I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.
It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.
It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.
Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.
@danvanmoll @leo I mean club twit. It seems like a subscription site if I want to see anything.
Which is fine, really. Just be honest.
@danvanmoll @leo twit.social is the federated gateway to twit.tv and that's perfectly okay. And content creators that want to move their profiles there is okay too. But ultimately that content is pay per view and that's okay too.
Just be honest ~ hey we've got this awesome platform service that you can monetize your works
Again, that's okay. Just be honest.
@danvanmoll it's more likely they are geared towards content creators but love consumers. Consumers are profit, no matter where they are
And consider this ~ they've schooled you, and maybe me. Here we are talking about a for-profit federated instance with an open front. They're not being honest; they want you there to get you to $ubscribe, It's not your fault as this wil be common for the next 6+ months
@leo Are you going to set up donations or tip-jar for the twit.social instance in future?
Would be helpful for those of us that want to contribute but are anxiously waiting to see if Santa brings a Club TWiT subscription this year...
@leo dot-social and which other?
tbf throwing money at dot-social *does* finance the busiest instance, and dev to keep that site up should ripple back into smaller instances being able to run better/more cheaply.
But if you aren't on one of those big two instances, definitely worth checking if your own instance needs the money first :)
If anything, the money provides the main dev to do as he wish as opposed to work with the community.
The day Eugen will have to get another job (and mastodon.social disappear) we will finally have a chance to get good governance.
The money absolutey does not trickle down into benefits for instance owners and most of the improvement comes from the community.
Give money to tusky/metatext if you want to do something useful for everyone
@dudleysaunders @mxfraud @leo Tusky and Metatext are mobile apps used to interact with an(y) instance. If you like the UI they provide more than the default website/apps and want more where that came from, they're a solid place to donate.
For under-the-hood stuff, other than Mastodon's GmBH donating to instance admins is almost certainly the biggest need, on average.
@leo I like your post, but, there's actually an officially registered Mastodon company, and the lead developer of Mastodon is its CEO. :D
But I get what you mean.
Content warning: asking for money
@[email protected] Guy, you talk like Eugen is developing all this by himself. Mastodon is a community project with lots and LOTS of merge requests. I will explain this in simple language for you: Other developers develop features and bug corrections and submit their code to the project leader, who is accepting it, after the wider developer community of hobbyists has discussed about the technicalities. You donāt need millions to *develop* Mastodon.
@leo As a server admin, I feel that supporting the development effort does support my own server. Just because the dollars donāt trickle down, doesnāt mean that we donāt benefit in other ways, through well-maintained code, not to mention access to the developers through Discord (not to mention supporting two of the largest instances, which are bound to uncover bugs and security gaps before my instance does).
I get what youāre saying, but some may interpret your message as discouraging people from participating in the āofficialā Patreon.
@frumble Perhaps @atomicpoet was being a little hyperbolic when he said that Mastodonās āvery survivalā is at stake, but I donāt think it rises to the level of āmisinformation.ā He was just pointing out that it costs real money to maintain code and servers, and itās incumbent upon those who can, to at least consider putting a few bucks toward that effort. If nothing else, it honors those whoāve put a lot more hours into building this community as well as its infrastructure, than any of us ever will.
[edit]
One last point: Iām not saying that people shouldnāt support their local server; quite the contrary, but for those of use who are running servers (even if weāre doing it out of our own pockets), you might consider sending a few bucks their way, in the same way that you might pay a monthly subscription fee for other pieces of software.
Itās just important to recognize that free software and services arenāt free; somebodyās paying real dollars and/or real hours of their time. And, as Mastodon (and the Fediverse) grows, the more that we can support the developers and server admins, the better off weāll be in the long run.
@leo thank you. Working had to keep mastodon.education running.
World/Europe
Donations, great. How? here for outside the Netherlands
https://ko-fi.com/ericredegeld
Or here
https://paypal.me/redegelde
@leo I would go so far as to say that no one should give more money to the official Mastodon patreon. Eugen is making close to 6 figures a year and very little of that is reinvested in his Servers aside from monthly bills.
Money will always be better spent on helping small instances pay their bills than putting another drop in the bucket.
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