That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.
Why aren’t admins considered part of the community? When it comes to the mastodon developers, they’re making 30,000 USD a month. I think they’re fine.
That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.
It’s not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.
Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.
I don’t mean to imply that Mastodon devs are rolling around in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck, but they are getting funded.