#category

We just hit the €1,000 / month mark for donations, thank you so much!! That means we're almost halfway to our initial goal of €2,500 per month to pay hosting costs, and to pay Tobi and Kim €1k each as a supplement for #GoToSocial bugfixes + release + maintenance work! If you want to help us reach that goal, you can donate to our OpenCollective org here: https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE Even a yearly donation of €12 (€1 per month) helps us. Thank you! <3

Mastodon is great and all, but if you want Fedi to be more than just one dominant server, I urge you to consider financially supporting GoToSocial, a lightweight ActivityPub software. @gotosocial@gts.superseriousbusiness.org is halfway to their modest funding goal. Developing open source software is labor and deserves to be funded. Even if you don't use GoToSocial, I cannot overstate how important it is to fund projects like this which advance the protocol we all use. Even a buck a month is helpful. https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE

Hi everyone!! <3 Over the last week your generous donations to #GoToSocial have brought our OpenCollective budget up from ~€450 per month to the current total estimate of €950 per month!! That's amazing, thank you so much to everyone who has donated, and boosted our fundraising posts (see thread above) That means we're a lot closer to our initial goal of getting an estimated monthly budget of €2,500 so that Tobi (writing this post) and Kim can pay themselves a supplementary wage of €1,000 each every month. Can you help us reach €2,500 a month, to make our work on GoToSocial less stressful and haphazard? We have yearly, monthly, and custom donations available: https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE Thank you again for reading, boosting, and/or donating, everything helps <3

Y'all want a fediverse that's not just big Mastodon instances, right? If so, you should consider financially supporting #GoToSocial. Even if you don't use it. https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE

GoToSocial is a type of Fediverse server which emphasises user safety and being lightweight to host. It's really good, and is particularly popular with those who self-host their Fediverse accounts. The developers of GoToSocial's software are currently trying to raise money to keep the project going. You can help by donating at: ➡️ https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE Here is more info about what the money is needed for: ➡️ https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01KW9ZZ72ZQTFH6AWR020VXWH9 You can follow them at @gotosocial@gts.superseriousbusiness.org#GTS #GoToSocial

Thank you so much for all your help so far 😍 Wow! With the donations we've reached overnight, according to OpenCollective we now have an estimated monthly budget of €727! For our first goal we're aiming for an estimated monthly budget of €2,500, so that we can pay hosting costs and pay ourselves €1,000 each per month as a basic supplement. So we're still looking for an extra €1773 per month! Can you help us with a monthly (or yearly) donation? https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE Thank you so much again for helping to make #GoToSocial development easier + less stressful for us (Tobi + Kim).

Hello sloth valuers! #GoToSocial could use your help! TL;DR, please help us by donating to our OpenCollective page so we (Tobi and Kim) can pay ourselves a basic monthly wage. Long explanation: In order to keep work on the GtS codebase buzzing along, Tobi and Kim have to perform the increasingly expensive chore of maintaining their flesh temples by consuming calories, keeping warm and dry (or cool and wet, depending on the circumstances), doing routine bodily maintenance, and so on. Not to mention paying for electricity, internet, etc. The money we need for all this has so far largely been provided to us by NLnet, the Dutch organization that funds a lot of fediverse projects (among other interesting things). NLnet's support has been of incredible value. Indeed, without it GoToSocial would not exist in its current form; we'd have long since had to get "real jobs" and GtS would have been relegated to being a side project. However, due to the way that funding from NLnet works, we get paid only for delivering features that we scope out long in advance of when the funding period actually begins. In other words, we get paid every time we merge a big feature, details of which are agreed up to a year beforehand. However, this payout happens only intermittently, since big features take a large amount of time to write. As everyone who works on code knows, there's more to a project than just writing headline features. We don't get paid for spending time doing things like maintenance, bugfixes, small bonus features, refactoring, triage, helping people in the Matrix chats, code review, and what have you. So, the intermittent way that we get paid means we have to juggle working on very important but unpaid "maintenance" stuff, alongside paid "feature" stuff when our bank accounts start to look worryingly moth-filled. This causes semi-regularly panics in the both of us, as neither of us are particularly resilient when it comes to dealing with financial pressures. To make working on GoToSocial more sustainable, then, we want to be able to pay ourselves--the two most active devs--a basic monthly salary for all the work we do that isn't big headline features. This will allow us to commit time to unglamorous but vital maintenance chores, without the constant background worry that by doing so we're going to end up running out of money at a critical moment. To make this happen, we need your help! Thanks to all our donors on OpenCollective and Liberapay, we'd accrued enough unspent money over the years to be able to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each, each month, for the months of February, March, April, and May 2026 (plus a little bit here and there from Liberapay). For transparency's sake, you can see those payouts here. As you'll see from our OpenCollective budget, however, we don't make enough from donations to keep this up, and indeed at the time of writing we have only 2000 EUR left in our OpenCollective budget, which gives us ~3/4 of a month when accounting for ongoing hosting costs. And so, we're asking you, dear sweet reader, sexy-ass cool reader, for a donation or two to our OpenCollective pot: https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE With your help, we want to be able to raise about 2,500 EUR per month, so that we can continue to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each per month, plus various other costs that are paid out of the OpenCollective. Thank you for reading this absolute saga of a post, and for considering donating to us. We really appreciate it!

NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN

@taoeffect@crib.social ran the IFTAS thread ( https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/ad4d151b-a6a1-4694-94dd-f4e60461e7f7 ) through a clanker and the clanker suggested that a lot of the information was unverified by hedging all to hell.

So, let's dig up the citations: it turns out that IFTAS is big business! $1,408,877.86, in fact. Not bad for a side-hustle that isn't even your day job, right?

Bringing up the head, the Social Web Foundation, of which @evan@cosocial.ca is the head ( https://socialwebfoundation.org/team/ ), doesn't list their EIN on their website. But their donation page ( https://socialwebfoundation.org/donate/ ) says:

The Social Web Foundation is a fiscally-sponsored project of Exchange Point Institute, a US 501(c)3 non-profit.

The Exchange Points Institute's EIN is 87-1028685. Their Form 990-N on IRS site says they have "Gross receipts not greater than: $50,000" for 2023; ProPublica says ( https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/871028685 ) that they got $527,410 in 2024, per their 990. Pretty fuckin' heavy! $120k of that was from the Ford Foundation⁰. Congrats, @evan@cosocial.ca ! If you like, you can also read Mallory Knodel's "Announcing the launch of Social Web Foundation" in the Association for Progressive Communications blog. The bold part from that blog post: "To fight inequality, participate in democracy, build an equitable society and economy, we can’t rely on a few corporate-owned, profit-driven spaces. The Social Web Foundation is our best chance to establish the conditions in which the new social media operates with zero harm." In the following paragraph, Eugen "John Mastodon" Gargamel-Rochko, is quoted as being proud to back the Social Web Foundation and their work.

Total (gross¹): $527,410

Next up, IFTAS itself, $384,375 in 2023, and then another $7,733 in 2024, but they spent $302,567 that year, per https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/932011167/202433169349303828/full . The ridiculously circuitous pathway for the money includes the National Endowment for Democracy () and the Open Society Foundation (Soros)². If you rolled your eyes when I said that the glowies were funding IFTAS, I invite you to come dislocate your jaw trying to fit my goddamn dick in your mouth. Looks like plenty of cash for just 40 hours a week, @jaz@mastodon.iftas.org . Way to hustle!

Total (gross): $919,518

Two of the bigger instances in the "Fediverse Governance" glowop are social.coop and hachyderm.io. There were nine more³, I didn't check, presumably they're worth less money.

The budget for social.coop is, per https://opencollective.com/socialcoop#category-BUDGET ) £71,952.29 ($97,373.03), of which they have so far spent £42,306.86 ($57,253.87).

Total (gross): $1,016,891.03

hachyderm.io is a little more convoluted: they're owned, per their about page, by the Nivenly Foundation, EIN 92-2345439 (which you've gotta dig out of the IRS because they do not list that on their website). They've pulled in $17,697.88 and haven't touched any of it yet. Way to show some self-restraint, @nova@hachyderm.io !

Total (gross): $1,034,588.91

Now, this one's trickier! For an undisclosed sum, NewsMast purchased indieweb.social ( https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/03/27/the-next-stage-for-indiewebsocial.html ). They claim to have done no trading any of the years they've filed, but they bought indieweb.social in March 2025. They filed as dormant for 2025 and then borrowed £276,575 ($374,288.95 at time of writing), which is currently about . So, unless they've made any big purchases other than that, it looks like they've paid a quarter-million pounds sterling sixabong quidbob for indieweb.social. As noted in the prervious post, NewsMast paid Tim Chambers for this site and Tim Chambers is the...the Executive Director, per the NewsMast site ( https://about.iftas.org/2024/07/12/tim-chambers-joins-the-iftas-advisory-board/ ). Now, that's how you flip a $10 domain and like a few hundred in hosting costs, @tchambers@indieweb.social !

Total (gross, including speculative valuation of indieweb.social): $1,408,877.86

So, you know, cram that in whoever's pipe next time @graf@poa.st spends a handful of bennies on Crunchbits/Frantech boxes.

⁰ "CORE SUPPORT FOR THE SOCIAL WEB FOUNDATION TO INCREASE THE REACH AND SUSTAINABILITY OF OPEN SOURCE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS" was worth $70k to the Ford Foundation and "CORE SUPPORT TO SURVEY AND INTERVIEW GLOBAL INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE MEMBERS OF THE INFRARED NETWORK THAT PROVIDE ALTERNATIVES TO MULTINATIONAL CORPORATE TECH PLATFORMS TO DEVELOP A LONG TERM AND SUSTAINABLE STRATEGIC PLAN FOR THE NETWORK" was worth $50k. So, that fediverse governance survey, that was a $50k survey! No big deal, though, the Ford Foundation (EIN 13-1684331) sneezes that on the hour; they control about $17.5B.

¹ I mean that I am totaling the amount of money they receive, but also: I am vomit. Not that making money is wrong, per se, but these are people getting foundation money to kill fedi.

² Real ugly goddamn URL, fuck's sake: https://datarepublican.com/expose/?custom_graph=131624046%2C042103594%2C430084%3B042103594%2C262048480%2C385000%3B262048480%2C205806345%2C837890%3B205806345%2C932011167%2C384375%3B521344831%2C133615533%2C166667%3B133615533%2C205806345%2C1710000%3B521943638%2C521338892%2C64298125%3B521338892%2C520846183%2C312658%3B520846183%2C951922279%2C810431%3B951922279%2C110303001%2C104696%3B110303001%2C205806345%2C90815505%3B943027961%2C522096845%2C146636%3B522096845%2C133191113%2C51000%3B133191113%2C205806345%2C295273%3B133586432%2C135598093%2C47661%3B135598093%2C630598743%2C651000%3B630598743%2C205806345%2C275000%3B132702768%2C521257057%2C953939%3B521257057%2C116107128%2C619108%3B116107128%2C205806345%2C30000%3B131656647%2C521847010%2C375000%3B521847010%2C133191113%2C12000&title=IFTAS%20INC&return_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdatarepublican.com%2Fofficers%2F%3Fnonprofit_kw%3D932011167 .

³ The Individual Eleven:

https://cosocial.ca/ (https://cosocial.ca/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/cosocial.ca (https://fedilist.com/instance/cosocial.ca) https://hcommons.social/ (https://hcommons.social/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/hcommons.social (https://fedilist.com/instance/hcommons.social) https://hachyderm.io/ (https://hachyderm.io/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/hachyderm.io (https://fedilist.com/instance/hachyderm.io) https://masto.donte.com.br/ (https://masto.donte.com.br/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/masto.donte.com.br (https://fedilist.com/instance/masto.donte.com.br) https://mspsocial.net/ (https://mspsocial.net/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/mspsocial.net (https://fedilist.com/instance/mspsocial.net) https://piaille.fr/ (https://piaille.fr/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/piaille.fr (https://fedilist.com/instance/piaille.fr) https://sfba.social/ (https://sfba.social/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/sfba.social (https://fedilist.com/instance/sfba.social) https://social.coop/ (https://social.coop/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/social.coop (https://fedilist.com/instance/social.coop) https://tooting.ch/ (https://tooting.ch/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/tooting.ch (https://fedilist.com/instance/tooting.ch) https://wandering.shop/ (https://wandering.shop/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/wandering.shop (https://fedilist.com/instance/wandering.shop) https://woof.group/ (https://woof.group/) | https://fedilist.com/instance/woof.group (https://fedilist.com/instance/woof.group)