Regardless of how you feel about it, it's still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it's not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it's substantial.

I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.

The goal is not only to support the Harris campaign but also to raise the visibility of Mastodon including possibly an official Harris for President presence there. I believe the fundraiser has already convinced ACTBlue to include a share on Mastodon link.

It's incredible how little people spend on free software :(

I used to have a dream of developing free software and launched a couple of big projects (thousands of github stars, millions of downloads) and no one fucking pays for anything no matter how easy you make it and how critical your software is to them.

To give some perspective - some Youtubers earn same amount annually from Patreon than both Gnome and KDE yearly budgets combined (which is ~3M usd).

I realized that the only way to fund something is to make people pay either through early releases, insider programs or something that forces the credit card form on them. That's the only way.