I think without some kind of "incorporation" (or whatever the tech/FOSS equivalent of that is), most of these kinds of thing will be vulnerable to issues with the owner's payment methods failing. Even with donation options available it's almost always still being used to pay to the server owner in parallel to them paying server / domain costs out of pocket (and then reimbursing themselves with the donations)
That said, I have to assume there's some way to set up some kind of automated payment option where community donations actually fill a fund that is used to pay costs directly in case the maintainer drops off the face of the earth.
It mostly depends on the legal framework of each countries.
I know in Europe a lot of FOSS non-profits are registered as such, with legal status, even sometimes tax deduction for donations.
I guess that will come in the coming months for some.
Thank you, the word "non-profit" was completely eluding my brain while writing that.
Yeah I hope a lot of the larger or more serious instances will look into that going forward, very curious to see what the landscape of all this looks like in a few months.
If Mastodon can be any indication for the future, I've seen a lot of European non-profits launch their own Mastodon instances.
I think without some kind of "incorporation" (or whatever the tech/FOSS equivalent of that is), most of these kinds of thing will be vulnerable to issues with the owner's payment methods failing. Even with donation options available it's almost always still being used to pay to the server owner in parallel to them paying server / domain costs out of pocket (and then reimbursing themselves with the donations)
That said, I have to assume there's some way to set up some kind of automated payment option where community donations actually fill a fund that is used to pay costs directly in case the maintainer drops off the face of the earth.
It mostly depends on the legal framework of each countries. I know in Europe a lot of FOSS non-profits are registered as such, with legal status, even sometimes tax deduction for donations.
I guess that will come in the coming months for some.
Thank you, the word "non-profit" was completely eluding my brain while writing that.
Yeah I hope a lot of the larger or more serious instances will look into that going forward, very curious to see what the landscape of all this looks like in a few months.
If Mastodon can be any indication for the future, I've seen a lot of European non-profits launch their own Mastodon instances.