Florence

Crowdfunding. It's something that we've been planning for a long time, wanting to get everything lined up just right. However, today we're announcing a soft launch of our crowdfunding to help support our working members in the new year. 

Thus far, we've created a Code of Conduct, had some ups and downs in activity, and are slowly working our way forward to where we want to start developing our fork of Mastodon. In our last update, we gave you a small overview of the roadmap, and unfortunately we've not made a lot of progress since then, as some of our members got very sick while others had a bit of a break. 

Looking forward to the new year, we are hoping to continue the work we've started 1.5 years ago (wow, time flies).

Crowdfunding

Initially, our intent was to wait and plan an ambitious crowdfunding campaign; the fear was that we wouldn't get any support unless the campaign was perfect, with everything set up in advance. However, we've ended up in a situation where a few of our key members have had to step away because they can't afford to work for free right now. We completely understand and support them in that decision, but it reminded us that we needed to start getting money in order to further support the project. 

We believe that a lot of you want to support this project based on its potential, so we can keep working and get there, and we wanted to give you that possibility today, so we are announcing a soft launch of our Open Collective. We have currently no stretch goals and no added tiers, hence — soft launch. 

What is Florence? 

This is a question that we keep being asked, and that we are asking ourselves. We have an outline, we know what the main goal is: to provide a Mastodon fork where people feel heard, where our users know that we're paying attention to what our community wants, a fork which takes anti-harassment and privacy features seriously. That we are willing to be a living organization that is open to learn from each other and grow together. We want to provide a space where you feel safe starting up a community for your friends, and we want to make it easy for you to do so. 

We re-started as Florence in February of 2019, with this blog post about Mastodon Not Sparking Joy, and have since baby-stepped our way forward, sometimes trying to take leaps that were somewhat too big in one go. A few of our members have moved, been busy with work or university; there's been a lot going on, but we've always tried to reconnect and keep moving forward.

Hopefully we can continue to do so with your support. Thank you being with us on this ride!