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.
Is there an opportunity here to pay mods and admins of the fediverse? I’m already signed up to donate to beehaw each month. Is there enough demand to have a paid-only subset of instances? I’d rather pay $5-10 a month and have mods get paid than have them burn out or have ads everywhere.
Well, at the size of beehaw, even if half of the people here gave 5$/mo, I think we’d almost have enough though it probably wouldn’t be fair compensation in terms of hourly wage. Speaking personally, I would not want to make this an exclusive space to people who can pay.