I spread out my donations, so less to more projects. I also try to prioritize projects that need financial help the most.

So as an example, the Linux Mint project is very well funded (especially this year, where they are receiving 30k+ per month) so I personally stopped donating to them so I could shift that money to a project that would benefit far more from the relatively small amounts I can share, such as the Movim project, which is attempting to completely replace Discord with a FLOSS solution, but was only receiving like $40 a month before they started a funding campaign a few days ago.

Figure it'll do far more good there to help the dude cover his expenses for providing such a valuable service to us all for free.

I'd say spread it around to support projects you use or like.

I just spent $15 on an app to play my music from my navidrome, because I use it so much. I could have gone to another app (potentially free), but I like this one so much that i gave them their $15 for their hard work. For anyone interested, it's Nautaline on iOS.

Quality > quantity every time

Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don't have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

I really like the idea of donating to a broader consortium, like the NLNet that's suggested already, specifically because they give donations to less consumer-facing elements that might be less likely to attract direct funding.

Other than that though, I'd say donate to the things that (a) you already use a lot, and which (b) seem most in need of funding. If it's big and famous and fairly stable without significant ongoing costs, it's probably not as important to donate to. If it's niche, needs a lot of development to add useful features or polish, or has significant ongoing costs (e.g. servers), that would be a higher priority. Evaluate based on whatever balance of those factors you choose.

There is a small payment provider overhead so I wouldn't spread too much but spreading a bit is good. You can always donate to lemmy devs.

Do you have projects that you personally admire? I assume you are choosing to donate to open source because you have an affinity for it. Personally I donate to political causes, particularly ones where I participate in/contribute to. Projects where I can get in the discord and talk to people, learn and really experience the practical side. I'm in a few Foss discords as well, so maybe joining some communities and getting to know people working with it, maybe learn to work with it yourself, will help and inform your decision.

Have a look at the programs you use, do any of them accept donations.

A tener to your Lemmy host a month would be good too Notepad++ is a good one too.

Gimp, Blender, and ~~DaVinci Resolve~~ to give a fuck you to Adobe.

This reminds me that I need to throw some money at Syncthing again.

I keep forgetting because it just works.

The Austrian-school got 1 thing right, fersure:

the less someone has, the greater the difference 1 currency-unit is going to make to them.

_ /\ _

Some suggestions:

https://organicmaps.app/donate

https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php

https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate

https://donate.kicad.org/

Jellyfin apps, for android etc. The main project gets enough donations.

Wikipedia, archive.org

Godot

Donate to more projects with less, it's better for everyone

I am a member of the European free software foundation, that is 10 bucks per month.

90 to go :)

If I had that much money to spare, I'd split it in smaller parts and donate to smaller projects that I use. I feel like Mozilla, Signal or KDE are doing pretty well at the moment, but what about some random developer that works on, for example, an open source app that you've been using for years? Some of them just get a few bucks once in a blue moon and that's it. I believe they should be appreciated more.

I think it’s better whatever number of projects you choose, to do so in a recurring way (I think it was the KDE devs that outlined it well) as it provides a lot of stability to a project, that can make long term commitments based on them. Currently I recurrently donate 10€ a month to Asahi Linux :)

Smaller, recurring donations to several of the projects you use most often or whose purpose you most support is what I would do. You can browse for projects you might want to donate to from this list on codeberg or OpenCollective, or look for individual developers you want to support.

Personal recommendations: your Linux distribution and Fediverse instances of choice, LibreOffice, WireGuard, Archive.org, Anna’s Archive, Signal, KDE, Wikipedia.