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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.
@freemo this is pretty strange. Mastodon is almost *too* active as a project. It may be that Eugen is very busy on 3.0 dev to respond to queries not related to that directly. Also he is known to de-prioritize requests that don't match his own vision for the project, but even then he usually states his disagreement before ignoring you...
Maybe consider migrating to #pleroma or try one of the existing Mastodon forks like #glitch #Florence or #hometown instead.
@maloki
According to @Gargron there is. But despite having a dedicated comms officer there is still well over a month of backlog gargron said.
I agree it is very concerning to see such a large backlog on the main email for comms, especially server submissions where the list gives use advantages to one server over the other and comes across as official endorsement due to its selectivity.
It all has me very worried still although I do appreciate that he eventually replied yesterday after my post.
@msh
