So how does Mastodon pay its engineers? Mostly...it doesn't. Eugen and Claire are the only paid devs on Mastodon. Everyone else is making updates *for free*, as a hobby, on the side, after their day job. People are building CalcKey for free. People are building just about every fediverse product for free, as part of the open source community. It was particularly amusing when Elon said he wanted to open source the algorithm-- Jack Dorsey saying he wanted to create an open source protocol-- Nearly all of the Fediverse is open source. The algorithms are already open source. The protocol is a W3C standard (ActivityPub) just like HTML. The future these dopes have been trying to build already exists. There's just no money or power in it for them, so they have no interest and pretend it doesn't exist.