An interview with @thisismissem from @APC: FediMod FIRES on building better and decentralised social media applications (by @XavCC).

Probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned over the years of the Fediverse is that it depends almost entirely on volunteer labour. There are a few people that are paid full time to work on the Fediverse. But to actually get the things that you need, it very much largely depends on volunteer labour, because projects are either chasing funding through grants or they're chasing funding through their nations. And those demands can often be at odds with what people overall need or want.

So that's probably the biggest learning from the Fediverse that I have: a lot of it is just run and funded by individuals and volunteers, which often means that it doesn't move as fast as more commercial operations.

> And those demands can often be at odds with what people overall need or want.

@hongminhee and here
I was thinking that having corporatized projects chasing investment returns is the thing that brings the wrong incentives to the development of social media. As it is daily reminded to us by Facebook and Co.

I'm going to speak my mind about this:
@thisismissem has sold out.

@APC @XavCC

@mariusor @hongminhee @APC @XavCC i've sold out?

That statement is based on being involved in various open source projects' issue trackers, seeing people using the software begging for features from developers that just aren't being prioritised because there's not grant funding available for those features.

Here's one from the Mastodon issue tracker yesterday, issue in this case is only a year old, but there's plenty much older: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34209

Chasing grant funding is no different to chasing VC funding when it comes to work priorities — you're prioritising what another organisation will fund.