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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 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.
