About Us

The whole point of Fosstodon is to be a community of like-minded people who enjoy Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). Running a social network can be expensive, so we accept donations in various forms.

From the very start, we committed to donating any extra money we have available to other open source project. This page will tell you a little more about what that process looks like - we also have a break down of how we use the funding at the bottom of this page.

At Fosstodon, we want to be as transparent as possible when it comes to the support we receive from our members. You guys support us every single day, so we want to let you know where your hard earned money is going.

How we assign funds

When you make a donation, either by Patreon or PayPal, it eventually ends up in our PayPal account. With this funding we do a couple of things:

1. We keep a 6 month float of running costs; so we know we have funding in place should we need extra cash for things like an unexpected server upgrade.
2. Anything over and above our running costs is accumulated in to donations to open source projects that our Patrons get to choose. We tend to save these funds up so we can make meaningful donations – usually a minimum of $100/donation.

Project donations process

Once we have enough funds saved up to make a donation to a project, we will create a Patron-only post on our Patreon page, which include details on how you can recommend a project for donation.

Once we have some recommendations from our Patrons, the team will create a short list. Once the short list is created, we will create a survey so all of our members can vote on which project should get the donation.

Again, this will stay open for a week and the project with the most votes at the end will get the donation.

We will then post details of any donations made to this page.

Current funding

The details below are accurate as of 17th January 2023.

Donations we have made

Total donations made: $1,750