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tante

On the other hand: Mastodon's funding situation ain't great either which is one of the many reasons the platform isn't developing as quickly as many would like it to. 20k/month from Patreon doesn't really pay for a lot of work.

Mastodon needs a lot more cash as well to clean up their code base and gain some development momentum. And "a few people pitching in a few bucks" probabtwill not get there

24 October at 17:37 | Open on tldr.nettime.org
9 comments
movation

@tante so what do you reckon how much would be needed?

24 October at 17:44 | Open on fnordon.de
JollyOrc

@movation @tante my calculations for a similar venture a few years back was an investment of 4 millions over three years, with a bunch of the money going into research, outreach, moderation, product management, and yes, coding too

24 October at 18:26 | Open on social.5f9.de
Glyph

@tante the pretty consistent month-over-month decline in patreon revenue worries me more than the fact that it is only $20k. I think that there is still cause for hope but everything I see does not seem to show me a healthy pattern of growth

24 October at 17:45 | Open on mastodon.social
Glyph

@tante and… I realize that this isn't causal or anything, but it can't be a good sign that @mastodonusercount has been offline for 2 weeks

24 October at 17:48 | Open on mastodon.social
Eric Schultz

@tante I would argue that, deep down, Mastodon's model is more honest.

24 October at 17:56 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Richard MacManus

@tante You can’t have it both ways though: it’s either VC money or continue to bootstrap. Are you maybe suggesting Mastodon should look for other crowdfunding avenues?

24 October at 17:56 | Open on mastodon.social
Jon

Mastodon does have other funding sources -- they've gotten a couple of six-figure donations, and their new US 501c3 opens up the possibilities for corporate matching. A couple of the 501c3's board members are great -- Esra’a Al Shafei if founder of Majal.org, co-founder of the Numun Fund, and board member at Tor Foundation -- although Biz Stone and a lawyer whose day job is defending AI companies against copyright lawsuits are also there, so we shall see.

In general I think Mastodon's going to have a hard time crowdfunding from the existing community under Eugen's leadership -- too many years of him ignoring community priorities. On the the other hand corporations who are betting on the Fediverse would find it embarassing if the best-known open-source Fediverse implementation goes away so that could be a more promising path for Mastodon -- for example I saw a post from Evan saying that SWF is looking for ways to get Mastodon money. Even if they were interested in VC funding, I'm pretty sure they missed the window (and that's almost certainly for the best).

@ricmac@mastodon.social @tante@tldr.nettime.org

Mastodon does have other funding sources -- they've gotten a couple of six-figure donations, and their new US 501c3 opens up the possibilities for corporate matching. A couple of the 501c3's board members are great -- Esra’a Al Shafei if founder of Majal.org, co-founder of the Numun Fund, and board member at Tor Foundation -- although Biz Stone and a lawyer whose day job is defending AI companies against copyright lawsuits are also there, so we shall see.

In general I think Mastodon's going to have...

24 October at 18:06 | Open on blahaj.zone
Paul Houle

@tante a budget would help: do they need $40k a month? There’s a lot of fear that non-profits, like the Mozilla foundation, are basically unaccountable, the fact that Mastodon is not based in San Francisco helps with legitimacy.

24 October at 18:04 | Open on mastodon.social
william.maggos

@tante

we need to decentralize payments. an open protocol to give fiat directly from my bank to other banks. then we build APIs so that it can be automated but always within our control and easy to keep track of in our own banking apps. I think this would drastically improve the number of people that would give to FOSS projects that we regularly use. and make pay per listen, watch and read possible outside of the big middlemen/aggregators. effort on this would ripple out to all these projects.

24 October at 18:27 | Open on liberal.city
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