@mmn I've not used Patron, but an observation is that it only works well if you are "internet famous" and the fediverse architecture doesn't lend itself well to having millions of active followers. What I see in the fediverse is folks appealing for money among affinity groups who are just as poor as they are, which doesn't really work. A better model might be some sort of income sharing agreement system, comparable to the mutual societies which existed before unions became legal.

@bob I would say it depends on what your goal with the financial drives are.  People are more than happy to donate to help support their instance of choice because they know that the servers have cost.  People have been happy to support further development of postActiv as well, because they know that money passed in that context means I have less pressure to do other stuff to make ends meet and pay servers/etc, so I have more time to develop.

But I think @verius put it well, albeit in another context - if you're looking for money to make something, people seem fine with supporting you.  If you make something to seek money, ie, inverting that, people are less likely to support you.  Also, most people in this culture are more likely to support things with at least semi-tangiable results (ie, "it helps support the software/server") than abstract concepts or just based on personality.  People in general seem more suspicious of people trying to "sell themselves" as a brand.