Some Thoughts on Donating to the Mastodon Project

Donations to the Mastodon entity support Gargron's salary and the upstream costs of the Mastodon project, which includes the flagship instances, so it's tricky for donations to that entity to be limited to funding software dev only.

But that's not the only way to fund work on the Mastodon software.

Another option would be to identify specific ways the software could be improved for social.coop use (or co-op use in general), and fund someone to work on one or more of these as part of the social.coop tech team. 1000 could fund someone to work on this for roughly 10-20 hours. The finished software enhancements could be offered upstream, but would still be useful to social.coop (and potentially other instances) whether or not Gragron ever deigns to merge them.

The key question to be considered by the membership then is; does social.coop want to employ software developers directly, or continue to outsource this to other entities? Both options come with pros and cons.