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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.
Gargron himself does tend to respond to my toots, but its very selective. I seem to see a partern that if he has concerns or disagrees with someone instead of voicing it, he just falls silent. On the other hand if he has an established connection with you he can be very responsive.
Back when I offered him a lawyer I was paying for to help with an issue he was very quick to respond through unofficial channels at least.
However Over the last month I've sent a reminder email about 1 - 2 per week to follow up on the original unanswered email, and not a single email has had a response.
You can also check out the thread here where over the past week I also tried to reach out to him and remind him about the lack of response and havent heard a peep from him in reply: https://qoto.org/@freemo/102881303314399290
It is more around being unprofessional than anything it seems. my guess is he has read the emails but simply doesnt want to say "no" so instead of a professional response he just goes silent. Which of course just causes resources to get wasted as people wait for a response and retry wondering if emails are even going through. Its very inconsiderate if that is the case. I dunno though i cant think of any other excuse since its been complete silence for so long.
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.
Those are all fair points and do seem like valid concerns.
I can understand not wanting to deal with a tough question or procrastinating on replying—that's definitely something I struggled with, especially when I was a bit younger. And I think it's common for many people to do so, especially if they tend to be a bit avoidant in their conflict-resolution style.
That said, I agree with you that the behavior, even if undstandable, just isn't professional
Yea I understand it too, especially with him being younger. I'm not mad at him, wouldnt even hold it against him. But unless there was some commitment to change the pattern my hands are sort of tired.
I tried really hard this last month to reach out just so i can go back to donors and reassure them putting money into mastodon is still a good idea. I really wish i could go back and say that as I like Eugene personally, I think he has good intentions. But like i said my hands are tied if this is the pattern of behavior.
Only reason I'm posting this publicly is that I hope it might entice a resolution/response so I have something more to say when I meet with donors this week other than "Sorry the project appears unresponsive after a month"
By the way here is a second mastodon thread from several weeks earlier where I also mentioned the lack of response on the same email and probed gargron. As you can see that thread was also silent with no response from him.
It certainly isnt for lack of polite effort on my end.
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.
One last comment, you said you dont see any follow up e-mails. I just checked my record and the following dates were dates on which I sent follow up emails, each time asking when I could expect a response on the initial email, with no answer:
August 31
September 2nd
September 6th
September 11th
September 30th
In addition two of our other staff at QOTO reached out at least one time each since September 11th. As well as me making 3 or 4 attempts over mastodon itself. No response. This particular post was simply a last ditch desperate effort to get **Some** response before going back to donors.
Not saying this to give you a hard time. I just want to make it clear that I made **many** efforts to politely reach out for response before I made my experiences public. There were in fact **many** attempts at a follow-up is my point.
@freemo @codesections Yeah I see multiple e-mails in the "Server submission" thread but none about the other things you wanted to talk about.
Hold on I'll find it for you. That thread was initially on mastodon and said was going to move it to e-mail since it was more official. I'll find that thread, not sure if it was DM or public but I do remember you responded to it initially before I started the email thread.
Give me a minute and ill link you if youd like.
@freemo @codesections I already told you there are no e-mails from you that are not in the "server submission" e-mail thread.
Sorry perhaps I'm not bneing clear. The discussion of donations started on mastodon, to which you initially responded. I then said I wanted to move it overt the discussion to e-mail.
I started the e-mail thread, the first issue I brought up was the server submission, as you hadnt addressed that in the mastodon discussion. However that was the point the emails went dead and I never got a response. We never had the chance to finish the mastodon donations discussion because the email thread was never responded to, comms went dead.
Obviously part of my internal motivation for submitting the server was so I could use it as leverage with the new donor to help make my case for donating to the project a bit stronger. But you know as well as I that I never once used that as leverage for the donation, nor did I say anything to suggest it was leverage.
In fact I even reiterated in our mastodon thread on donation (which i made public) that it would have no effect on any personal donations I make. I also made it clear donors were **not** making any demands. The concern was 100% lack of responsiveness from a project we were trying to build on top of.
All coms just went silent after that email and no matter how hard i tried to get some communication with the project all I got was silence. Again not upset at you but at a time that you knew I was trying to convince donors to give me permission to pass some of that money on to the mastodon project it was obviously one of the worst times to go silent. Even if for some reason we didnt get server submission it wouldnt have effected the fact that I was pushing for donations to go to the mastodon project.
@freemo @codesections Server submission e-mails go into a different folder than general inquiries and are not handled by our communications director. You should have kept the matters separate...
Thats fair, I did not know. Obviously what I'd suggest is that if emails going into a particular folder are likely to be ignored for a month or more, then at the very least setup an automated response so people communicating with the project can be aware of that.
Obviously in its own right that is still very concerning due to the large impact on adoption that joinmastodon has for mastodon servers and the project overall. But at least if there were some warning that emails with a particular topic in them go into a mailbox that isnt touched for months on end then I would have been happy to do as you ask and separated that concern into a separate e-mail.
As it stands however there would be no way of me knowing that.
No big deal, honest mistake. But again this is why I keep offering to help, as im sure others are too. We know your only one person and appreciate what you do. But as a project it does appear from the outside that you need help if there is over a months backlog in correspondence over server submissions, even in isolation, that is still concerning. Again happy to help you fix it though.
Regardless as you saw with my response here i am trying to be honest and transparent and letting others know what your response has been to my concerns. I do hope you feel im being fair, I am not trying to give you a hard time.
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 .
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.
@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.
@msh We already run our own mastodon fork that I developed, it pulls in some code from other forks and some of our own.
You can see a link the the mastodon thread where I tried to let gargron know about the unresponsiveness after several weeks. You can see after the better part of a week he was also silent on that thread: https://qoto.org/@freemo/102881303314399290
I should also point out that several other server admins got similar silence in their own attempts to contact joinmastodon, so I'm not alone in this. Seems a rampant problem.
De-prioritizing (i.e. passive-aggressively not responding) might be what is the case here, not just negligence. But in my opening email I went down the points in the vision stated by the joinmastodon page and made sure to reiterate how we as a server share all the criteria/vision. So if he did feel there was some sort of vision mismatch you'd think he would have raised that concern.
Personally I'm not sure how a moderated instance devoted to STEM collaboration might not line up with his vision.
@freemo maybe raise issues on their github?
I'm pretty far removed from Mastodon development--I just run a small stock instance and don't have grand ambitions or special requirements so haven't had the need to directly deal with Eugen about the project myself. I just see the discourse lol.
If I was in your position I would align with or base from one of the aforementioned forks that seems to line up best with your priorities (or, if you had the resources, formalize your fork).
@msh Yea, i could start raising issues, but since my current concerns arent bug related i dont want to resort to that, seems spammy.
I do agree going from a fork is a decent idea, but in the end such forks still depend on the resources of the base code. Sinc eit appears to be struggling to manage the project I have to assume the base code is destined for source-code graveyard. Which means I'd in turn rely ont he ability of the fork's team to be able to maintain the base code on their own. So I am still stuck picking a base project I feel is most likely to thrive as my own base.
Basically forks still need a healthy upstream to pull from, short of that they need to maintain all the code of a project on their own. So its a matter of mitigating effort really.
@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
@freemo publicly calling out someone because they have been ignoring you is a disingenuous and impolite method of attracting attention to any issue.
@mariusor Except that isnt the case. We are talking about a public project being unresponsive and not just to me but with a dozen other people who have tried to reach out to the project. I also made many attempts before making it public.
It isnt impolite to make statements of facts about the responsiveness of a public project that others depend on. Particularly when every effort was made to give them a chance to respond or to even claim they do not wish to respond (they didnt even do that much).
Its more about public awareness, which would be impolite to keep to myself lest other people fall victim to the same mismanagement. It helps other people avoid the project before its too late and they are stuck in a similar situation.
@freemo "the project is going to die" is in no way a "statement of facts". What you are stating, is a very biased opinion, and based on flimsy evidence which is contradicted by Mastodon's development log.
@mariusor Yes it is an opinion based on what seemed like unresponsiveness on an ongoing issue. A good project requries more than just code patches. But yea i cited the troubling pattern that specifically resulted in my opinion. You are free to disagree.
@kaikatsu At this point im not sure. @Gargron did eventually respond. Basically said there was a huge backlog (more than a month) on any e-mails that include server submissions to the official list. Thus the lack of responsiveness (since that was one of the issues I had questions about).
I'm kinda hoping the backlog resolves itself before I need to update the staff later this week. But it seems unlikely and I'm not sure if I am going to continue to push mastodon as a viable option or not. Pleorma is an option to consider ill likely need to present it as an alternative option.
The team has been discussing several code changes we want to add to a fediverse/activitypub base.So how active and responsive a project is will probably have a big impact on our choice.
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.
@freemo We'd love to have a conversation with you about something like this.
I must warn you that our 1.0 release is a bit away.
Florence (former ForkTogether) is a Mastodon fork.
@forktogether
Sure let's chat. I'm all.about teaming up on projects.
@freemo this week may be very busy for me (family wedding the coming weeks). But I'll try to get back to you soon.
/mal
@Gargron I recently got a reply a few hours after making this post. For transparency here is the official response::
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102881959653298127