I am planning to create an open source project for a web application whose entire premise is to provide an otherwise paid service for free, so I am not planning to commercialize the project. This project is also a passion project. I seek to improve my skills by working on the application and I am not looking forward to expand it as an organization nor invest more time or resources into it than necessary.
However I want to know if I could ask for voluntary donations which support me on a personal level and not for the project itself. I want to consider it as a passive income and I don’t care how much I receive in donations as long as I am doing it ethically and someone is willing to donate for this purpose knowingly.
If it is possible for me to ask for donations this way, how would it impact the domain of my website? Could I use .org for it being non-profit overall or would I need to use .com for asking for donations to be used for personal expenses in any manner? Or would I need to use a specific domain for this situation?
Those top level domains aren’t set in stone. The majority of TLDs can be used by anyone. It’s more what kind of image you want for your company/project. Lots of open-source projects have .org domains or .io
But you can choose whatever you like. Even a country domain is okay. But I personally wouldn’t choose .com for something open source. Look at the prices and go for .org unless that’s substantially more expensive with your registrar. (My opinion.)