2023 Final Update of the Year
We’re here, it’s the end of the year, as things wind down for the festive season ahead of us, it’s time for another update: December, what’s happened in the past month, and where things are going. This will be the last update for the year.
Grab a glühwein, and help me close out the year.
In Summary:
- New funding website: https://support.thisismissem.social
- Average income over 6 months of €2000 per month, not including taxes and health insurance, so actual income has been much less.
- I’ve personally funded myself to the tune of €16,000 this year through my personal savings, which are now gone.
- Joined IFTAS’s advisory board, a part-time paid role. Also involved in their CSAM detection efforts and CARIAD (blocklists).
- Work on FIRES continuing, albeit slowly, due to health issues & other work taking priority.
- Continued contributions to Mastodon and Pixelfed.
Funding Update
In the middle of November, I posted a status about how funding just wasn’t at the levels necessary in order to sustain the work I’m doing. At the time, I had approximately €700 in monthly income (my rent alone is €850 odd), so I wasn’t breaking at all even with monthly expenses. This meant that I’d have to seek out alternative employment which would take my attention away from the Fediverse — thankfully, I don’t think this will be the case going forwards.
The big reason for this is the increase in monthly income from joining the IFTAS Advisory Board. This is a part-time role that fits well with the work I’m already doing on the Fediverse. Whilst I can’t discuss the exact amount of money that they pay me, it is an amount that makes my work a lot more sustainable. This was something that’s been in the works for many months, and I’ve been involved in many discussions on their matrix chat and various projects.
As of a few days ago, I’ve passed €12,000 in revenue for the year. This is the total of all the donations I’ve received from individuals, the money from sponsorships to work on certain things, and bits and pieces of freelance work. Whilst this sounds like a lot, if you split it across 6 months, it’s really not that much: €2000 per month or less, not including taxes and health insurance.
In most months, my income has been between €600 and €2000, with some outliers of €4000. This inconsistency in regular income comes from the freelancing and grants, and in November in particular I was running my life with a bank balance of like.. €200 or less for things like food, bills, etc., so things were pretty dicey to say the least.
This year my income has gone from €75,000 to around €32,000 in total, this is a trade-off I decided to make, knowing that the work I’ve been doing and continue to do is important and necessary for better online social spaces. That is, I entered into working on the Fediverse knowing that I’d be taking a fairly significant pay-cut, and my numbers have all been around what my budget necessitates that I earn in order to be at a net neutral each month, rather than a net negative.
In order to have a better, more direct method for collecting money from supporters, with simpler business operations, I’ve rolled out a new Stripe powered website through which you can support my work: https://support.thisismissem.social
If you’d like to migrate from ko-fi to directly supporting me, feel free to either cancel and switch before your next billing cycle, or switch in the current month and drop me an email (see the support site’s impressum) and I can refund you via ko-fi.
This also brings back the ability to support with PayPal (though this has higher fees), as well as other payment methods. PayPal was briefly enabled on ko-fi but once again caused issues with book-keeping, so I’ve had to disable it on ko-fi (but it’s fine on direct support due to that processing through Stripe rather than directly through PayPal).
I can also now issue invoices and receipts for all transactions (with thanks to my friends at Neighbourhoodie Software for letting me use their company address), you can find them by going to “Manage Payments” in the top right, there you can also manage your recurring donations if you need to or want to change the amount that you support me.
The average amount that is donated to support my work is €20 per month, but I have donations in all sizes, ranging from €5 to €250, which are all greatly appreciated. I am however, still interested in finding a few Financial Sponsors who would have the added benefits of being listed as supporting my work.
As it’s the end of the year, I’d also be amiss to not discuss taxes (the German tax season is calendar year based), so, how much do I owe the tax office? Currently less than €500, based on current profit for the year. Yes, I pay taxes on all the “donations”. (though apparently I might be able to classify these all as “true grants” rather than “Sales of Services”, since there is not a direct exchange of services directly with the “customer”)
On top of this, I’m looking at approximately €1200 in additional payments to my health insurance provider to adjust for what my income actually was over the past 6 months — luckily I’ve this money stashed away — and hopefully in the future I’ll be able to correctly report a more stable income to them.
Another concern I have here is that my residence permit to remain in Germany renews in 2024. Whilst I’ve lived here for 8 years, I need to make sure that I’m earning enough to fulfill the requirements to remain in Germany, and unfortunately I’m not eligible for permanent residency at this point in time. That threshold is around €45,000 if I recall correctly.
There are a few things that have happened this month which have helped me greatly with being able to continue to do the work I’m doing, when things became really tough:
- I’ve had one generous supporter who took all of their donations (€100 / month) for 2024, and bundled them up into a single one-off payment. Whilst I usually say monthly is better than one-off donations, in this case, the one-off lump-sum donation really helped me out of a tight place.
- One kind instance operator decided to donate some of their excess in funding for the year to me, which was very welcome. They’ve asked not to be named, but I’m deeply thankful for their support. If you run an instance, and would like to support my work in a similar way, you can either do a one time donation or contact me for more options.
These all helped me make it through November, and make the future look much brighter.
Mental Health & Physical Health
At the start of November, and tail end of October, I unfortunately had a depressive episode, this was brought on by a number of factors, but the major one was the financial stress that I’ve been facing: uncertain income can really eat away at one’s mental health. At the same time, I was dealing with being out of therapy due to some scheduling and availability issues.
I’m now back working with a therapist, and I’ve also a good friend helping me manage some of the symptoms and triggers. So overall I’m doing better, but still being cautious. In the past I’ve written about mental health and dealing with it whilst working, as depression and anxiety are disorders I’ve grown to live with and manage for the majority of my life.
On a small note of physical health, I’ve also had a cold and been dealing with pain in my left shoulder from too much typing. This has been meaning I’ve not been working quite as much. Whilst I’m treating both, they have taken away from my productive time this month.
On top of all of this, I also had the displeasure of two misinformation and/or disinformation posts about me and my work. Let me be very clear: FIRES is not in anyway related to nor the same as FSEP, we both just happen to have the same sponsor, as they happen to be sponsoring various efforts attempting to advance the Fediverse and improve its trust & safety and moderation tooling.
Spreading misinformation or disinformation doesn’t create clarity in conversation, and to be on the receiving end of it is just not nice. It places a ridiculous amount of extra stress on people who are all working towards a better Fediverse. Even if our exact definitions of “better Fediverse” differ, we can all agree that we all want the Fediverse to succeed, ensuring safer happier social media for all, free from manipulation and ads, with harassment and hate speech mitigated and prevented as much as possible.
That said though, there are a few individuals who repeatedly participate in the spread misinformation or disinformation, trying to cause confusion and harm to those who are contributing to projects in the Fediverse and especially those working on building trust & safety. The primary fear seems to be that they may be moderated against, tend to distort facts and correlate the unrelated in an attempt to push this narrative that moderation is bad, and they should be able to act with impunity for their words or actions.
The great thing about the Fediverse is that every server can choose who to federate with and who not to, and in the future tools, that can hopefully be extended further to end users. That does mean that some instances may choose to defederate due to safety concerns, and to publish notification of such, should others wish to moderate similarly. Moderation is a hard task at the best of times, but with a lot of work (and time), we can hopefully build tools that better empower communities.
As people involved in the Fediverse, we really must do better with calling out misinformation, and speak up when it’s doing the rounds. Some of the stuff I’ve seen recently has been pure conjecture with language specifically design to trigger an emotive response, based on a wilful misinterpretation of information or cherry-pick of information to suit a certain narrative.
Most folks working on the Fediverse are very approachable & transparent, and can be approached to give clarification. However, it’s up to you to decide who you believe: the people working on the Fediverse, or the people posting specific narratives that play on fears or concerns.
Joining the IFTAS Advisory Board
Way back in June or May, I started to get involved with IFTAS, a newly formed non-profit aiming to tackle some aspects of trust and safety for independent federated social media. As of early December, I’ve publicly joined the advisory board of IFTAS, which is a paid part-time position.
Over the course of the last six months, I’ve helped start to figure out a proposal and request for comments process for IFTAS, helped guide conversations in their Matrix chat, advised on and helped build their CARIAD FediCheck tool, and I’m currently involved in their CSAM prevention or scanning efforts.
Thanks to IFTAS, I was also able to participate in a panel hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on trust & safety in federated social media, which will result in several papers being published.
Mastodon and Pixelfed Pull Requests
I’ve had some progress on some of my Mastodon pull requests, but due to health issues and being busy with other work, my attention hasn’t been fully dedicated to that work. Some selected work there is as follows:
- Started conversation around being able to filter out certain hashtags from your feed: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/27991
- Improved debugging tooling for folks working on the ruby codebase: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/27960
- A small cleanup of the VAPID Public Key, moving it to the correct API endpoint, which is the Instance metadata endpoint instead of the App registration endpoint: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28006
- Additionally work has been progressing on the Mastodon Streaming server, with pull requests to replace the logging module with something production grade well under way (there’s several pull requests)
On Pixelfed, I’ve been doing some code review, and also trying to do a fix to the docker setup after accidentally breaking it when I approved an erroneous pull request.
FIRES
Work on writing FIRES is also still underway, where I’ve ended up adding a reasonable amount more prose to the proposal, explaining the rationale behind certain design decisions, making the first half of the proposal less technical than the rest of it.
For instance, I’m documenting things like a “what are federation filters” and why I recommend that model over separate domain blocks vs domain allows; also some maybe unexpected ideas like “present a recommendation to your users” as in, “your moderators have recommended a server-wide block against instance.example, do you want to accept this moderation recommendation? Yes/No”, which could allow for users learning of potential instances that they don’t want to federate with, but which aren’t blocked from federating at server-level.
Unfortunately, I’m slowed here due to the aforementioned issue with my shoulder, where typing for long periods of time results in pain. Whilst I really wanted to publish it before end of year, I’m also aware that I have a lot of other work on-going so it’ll probably be early next year now.
I have also been fielding a few press inquiries about FIRES, from voices that reach and represent a diverse cross-section of the Fediverse, these inquiries take time to respond to, but I thank those that are approaching me for clarification prior to publishing articles about FIRES.
To Wrap Up 2023
With the holidays and this being delayed in publication by two weeks, this will be my last update for 2023. I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has supported me through financial donations (all 100+ of you).
I’ve had some fantastic conversations and worked on some really interesting things this year, and I know I’m only just getting started, and I hope you’ll all join me for the road ahead of us in 2024.
The coming year is looking bright, but busy, so stay tuned! Happy holidays and Happy New Years!
If you’d like to support my work, you can do so at: https://support.thisismissem.social
