I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the rich guys giving some millions on top of that to be in a safe financial position.
Maybe something that could be done to encourage donations is have the client estimate how much raw infra costs your usage created and display in the donation screen.
Second, are you hedging your bets and supporting Matrix or XMPP as well, or will you only encourage people to "donate" to the platform that you happen to have picked already?
I also use Matrix. Element has been pretty good for a few years now, but it's still not smooth enough for mainstream use. (Encryption state in chats gets messed up sometimes, for example. It feels like Signal 10 years ago, and it's had security issues in its client also)
The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server. You get to choose or run a server, but the protocol still leaks the user info to whoever runs the home server and to any foreign server that has a user in the same channel if you are using it in a federated context. Signal manages all of this by peer to peer messages where cleartext is only available to clients, which is really slick.
XMPP is just dead. Forget about XMPP. Matrix is the clear leader in the federated messaging system category. I'd like to see Matrix displace things like Telegram, Discord, and Slack. I may donate to Matrix affiliated projects in the future, as I also donate to other open source projects from time to time, but I'm not going to promote any of those things in this thread.
Because you are (consciously or not) creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for one champion over the others. Worse still, you are asking everyone else to devote resources to your preferred champion when we have no reason to believe that this is long-term sustainable.
> The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server.
As I said in another thread: I honestly care less about the security guarantees from one protocol over the other than I care about the fact that pushing for Signal would mean that everyone's communication would be tied to one single provider. This is a systemic risk that no amount of "you don't need to trust us, you just need to trust math" can ever mitigate.
Sorry to break it to you, but if it was only a matter of preference, I would've been fine with Signal or even WhatsApp.