 Over the past two years Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) has provided crucial support to independent, decentralised social media moderators, administrators, and community managers. Our mission has been to equip these individuals with the knowledge, resources, and services needed to create and nurture safe, civil, and inclusive online spaces. However, despite our best efforts to secure sustainable #funding, IFTAS is now facing a critical financial shortfall. 1/10. 9 comments
At this juncture we are committed to continue fundraising until February 28. If by then we have still failed to source funds, we will begin closing down some of our activities. Any formal announcement of our plans will happen on or after March 1, 2025. 3/10. Our founding plan was to source three years of external support from corporate and institutional funders while we built toward self-sustainability. The list of companies we would accept money from is shrinking, and the charitable funding landscape in general has proven to be harder to access than we had hoped. 4/10. Like many #NonProfit organisations operating in the civil society landscape, IFTAS has relied on grants, donations, and partnerships to sustain its work. However, shifts in funding priorities, economic uncertainties, and increased competition for limited resources have made securing financial support increasingly difficult. While our work remains as vital as ever, we have struggled to find long-term funding commitments that would allow us to continue operating at our current capacity. 5/10. We are not a research group, we don’t focus on any particular demographic or harm, we are a general purpose charity with routine bills to pay, and this is not the kind of activity most institutional funders want to support. We have met with dozens of foundations and civil society organisations. We have submitted grant applications and letters of enquiry. We have reached out to hundreds of companies and charities and others that operate in the Fediverse with accounts or their own servers. 6/10. For 2024 this outreach raised just short of $10,000, mostly from our community crowdfunding campaign, with about $400 a month in recurring donations. While we have two grant applications pending, both of them will require us to have matching funds to properly put those grant funds to work. Despite our conversations with companies and nonprofits over the past nine months, we have zero committed funding that we can use to properly sustain our services. 7/10. Our 2025/2026 budget plan with Content Classification Service (CCS) included is $1.2M of which we have $300,000 in grants applied for. A large portion of this budget is for the extremely complex legal and content review work that needs to happen to assure this activity’s legality and compliance. 8/10. If we close CCS we can survive with significantly less funding (but would forego the two grants as they are CSAM-specific), but will then be unable to respond to what our annual surveys consistently tell us is the highest need for Fediverse providers – detecting and reporting CSAM. 9/10. There is a possible outcome that includes a significantly reduced IFTAS providing core community services and little else, we will need to carefully examine our ongoing costs and determine what we may be able to support over a longer term. Read the full announcement: https://about.iftas.org/2025/02/06/funding-challenges-and-the-future-of-our-work/ 10/10. |
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Without immediate support, we will be forced to severely curtail our activities in the next 60 days. With our current commitments we will be unable to pay our bills in April.
Therefore we are preparing to scale back our activities and reduce our ability to advocate for better trust and safety standards across decentralised platforms.
2/10.