Seeking Donations
Donate now to Switter ❤
https://liberapay.com/assemblyfour/
We’ve finally opened up making donations to Switter! It’s taken longer than expected because we needed to get our ducks in a row. We’re hoping that donations should help offset the growing costs of maintaining and running Switter.
We are currently looking for donations to cover the recurring costs that keep Switter running as well as raising enough to continue expansion and improvements.
We’ve noticed that many people have questions around the sustainability of Switter and donations, so we’ve included a few of these below.
Why we need donations and our current costs
Setting up and maintaining a community of this size obviously comes with a number of costs attached:
- Infrastructure (servers, file storage, CDN, email, monitoring services etc.)
- Development (features, bug fixes, giving back to the Mastodon platform, etc)
- Business services (Email, support tooling etc.)
- Operational (Legal, admin etc.)
The main uncertainty around Switter is around legal, especially the interactions between US law and the rest of the world, so we are focusing on making sure we understand the legal interactions and implications of this endeavour so we can protect the platform and the community. We are working with both local and US-based lawyers to ensure Switter’s sustainability.
How we were paying for it previously
Before donations, Switter has been entirely funded by the three co-founders of Assembly Four: Eliza Sorensen, Lola Hunt and J. Due to the overwhelming response to the platform, Eliza and J have left their previous jobs and Lola has cut back on sex work to work on Switter full time.
What happens if you don’t get enough donations?
Ideally, we’ll be able to support Switter through the generosity of the community but we are investigating other avenues to ensure the longevity of Switter.
What we’re currently working on and what we will do with the money
On the agenda for the rest of this month and into May, we will be focusing on building a larger mod team, ensuring Switter is sustainable from a legal perspective in light of the Cloud Act and FOSTA/SESTA, and improving Switter listings and search to help more #switterdates happen!
Going forward, to ensure we keep up with the pace required to sustain the community, we need resources to address the following:
- Support — account, technical, responding to law enforcement
- Moderation — content, fake accounts, spam, user education
- Engineering resources — features, maintenance, on call
- Infrastructure — servers, security, regulatory compliance, monitoring, maintenance
- Media — press, public relations, blog
Shaping the community
We have had amazing support from the community and we love to hear feedback from you. We want Switter to be formed by the entire community. One thing we do hope everyone will keep in mind is that Switter, as it currently stands, is currently run by 6 people, Assembly Four and Switter mods.
While we also want to implement the amazing ideas which have been put forth to us, we have to be wise about what we spend our time on.
We will be maintaining a monthly blog on Medium to give you a review of the month past and our future plans for the follow month. You can find our blog here:
https://medium.com/assembly-four
Lastly, we want to say a huge thank-you to everyone who has supported Switter so far and allowed the community to grow to where it is.
Here’s to you Swithearts!
If you’d like to donate please visit:
https://liberapay.com/assemblyfour/
If you have any questions, please e-mail support@assemblyfour.com
