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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.
@kaikatsu At this point im not sure. @Gargron did eventually respond. Basically said there was a huge backlog (more than a month) on any e-mails that include server submissions to the official list. Thus the lack of responsiveness (since that was one of the issues I had questions about).
I'm kinda hoping the backlog resolves itself before I need to update the staff later this week. But it seems unlikely and I'm not sure if I am going to continue to push mastodon as a viable option or not. Pleorma is an option to consider ill likely need to present it as an alternative option.
The team has been discussing several code changes we want to add to a fediverse/activitypub base.So how active and responsive a project is will probably have a big impact on our choice.
