I would like to support the project, but I am not a coder or dev and don’t know a lot about servers. What are good ways for me to give back to the community, the contributors and the team?
Would it help if I make an English and German video about the Yunohost installation process or other topics from the user’s point of view for Yunohost Cinema?
I discovered Yunohost when I was looking for an easier way to install Kimai2 and then got sucked into a hole by all the amazing options I now have with my own server. I am testing one app after the other and already found a bunch of tools that will now make my digital life a lot easier.
Is it customary to offer small tip donations for a helpful support or app updates?
After a quick search I found some discussions about donations and premium offers. Yunohost is saving me a lot of time and even if I can’t afford to give much at the moment, I would love to give a few Euros here and there if it helps to keep the servers running and shows some gratitude to the contributors.
Thanks to everyone working on Yunohost and maintaining the apps! You are wizards with powers far beyond what I can comprehend!
In terms of money-donations, yes it’s still not straightforward and we are hoping to setup a clean solution to receive those in the coming months (well, we’ve been saying this for a like a year now, but it progress … just slowly )
If you want to contribute with your time, there are a few things you can do even without technical skills (well everybody has technical skills, but maybe not everybody has programming/sysadmin technical skills, but I digress) :
as you mention it, a video about the installation process would be absolutely awesome ! I often think about the nice video done by the freedombox project : https://freedombox.org/ (at the bottom) which looks clear and straight to the point. I think it would clearly help the project and the users willing to install
talking about the project around you is something not to underestimate, we don’t have so much communication right now, so we mostly rely on people talking about the project around them. We really need help to expand the user base, especially outside France ;
if you want to help the app team : app packagers will always be thankful to have feedback about the testing-branch of apps. This is detailed a bit more in How to contribute to YunoHost (+ various other ways to help)
then of course there is translation, documentation (c.f. the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of pages in the doc), or reporting on the issue tracker anything that you find frustrating / not smooth in the various steps and stuff you can do with YunoHost, UX is always something to improve, and as time goes by, we developers ineluctably forget that some stuff ain’t obvious
You would be surprised if you knew how much we have no idea what we are doing haha
Awesome! I will make a video in the style of the freedombox example for setting up YunoHost on a VPS.
I am working in the animation industry where we all need project management but can’t pay the premium per user per month pricing of the established systems like Jira or Microsoft Sharepoint/Team/Projects. The perspective of hosting your own Wekan or Kanboard with a chatserver should be interesting for many people.
Sure I would love to test branches. If I can understand the instructions I will also have a look at the translation (I was very surprised by the installation being in perfect German.)
As for donations I think I wouldn’t mind to be nicely reminded in the admin interface every now and then that there is a ton of work behind this and that donations help a whole lot to keep things going. Maybe after you installed your third app or something like that. While I love the idea of free selfhosting, I think it’s only fair to ask for funding where it’s needed.
I think a function in the forum to tip the author of a post would also be a great thing to show some appreciation for the time and effort some people put into their answers and contributions. I get the impulse to give a few Euros whenever I see one of my favorite apps being updated, so why not just give the option as long as it isn’t mandatory. I also keep thinking about giving something to the devs of the individual app, but then I simply forget about it. So maybe even the admin interface could have the donate links to both the maintainer and the dev team of the app.
I think I also would pay for premium support. If there would be someone I can call and they fix my problem within a couple days - that’s time I can spend otherwise and that is worth something to me.
That’s good point / idea about tips for app maintainers, and it might help them keep motivation to package and maintain an app on the long run ! We should think about it and see if we can implement such a system that maintainers could easily set up and that would be displayed in the webadmin !
For this you might want to ping @ljf though dunno if it can work if you’re outside of France
I would like to add to the German translation of the documentation, but I have never used Github. Do I just click “create new file” and “edit the file in your fork”? What do I do when I am done with my changes?
You are wizards with powers far beyond what I can comprehend! 
;
I will also have a look at the translation (I was very surprised by the installation being in perfect German.)