Thank you, Mastodon community!
Thanks to your incredible support, this Giving Tuesday we’ve raised $10,438 (13% of $75,000 goal) for our Trust & Safety Lead hire!
There’s still time
Every contribution brings us closer to building a safer, more inclusive, open & free community-led platform where people, not profit, shape the future.
Thank you for donating, spreading the word & being part of this journey!
Help us reach our campaign goal: https://givebutter.com/givingmastodon
@Mastodon is this a role for mastodon.social or are they adding t&s tools to the open source project?
@Mastodon can we please not use a tip economy as a business model?
@rvcx What would be the better alternative (in this case)? (I'm also not sure if collecting donations for a software project/online platform is the same thing as a tipping economy, but that's at least arguable).
@ProfessorPootis kinda sounds like you don’t know what that means.
@rvcx plenty of nonprofits rely on donations
@ProfessorPootis so do for-profits
@rvcx generally not. How do you think Mastodon should fund itself?
@ProfessorPootis ~every table-service restaurant in America.
@rvcx Restaurants avoid paying their employees a reasonable wage by passing it on to the customer. They get money by selling food.
Mastodon gets their money via donation. They don't sell user data. They don't put up paywalls. Adding ads would likely cause a mass exodus and bring up privacy concerns. They ask for donations.
@rvcx If you can't donate, don't. I don't feel like a total asshole for not donating. With tipping you're forced into an unnecessary, awkward system where you have to pay some mystery amount based on ?????? leading to inconsistent income for the tipees. A lot of nonprofits encourage things like monthly donations because they are consistent. However another reoccurring payment is something most people would rather avoid so donation drives are a good way to fund money.
@ProfessorPootis Ah—I hadn’t realized that the one thing is bad but the other is good. Your long-winded analysis-free assertions have really cleared it up.
Blocked.
@rvcx As a non-profit, most of our revenue comes from donations. We provide a free service, and a free (as in Open Source) software, so I am not sure what other model could work here, but I am interested if you have alternatives to suggest!
While it must be frustrating at times, there is also something incredibly uplifting about how many people are using Mastodon seemingly without having the slightest idea about what open source is or how any of this works.
When I joined this platform it felt like 95% of the users were open source developers. That has certainly changed. And that's fantastic, despite some weird misunderstandings.
Thank you so much for taking so much time to communicate with the community, @renchap !
@rvcx
@renchap @rvcx have you seen the KDE donation notification? Basically, KDE added a notification that appears once a year (and can be disabled) asking for donations, and it dramatically increased donation revenue: https://youtu.be/5vivHquoiAc
Unfortunately, these notifications work best in December and by the time all the instances update it probably would’ve already past. Still, for next year I think it’s worth considering :)
@eb @rvcx we started building a similar feature in our official mobile apps, and are looking to build it for web, but it is a bit more complex because we don’t want to cut out the instance admins from donations so we would like to have a way for their user to donate to both the software project and their instance
@Mastodon @bandarbaru_1 kesulitan dalam translate bahasa ke bahasa indonesia.
@shimaze untuk terjemahan, bisa diubah terlebih dahulu pengaturan bahasa-nya menjadi Bahasa Indonesia, agar postingan dalam bahasa Inggris dapat diterjemahkan
@shimaze dan sangat disarankan, kedepannya saat memposting untuk ubah terlebih dahulu bahasa postingannya menjadi Bahasa Indonesia. dan daripada mengubah bahasa setiap saat memposting, maka bisa di-set secara default bahasa postingannya di pengaturan
@bandarbaru_1 oke bang, terimakasih atas sarannya, nanti akucobanya
@bandarbaru_1 terimakasih banget tipsnya, sudah berhasil dan sangat membantu.
@Mastodon so because X will become an 'everything app' (doubt it), there is need at mastodon to hire a fulltime lead programmer that works on moderation tools and blocklist support?
If those features are indeed so underdeveloped, won't it be much more apt to organise summer of code style initiatives or feature pledges rather than job positions? Now it is just asking for company growth because X bad.
@frog_reborn @Mastodon that is kind of my point. I am going on the text in the fundraiser.
@oddly As a former GSoC mentor and GCI admin, I can tell you it's a lot of work. The Mastodon project has limited capacity, I doubt they'd manage at the moment; maybe in a few years from now. (Looking at the backlog of issues and open patches, it's getting better.)
@nemobis thank you for the info, that is really interesting. Would such a position need to be filled permanently or is the asked amount so high bc of one-time costs?
@Mastodon Yes, but please choose a service with sharing support for Mastodon in the future …
@Mastodon you censored me just fine without instituting position creation