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If you are ever considering starting a non-profit on the Mastodon platform, DONT, here is why.
About a month ago I received a little less than a 10K donation to fund the QOTO effort (A space of distributed and federated services for open-source projects and project owners). The mastodon component is intended to be the social media aspect of that to replace the need for facebook or twitter accounts as a home for future software projects.
I reached out to the joinmastodon, the organization behind the Mastodon project, because I wanted to forward some of those donations to the mastodon coding efforts, as well as potentially offer additional donations to fund specific features on the mastodon to-do list, however after more than month of trying to reach the organization through e-mail as well as contacting @Gargron directly there has been nothing but complete silence.
This in turn has myself, as well as the donors, seriously dismayed about the future of the project. Unresponsiveness, particularly in the face of contribution or donations to a project, has myself and others worrying mastodon is a dead or dying software. At the very least it means bug fixes and other contributions never make it since contacting the team is a near impossibility.
I am now in the position of reaching out to the developers of competing ActivityPub software and seeing if we can use the donations to pay them to write a complete fork of mastodon, with my own contributions as well added on top.
What a mess, its such a shame that a project with so much potential is going to die because of rampant mismanagement. The in ability to even respond to basic email.
I hope I'm wrong but after a month of all communication channels being dead its time to reevaluate where to go from here... But it is clear mastodon is NOT a technology I recommend others adopt as part of any new project.
I've seen their code, very buggy. They dont really have my confidence as developers yet.
Maybe, I'd have to review the code base to see if it is well written enough to constitute a fork.
I will be a lot of work, duplicating your existing Mastodon changes on top of Pleroma, and I have no idea how hard the database translation will be, though somebody has probably done that part already.
And you have to learn Elixir/Phoenix. That's why I'm doing it. I WANT to learn BEAM/OTP.
Learning the tech isnt as much an issue for me as much as the quality of the code architecture.
I've done enough enterprise web development I could probably address any inherent scalability limit when the time comes.
My concern is that considering the lack of response from the mastodon organization it means even if i did develop performance oriented contributions I'd be in for hell just trying to get a response from them in order to get a patch contributed back to the source.
Thus the problem. It isnt code or technological, its a core team which is unresponsive to even basic contributions, let alone larger ones.
S I M I L D O N
@Surasanji Oh dont worry thats still on the list.. this is really more about what to fork that from and use as the QOTO base software.. Out own fork, regardless of the base, is still part of this.
Time to switch to Pleroma? That's where I'm going to focus my attention, once Mammudeck works well enough for daily use, as my ONLY client.