This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We’ve already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.
Good article. I would imagine one large stressor for admins is “how am I supposed to pay for this?” With instances needing to upgrade because of the huge influx of users.
The article suggests a non-profit for mental health support for admins and moderators. While I like the idea, I think we can go further—a non profit to help pay for running instances and paying admin and developer salaries. The names mentioned in the article would make sense for something like this (for instance, Mozilla. Also, how about the EFF?)
Yeah I was thinking about that too. Right now most instances rely wholly on donations from their users. The fediverse probably needs something like the linux foundation or clound native computing foundation to help cover costs for instances that get unexpectedly huge