Organizational updates pre-1.4 (Patreon)

Hey folks! It's been a while since my last Patreon update, again, so I wanted to let you know what's been happening.

First of all, I have hired maloki@mastodon.social (her Patreon) as a part-time project manager to deal with roadmaps, mission statements, and coordination between contributors. So that's where a part of this Patreon goes every month.

We just release a first iteration of a website for the project as a whole, called joinmastodon.org, that links together all the various resources about Mastodon. Maloki has enlisted a large number of new moderators for mastodon.social. These community moderators are also helping out with another new item: Mastodon Meta Discussion Board.

The Discourse project has kindly provided us with free hosting of a Discourse board for meta discussions about Mastodon on discourse.joinmastodon.org - this should replace mailing lists for admins, deal with troubleshooting and generally house everything that's too distracting to put into GitHub issues.

I have been working on the v1.4 release. It has grown quite large compared to previous ones. This time we want to approach the release process more carefully: right now we're putting last strokes on the features we added. Then we will publish it as a "release candidate", meaning that it's sort of destined to become the release version, but not yet battle-tested. Brave admins can then upgrade to it and report issues within, say, a week. Also, translators will have that same week to add localizations for changed strings. Then the real release happens. I am hopeful about getting the RC out on Monday, if not before.

For those unfamiliar with the 1.4 roadmap, it includes: muting threads, personally hiding everything from a particular domain, language filters for public timelines, and massive JS optimizations due to replacing Browserify with Webpack in the build process.

I have updated this Patreon's goals. Beyond my own wage and mastodon.social hosting costs, which are now covered, and Maloki's part-time wage which is also covered, we want to expand to hire a community manager and reimburse mastodon.social moderators.