In 2024 I received $1861.88 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 10k stars on GitHub, 106k downloads and almost 2000 members in the community Discord. Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorship payouts received in 2024: Month Payout January $92.35 February $115.48 March $143.03 April $150.30 May $188.

Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you’re spending on them is—I’m not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day.

The social media landscape from Twitter and Mastodon to Instagram and TikTok has, for better or worse, centralized on sharing text highlights and quotes as images rather than as plain text. Now I can share my highlights easily as images on social media! I like to share my highlights from across the web, which is why I publish topic-specific RSS feeds for people to subscribe to. However, one of the features that I’ve been missing for a while now on Notado is exporting screenshots for social sharing.