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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.
