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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.
That is indeed pretty troubling, and sad to hear.
I want to mention that I've had the exact opposite experience. I've been working with the Mastodon project for the past few months and have found @Gargron and many others to be highly responsive.
I don't say that to take away from what you experienced, but just to share a different set of experiences.
I guess my point is that the silence is either intentional, in which case it demonstrates a lack of transparency in decisions (the most troubling case for me)... or it is due to mismanagment, in which case its negligence and still almost as troubling.
Either way after a month it has me and the donors very concerned and ready to just abandon the official support and fork it ourselves. Which personally I'd rather not do, I'd rather contribute to the main project so everyone benefits.
BTW gargron did respond (see main thread). Seems they are just so understaffed they cant handle emails, server submissions, or presumably other project management duties. I did offer to help.
Seems the fears of project management were the cause. I get the impression Eugene likes to keep the bulk of the power consolidated and may be unwilling to offload duties to other members, but I offered anyway. Either way im not sure this improves matters much.
Also he only addressed the server submission not the responsiveness on joinmastodon in general or the other topics I wanted to discuss. So I dunno.
@freemo @codesections As far as I can see you didn't send any other e-mails to the joinmastodon address.
We began the discussion about donations here. I'll have to dig up the thread. The email was intended to be a continuation of that. At the time I figured might be easier on you than long-form mastodon.
I'll find the old thread.
@freemo @codesections Yeah I cannot keep up with DMs on Mastodon. I did not receive any follow-up over e-mail. Either way I ask you not to use donations I did not ask for as some kind of ammunition against the project. If someone wants to do a no-strings-attached donation to the project they can put the money in OpenCollective, which finances Mastodon contributors other than me.
That is an unfair accusation. I never claimed the donations were asked for, nor did I use it as "ammunition".. If a project is unresponsive, particularly in the face of a contributor, it is concerning. This has nothing to do with money any more than it would have to do with someone offering their time (which I have also offered to the project on more than one occasion).
Please dont deeflect over a month of unreponsiveness to emails as if I'm being the bad guy for being transparent about that.
I've literally been trying to debate with our latest donator for well over a month to try to get permission for me to give a percentage of those donations to your project. No one made **any** demands on you for that donation. There were simply questions, nothing more. But when the maina nd official email for the project is completely silent over the course of a month even with repeated polite requests for follow up, then it makes my job at convince that donor damn near impossible.
That isnt ammunition, that is simply the reality of it. I mean its ok, but there are better ways to respond .
