If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.
Add "help design lemmy" next to the title? e.g.
Help Design Lemmy: How to improve the Joinlemmy Donation page?
As i said adding a "learn more" section would be really helpful. right now it sounds like you are not really sure you even want donations. if you won't believe people should donate and are not willing to explain why people should do it why should potential donors believe it? . so far i didn't really see a noticeable spike in the patreon and liberapay stats despite many of the largest servers using the newest version (you can enable it to show the version of servers). some projects have a fairly consistent increases in the number of donations for years (e.g. 1 2 3 ) and i don't think lemmy has less potential. even piefed donations have been increasing organically.
Of course A/B testing will be the best way to prove these claims.
Maybe we could crowd source a list of arguments about why people should donate.
Not really. i know wikimedia foundation did that but it is probably not the best option. googling gives a few results but that's not really insightful.
I don't think this solves the problems i mentioned (including in the pull request). donations and working full time are a means to an end. the average response by average joe might be "well they can just get a regular job like the rest of us".
I don't we should insist on just having a elevator pitch. sure an elevator pitch is very useful but i know that when i wanted to donate to charities I looked for a decent chunk of information to help me make a decision.
this part that appears inside thunderbird (which seems to be doing very well interm of fundraising) is more like something i had in mind (in term of feeling important)
there is some research about this type of messaging (see risk aversion and fear appeals). naturally it does not feel great because i think the thought that a project is at risk and might need donations is a negative evaluation that will probably produce a negative emotion. but i think it is the honest truth for thunderbird and lemmy and any large scale open source project.