@mmayo Honest question: do you have merge rights on Mastodon? If not, how will you ensure that the contributions are merged? Is there agreement from the Mastodon core team about those issues already?
In my experience, pouring time/money to an open source project doesn't do magic. It requires consensus building, a good relationship with the maintainers, and some patience.
@astrojuanlu @mmayo You don't need to have merge rights to make valuable contributions.
Sure, in some cases @Gargron might not accept contributions, but the same is true of paid contributor to lots of other major open source projects; there are lots of folks who do kernel work full time, who have patch series rejected and need to either rewrite or drop it.
Even if patches aren't accepted upstream, they may be accepted for local forks or widely used forks like glitch-soc.