Where we're at (Patreon)

Hello all, it's been a long time since I wrote an update on Patreon, and there are quite a few things to catch up on. November last year turned out to be a very turbulent time with the amount of active users on Mastodon jumping from about 300K to 2.5M and with them also the pressure on the project from pretty much every angle that still hasn't subsided.

Our repository was overwhelmed with new contributions, bug reports, and feature requests; mastodon.social and mastodon.online overwhelmed with demand, not just from a technical perspective of needing to scale up the infrastructure to handle new traffic, but also from a customer support and moderation perspective; e-mail overwhelmed with press inquiries, suggestions, offers, job applications, server submissions; not to mention the overlap with the Mastodon 4.0 release which on its own requires a lot of focus and attention.

Very fortunately, our support on Patreon grew as well, from previously about $7K USD per month to (as of writing) $31K USD per month, which not only covers the increased operating costs, but also opens up new opportunities for our non-profit organization to grow, which I am extremely grateful for. Mastodon has been a very small operation for a very long time, it started and continued up to now as a solo venture with a moderately growing number of contractors; both the new challenges and the increased support mean that it's time to take it a step further.

Here is what's been happening and what's coming soon.

In November, Mastodon 4.0 came out with post editing, hashtag following, post translations, customizable user roles and many other features.

We plan to release the 2022 Annual Report this month. I believe it might be a bit more interesting than last year's.

We've been laying the groundwork for being able to employ more people and are planning to announce job openings for the first key roles soon.

Our trademark is already registered in the EU, and is now in the process of registration in other countries, most notably the US.

With increased attention on Mastodon, the name that identifies us and our community becomes a more interesting target for misuse by bad actors.

Due to the lack of legal counseling early on, information on the usage of our trademark has always been sparse. We now have a Trademark Policy.

To provide more transparency on what we're working on and what we're planning to do, there is now a public roadmap on our website.

With two new iOS developers on board, the development of the official Mastodon app for iOS has picked up steam. We have a lot planned for both our mobile apps.

We're designing new merch items and talking to a manufacturer/distributor with high-quality, responsibly-sourced products.