The Era of Mastodon | Elena Rubashevska, Dec 5, 2022

"...To be sustainable, Mastodon instances have to cover costs and support admins. So, how do you fund an un-owned network of autonomous open source communities? That’s where Open Collective comes in. Ben Ramsey, the admin of phpc.social instance, explains the need for crowdfunding: “I've been running a Mastodon server for the PHP community since August 2018. During much of this time, growth on the server has been slow, and our small moderation team has had no problem keeping up with sign-ups and abuse reports. However, that's all changed. The influx of new signups is overwhelming at times, as our moderators manually approve each registration to ensure we build a safe and healthy community, and I've had to increase the server resources to keep things running smoothly. To date, I've used my own funds to cover hosting and other associated expenses: email delivery, domain name, etc. I'm happy to continue funding this project, but many have asked how they can contribute. Since I think this is an important community resource, I've created this collective, allowing the community to share in its ownership'...

The Fediverse includes interesting alternatives not only for Twitter migrants but also for those exhausted by recent changes on Instagram. One of the most popular is Pixelfed, a federated social image-sharing platform using the same ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon. Another open, decentralized tool is Matrix, a Slack alternative. Some communities, like NZ Federated Services, fundraise to support instances of all these tools at once. The community principle of Fediverse infrastructure makes it a convenient tool for finding a digital ecosystem that corresponds to users’ beliefs and values...."