It’s not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.

Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.

I don’t mean to imply that Mastodon devs are rolling around in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck, but they are getting funded.