@aral Getting blocked by fosstodon doesn't make sense to me, although it is the case that a lot of foss people have one foot in the world of BigTech and so may feel obligated to defend unethical business practices. Get them by the salary, and hearts and minds soon follow.
When we first started Ind.ie (now Small Technology Foundation) and took a principled stance against people farming/surveillance capitalism, we received the greatest vitriol not from Silicon Valley folks (although, goodness knows, there was the occasional asshat) but from the open source community. And exactly for the reason you just stated.
@jens@bob@aral this is admittedly a cynical view, but in recent years I've found a shit ton of "FOSS" to be basically "polite ransomware" which is constantly up trying to upsell to a cloud or commercial service (and any "community edition" or support is provided begrudgingly), rather than something you can easily deploy on a homebuilt server I've noticed this in particular for VOIP telephone system software and radio broadcasting..
@vfrmedia@bob@aral Nah, I understand. Unfortunately, the FOSS financing model is a) megacorp pays for it, b) community pays by donations, c) community pays by this upsell method.
It's rather difficult to break out of. @smallcircles is trying hard to bring people to the same table to find something in between that's sustainable and more acceptable. I'm also all ears for suggestions.
But that said, there are clearly better and worse ways to go about it...
@jens
you forget the "grants pay for it, aka Institional megacorps"
And I do not think it got worse, we have a large shift to webapps and many are just shitty documented for selfhosting.
Documentation and portability have always been issues, but now in the clo(ud|wn) world running in your infrastructure is good enough.
So yes, the not honoring the Documentation/technical writers bites us additionally. They rock and make much more move than most think.
I feel I didn't so much forget about grants, as that I'm still unsure how sustainable they are. And a quick boost of income for a particular feature set doesn't scream "maintaining FOSS" to me.
I say that while I'm financed by grants. I can see the end around the corner, and clawing for ways to continue that don't enshittify everything. It's also possible that the grant train goes on for a while. I just don't know.
Ah yes. While I do get this, there is the issue of for whom.
Torproject and other institutionalized FLOSS projects can live by grants just fine.
Yes there is always the overhead of grant writers and scouting, but they are fine I think (OKFN and others come to mind as well)
For the small individual project? it is tough.
Think curl and others.
And they are not services, which are hard to run. Think overleaf.
@mwfc This is another aspect we've been discussing with @smallcircles recently: can we band together enough smaller FOSS projects to go directly for a Horizon grant?
Most require some kind of sufficiently large commercial entity to join a consortium, but not all. The hard(er) part is the coordination of those efforts sufficiently in advance, because writing those proposals takes a lot of effort.
I can tell you that in several years of trying at the UN Foundation, we could not convince donors to support a pooled sustainable maintenance fund for critical projects.
The donors' metrics by which they are judged successful are simply incompatible with anything other than building shiny new features for software deployment in explicit use cases...
@downey It seems to be changing a bit with stuff like the STF and other funds aimed at maintenance.
And I know a lot of funding orgs are deeply aware of this, and are trying to open up continuous revenue streams. It's tough, but we're not at the end of the road yet.
@downey
I think some stuff is changing.
I mean at least floss becomes a thing for the German government now. There are a couple of projects and even if some people call it bullshit, it is happening.
Think the horizon 2020 programs, prototypefund, sovereigntechfund, covid app Germany and even stuff like project phoenix from Dataport.
Sormas was being used
And BTW pretty much all of the people with access to grant budgets are on LinkedIn, not here, and worse, have been fully captured by Big Tech who funnel them money and effectively call the shots when it comes to any policy decisions.
P-5's and D-1's in the UN system and director-level folks at INGO's and other donors do not run on pocket change, and have sufficient financial resources that (should!) allow them to prioritize their values and Do The Right Thing.
But as we have seen in the Fediverse, neoliberalism is still winning, and money/power is a greatly corrupting factor.
I am talking about the many many folks I know from the floss community. Those that mostly have seen burnouts and know what it means to not be sure how to pay rent half a year in the future.
Those not charging arms and legs for everything.
Applying for small grants is often seen as hassle because of unknown turnout. Think gnupg.
Openssl, and others.
Not torproject, which is fine supporting a small bubble by getting big grants.
with a telephone exchange, broadcast playout system or other similar "semi embedded" tech its slightly different as its more a niche market and its something you deploy and might use for 10+ years; the problems occur as what funding exists seems to be driven by constantly adding new features, and overlooking the userbase that is perfectly happy with the existing system provided its maintained...
And then, we have not found a decent way to pay our folks.
Charging for use feels to me in most cases like begging. (like running a mastodon server, sure, it costs money, but how much?
1 Euro per Account? on a 1k Account infra?)
Yes, some users need to pay, but for a instance like chaos.social the hosting costs are a joke compared to the user accounts.
400 Euros/6k MUA. https://meta.chaos.social/money
Yes. I am fine with that, but then administration for the instance is how much a week?
How many Euros do we grant for operating the software?
(Moderation is a different beast)
So even if we wanted to, I am not really sure chaos.social would warrant a full position, which is basicly what 6k/month would pay (1 Euro/User)
And all the moneysending services take a cut that is unholy at best. So paying per Account is not really feasable either.
@jens
The point is, most donation/payment platforms take the huge chunk.
I am fine with paying a decent salary, so E13 in Germany is OK?
That is 40hrs/week.
For doing what?
We need a backup person too, because vacations are a thing (and fuck 24/7/365 just because they get money)
I am not sure hosting one mastodon server warrants that.
(Again, I am not talking moderation, which is unpredictable and can be anything from 1 hr/day to neverending.) @vfrmedia@bob@aral@smallcircles
Point it:
it scales.
chaos social has something like 12-13k accounts, 6k MUA
I think I know leah and rixx enough and their workethos that their setups are 100% work for one instance, and each additional one less than 10% because excellent documentation and automation. (Thanks for this awesome job)
So few people can run a shitton of mastodon infrastructure (see eugen's ggmbh)
We must set limits, but
1 Euro/account seems too much.
so yes., I have been paying for another fediverse service (guppe) for the last 9 months or so (5 Euro/month)
Because I know the service is needed and chaos.social is stable (financially)
And I hope others pay for peertube and other services, so I can enjoy stuff from them
And yes, we need to pay our community for running services for us, be it by investing time, effort, and or money.
Because in the end they deserve a good life.
@jens
And no, I do not think that combining moderation and administration works all the time.
Because there are different people.
Not every good moderator will be an excellent administrator.
Many highly skilled people from the compuer science field I would not allow near a keyboard for moderation. Really, No.
I doubt I would make a good moderator, and I am less skilled than many.
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