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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.
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"
@codesections
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.
https://qoto.org/@freemo/102772907695510482
@Gargron