I'm building a catalog for the Internet -- think Google crosses old school library card catalogs, meets Dewey Decimal System, and will eventually require donations. What's the best platform to use for this?

The entire database will be made available to the public, for private offline use in custom desktop applications, or other sites with alternative ideas.

I'd like a goal meter, to show how close we are to reaching our funding goals and for the platform to have a good reputation.

Imo the “best” way would be to use different popular services/platforms. Some commonly used ones would be:

• Open Collective
• Liberapay
• Ko-fi
• Patreon

Maybe cryptocurrency can be added to that list as well, Trocador would probably help with that but this requires some amount of technical knowledge depending on how you use/implement it.