans for TROM, so let's see how things will evolve. We will keep you posted.
Ok, that's all. Thank you!
Tio
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Zaphod Beeblebrox
in reply to Tio • • •Okki
in reply to Tio • • •Hydrian
in reply to Tio • • •Tio
in reply to Hydrian • •Hydrian
in reply to Tio • • •Karl R
in reply to Hydrian • • •@hydrian That's a neat theory, but in practice Murphy's law applies and every version of a given library eventually gets pulled in.
Talking with the Flatpak faithful feels similar to talking with crypto bros.
crypto -> "We have a complete record of transactions that will solve all monetary problems!"
flatpak -> "We have a complete graph of dependencies that will solve all software deployment problems!"
Here's a thread with some more numbers of how bad this is:
mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/1…
@hydrian That's a neat theory, but in practice Murphy's law applies and every version of a given library eventually gets pulled in.
Talking with the Flatpak faithful feels similar to talking with crypto bros.
crypto -> "We have a complete record of transactions that will solve all monetary problems!"
flatpak -> "We have a complete graph of dependencies that will solve all software deployment problems!"
Here's a thread with some more numbers of how bad this is:
mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/1…
Eugenia L
2024-03-22 15:27:16
Hydrian
in reply to Karl R • • •Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸
in reply to Tio • • •FYI each Flatpak app is like a Git repo and an update just downloads the files that actually changed. The files of all installed apps are stored together in a content-addressable storage, then hardlinked one or more times to form each app.
OSTree-based host OSs like Fedora Atomic work in the same way and hopefully in the future the files will be shared between the host OS and Flatpak apps too.
Okki
in reply to Tio • • •When you install a Flatpak, it will need runtimes (GNOME, KDE, Freedesktop...). These are the ones that really take up disk space. But the good news is that it looks big if you install just one Flatpak application, but the more you install, the more they'll use the same runtimes already installed, and the less disk space they'll occupy.
And no, ungoogled-chromium doesn't require 4-5 GB, just 153 MB...
Tio
in reply to Okki • •How come on my system it had to download 4-5GB? And yes I use many flatpaks but that didn't seem to help. And this is not the first time am seeing these massive downloads.
Okki
in reply to Tio • • •Tio likes this.
Okki
in reply to Okki • • •Tio likes this.
Rokosun
Unknown parent • • •Thibaultmol 🌈
in reply to Tio • • •"takes forever to update them even on my 1GB internet connection"? huh?... you're on gigabit internet and it's taking forever? honestly that's not possible... Are you sure you have gigabit internet? or do you mean that your lan port is a gigabit port?..
I use flatpaks and it's really not that big of a deal (plus it happens in the background anyone, so most people will pretty never notice it)
Tio
in reply to Thibaultmol 🌈 • •Thibaultmol 🌈
in reply to Rokosun • • •lerudd
in reply to Tio • • •Florke×64 🏴☠️
in reply to Rokosun • • •Rokosun
in reply to Thibaultmol 🌈 • • •Rokosun
in reply to Florke×64 🏴☠️ • • •