๐ณ๐ฑ
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.
Well he eventually responded. The backlog wasn't specific to our email. He has a dedicated comms officer but despite that there is still well over a month backlog on any emails that include the topic of server submission.
From my own conversations it's the same expiernce atleast a dozen other admins have faced and mentioned to me in the past.
I agree it is very concerning.
Sounds like he needs an automated answering service to respond to emails with "it may take up to a month for a human to even look at your email." Or, as you recommended, a note on his mastodon.social profile, or in the README for the repository.
It would be the minimum he could do. Though it should be on the joinmastodon.com page directly since thats where the email is. Or just an automated email response.
