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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.
@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.
@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.
@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).