Give the people who are building tools like Mastodon:
1. Training in user-centered software design and how to make well-founded product decisions quickly
2. Training in go-to-market and business skills
3. Training in trust and safety and community management
4. A network
5. Money
@ben @Mulderc that sounds way too small. Mastadon is already earning $35k USD / month on Patreon. That's $420k/year
You're talking about a one-time grant for like one "rich world" engineer salary. And the output of these accelerations are just more features that need to be maintained by the core team.
Now I don't object to contributing the 100k once. But if we want Mastodon to be a forever tool, It needs forever funding as well.
@akkartik @ben @Mulderc starving an essential tool of its resources ends up dooming its dependents and always leads to capture.
I think that we will forever need a waste treatment system and it should be funded forever. You seem to think this is a bad idea because it will lead to "creeping bureaucracy and capture".
But unless you have a better system for dealing with human waste (?) I think your premise stinks.
@gatesvp Waste treatment is certainly way more important than Mastodon. I haven't heard that it has some sort of endowment in perpetuity. I'm not an expert, but my null hypothesis is that waste treatment is perpetually underfunded in the US while we carefully avoid ever touching say defense spending. The US govt as a whole _is_ hopelessly captured.
I don't understand your first paragraph. Perhaps you have a different definition of capture than me.
@akkartik look I will just quote you here, but I will replace "tools" with an actual technology.
There should be no forever {waste water system} and no forever funding. Trying to guarantee stability in a changing world always leads to creeping bureaucracy and capture
Mastodon is currently the primary tool for delivering an ActivityPub powered social network. And I think we need a publicly funded social network forever.
I'm not sure why you don't?
@akkartik Mastodon was founded in 2016. ActivityPub is 5 years old.
If that's young, what's old to you?
If not Mastodon, then who/what do you fund forever? While still avoiding capture?
@gatesvp The idea of funding something forever is fundamentally susceptible to capture. We shouldn't have a forever funding source deciding whom to fund. As new tech arises, grow its funding gradually. If Mastodon slows, atrophy its funding gradually -- and independently.
I have zero objection to, "Mastodon is popular now, it deserves funding now." And all your statements about how much is too small, how it compares with one "rich world" engineer salary -- all that still applies.
So $100k is like one skilled senior white collar worker (with healthcare and benefits).
Maybe 1.5 to 2 junior people.
How exactly are you allocating 12 to 18 months of work to cover all of your five points? Will this still allow staff to complete the existing job they're already doing?
If I wrote you this $100k cheque tomorrow and we fast forward to June 2024, how would you know it was successfully deployed?
@gatesvp @Mulderc Off the top of my head:
The idea has been researched, validated, and potentially adjusted if the team’s research showed it originally wasn’t right.
The team has been established and has a strong, empathetic, open culture and norms.
An early prototype, suitable for further testing, has been coded.
And the team has a strong idea of who to reach out to for funding and why, and has ideally already started (after intros from the accelerator maybe) with expressions of interest.
@ben @Mulderc you successfully pumped out a pair of toots without providing a single measurable metric for 100k investment.
And yes, you sound like they're driven by for profit orgs that intend to grow even more. You want to teach them about UX, but they're actually just going to need a UX person forever. And today, Mastodon is less than a dozen people. You can teach them all you want, they don't have that human.
You want to accelerate them, but accelerate to what?
@gatesvp So, a few things:
Software that is built code-first is more likely to fail. It’s not about having a UX person; it’s about baking a culture of research and fast iteration into the team, which I believe gives them more of a chance to succeed. A more entrepreneurial approach to open source.
I want these projects to be able to pay for themselves and have the nfp business skills to be sustainable, in addition to plugging into a network of people who can help.
@gatesvp And I want to make sure these projects are built in a human centered way rather than people just buckling down and hacking. We’ve got plenty of open source that does that and it’s full of people just scratching their own itches.
Other approaches are available. But having built a couple of large open source projects, and advised a bunch of non profits, that’s mine.
You want to accelerate [end user open source projects], but accelerate to what?
@ben you talk about open source developers scratching their own itches. But this whole thread sounds a heck of a lot like you trying to scratch your own itch about wanting to talk to people about your experience.
And maybe get paid for it.
Almost every open source project on the planet is wildly underfunded. Asking people to write you a check instead of writing a check to the project they care about is a really big ask. Nothing in this thread has convinced me it's better.🤷♂️
@wilbr I'm already a co-founder of a 501c3 non profit hackerspace. I was a libre/free open source contributor much earlier and yet still seem to be thousands of dollars in debt and sleeping in my car (I've had it worse).
I somehow don't think that hackerspaces or present funding programs (e.g. I've applied for NLSNet grants and been rejected) are the ticket, maybe for some?
Definitely not helpful for me and many others.
@misc @ben Yes—making deliberate space for interested & capable non-coders is also important!
Having volunteered for about a year in a different open source project ( @dendronhq ), I know that the project & users benefited from having thoughtful, attentive, articulate users discussing what works, what could be improved, etc.
@misc Idk if this is good advice or not, but I’d say actually being able to code is mattering less and less.
“Good enough” understanding of what *can be* coded and how to *talk* about it is mattering more and more.
I would recommend CS50 which is a free online crash course that skims the surface of many coding concepts. Far better to have a shallow knowledge of everything than a deep knowledge of anything in particular. As weird as that sounds…
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