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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.
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.
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.
@freemo @codesections I already told you there are no e-mails from you that are not in the "server submission" e-mail thread.