We Are Live On Open Collective

Thanks to the great people at The Social Change Nest, we are now officially live on the Open Collective platform:

Tŵt Cymru / Toot Wales Collective

Along with our recent server move to Mythic Beasts, this places us firmly in the UK and will allow Jaz to wind down the New York-based charity that has operated toot.wales until now.

Budget

Our services include the Mastodon server, a web site, and our domain names. The annual cost of running the services is currently £3,954, which works out to £329.50 each month.

Although we don't pay our moderators, we'd very much like to get to a point where we can provide a little something each month for the effort and energy our moderators put into keeping Tŵt running.

We very occasionally produce postcards and flyers and such, and may incur a small cost here and there for sundry items. We may also choose to host additional services.

With the arrival of the Online Safety Act we may have to pay for some advice and/or some third-party services to ensure our compliance.

Please note: we pre-paid the server bill for a year, so there won't be a major payment for some time, but we need to raise the money in time for a few smaller bills and the next annual payment in December.

Governance

These recent changes mean we will be moving away from a board-governed charity and instead operate as a fiscally hosted collective. All income and expenses will be public, transparent, and published on our opencollective.com page. The Collective is administered by Jayne, Jaz, and Mark, you can view their profiles on the Collective page.

Our organisational policies remain the same, and can be viewed at https://blogs.toot.wales/toot/croeso-i-twt

As we close down the NY charity we will pay any and all bills we need to before shutting down, we have a small surplus that we will use to prepay the domain names and any other services we can legally spend the money on subject to NY and US charity law.

Paypal

If you were previously donating using a Paypal account, please consider switching over. We will close the Paypal account later this year. To cancel your Paypal recurring payment:

A Note From Jaz

When I started this project in 2018, I made it clear it needed to be something that can survive without my direct support, that success would be defined as Tŵt being able to stand on its own two feet. In many ways, I think we've achieved this goal.

I sincerely believe social networking should be a non-profit, community-driven activity, and our success growing toot.wales is testament to those of you who agree with me.

I am heartened not only by our collective community, but the thousands of other communities around the world that we connect to, similarly ad-free, community-managed, allowing 15 million people to connect to each other in a people-powered network owned and operated by the people using it.

We are seeing a shift in mainstream social apps that are allowing if not encouraging the toxicity and intolerance we work so hard to prevent. It's never been more important to offer the alternative vision that so many of us in the Fediverse believe in.

I understand not everyone can put their hand in their pocket to support our little corner of the Fediverse, so I humbly remind everyone that there are two ways you can help us continue to offer this valuable service: donate your money, or spread the word.

If you enjoy the experience toot.wales and our larger network brings you, tell five friends. Tell your colleagues. Tell your local newspaper or radio station.

You don't need to sell people on open source, mastodon, no nerdspeak. Just let everyone know there's a social network you use that is growing rapidly, is not owned by billionaires, has no advertising, no addictive algorithms, it's just a big collection of apps that can all connect and talk to each other.

Pick any app, pick any server. They all work together.

You know. Like a world wide web.

https://jointhefediverse.net/ is a great link to share, simple and easy to understand.

To everyone who uses our services, supports us, or uses and supports a different part of the open social web – thank you. The future is federated, and we intend to continue to be a leader in this space.