I rarely donate on the internet because it’s hard to verify the authenticity of many causes. Unless I know someone personally or the situation is something I can trust, I find it hard to commit. I feel that donations only truly carry meaning when they are directed towards something real and tangible. For me, it’s more about going to the ground and understanding the situation firsthand before making any decision.
Then just donate to the projects that you use maybe? Certainly there are some OSS projects that don't need our help (Chromium, for example), but there are lots that do:
- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others
- Anki
- Recoll
- FSF
- Virtually all community driven linux distros
If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".
Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.