this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Why can't it rely on donations? People poo-poo this, but I've yet to hear a substantive reason as to why.
Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of the moderators, admins and developers.
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison though? To me, that sounds like "Show me a soup kitchen that's able to pay market rate for chefs".
Also, by that logic, Reddit is a failure. They don't pay mods either.
What would happen if the masses realized how fast food is bad for them and stopped eating at McDonalds? Would they go to eat on a soup kitchen, or would they be expected to buy/grow their own food?
Ok. Fair enough, moderators usually are also part of the community, so they akso have the incentive to keep it going well even if unpaid.
Yet, the point stands. Remove "moderators" from the previous comment. Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of admins and developers.
Why aren't admins considered part of the community? When it comes to the mastodon developers, they're making 30,000 USD a month. I think they're fine.
That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.
It's not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.
Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.
I don't mean to imply that Mastodon devs are rolling around in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck, but they are getting funded.