Chris Wood (@chriswood.mastodon.design.ap.brid.gy)

Funding Challenges and the Future of Our Work 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. 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. 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. <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Funding Challenge</h2> 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. Like many non-profit 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. 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. 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. Our 2025/2026 budget plan with <a href="https://about.iftas.org/activities/moderation-as-a-service/content-classification-service/">Content Classification Service</a> (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. 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. 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. <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What This Means for IFTAS and the Communities We Support</h2> If we cannot secure immediate funding, IFTAS will need to: <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Halt new activities and policy guidance: Our ability to analyse emerging threats, develop best practices, and publish guidance for community moderators will be significantly reduced. This includes our work to help manage compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act.</li> <li>Suspend CCS: CCS and its CSAM detection and reporting service online is the most expensive project we operate, and will likely close between March 15 and March 30. The core technology requirements to simply operate the service exceed $60,000 per year, and that doesn’t include the legal advisory and content review support we need to bring this service to the Fediverse in a broader fashion.</li> <li>Reduce advocacy efforts: IFTAS has been a voice for decentralised communities in broader trust and safety discussions. Without funding, our participation in these critical conversations will diminish.</li> <li>Rethink our scope: Significantly reduce our fundraising goals to support and sustain a much smaller portfolio of activities.</li> </ul> These cuts will leave many independent communities without the resources they need to handle complex trust and safety challenges. It will also reduce the visibility of decentralised networks in discussions about the future of online safety, making it harder to ensure that their needs are considered in policy decisions. For the time being we anticipate <a href="https://about.iftas.org/activities/moderation-as-a-service/fedicheck/">FediCheck</a> and <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/05/29/iftas-connect-a-community-for-fediverse-moderators/">IFTAS Connect</a> staying online for at least the next several months. Our hope is to prepare FediCheck to be open-sourced so the tool can be used independently, and to find a way to sustain the Connect community for as long as possible. We will never share or in any way disclose the personal data and conversations that we host, so either we keep it online or it will be gracefully shut down with plenty of time to help find a new home for the community. <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How You Can Help</h2> Spread the word: Raising awareness about our funding challenges can help us connect with potential funders, partners, and supporters. Share our <a href="https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/2024-2025-IFTAS-Overview.pdf">fundraising overview</a>. We know most funders cannot move quickly, so for now, we are accepting pledges. Pledge a donation: If you or your organisation can contribute financially, let us know. We are not accepting donations at this time, but we will take your pledges to see if we can reach our funding goals. We need pledges by February 28 so we can make an informed decision about our next steps. <a href="https://about.iftas.org/contact/">Contact us</a>. Connect us with potential funders: If you know of philanthropic organisations or individuals interested in trust and safety for decentralised communities, we would love to connect. If you know anyone going to RightsCon who might be a good connection, tell us. Advocate for trust and safety funding: The broader trust and safety field needs more sustainable funding mechanisms. By advocating for increased support for this work, we can help ensure that independent communities are not left behind. Vote with your feet: Use social networks that are well-moderated and bring you the safety you need online. Support that service financially if you can. Say “thank you” to your moderators. <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Road Ahead</h2> (a note from IFTAS Director Jaz King) I believe there is no social network that has any sustaining, meaningful value outside of the trust and safety it brings to the table. There are hundreds of apps and platforms, multiple protocols. Our society is extremely willing to fund the creation of yet more apps and platforms, repeating the cycle of build something new, attract people, wait until they find out it’s an unmanaged mess, watch them leave, build something new – but funding the trust and safety that provides much, if not most of the value is a tough nut to crack. I started IFTAS with the idea that we can break this cycle and help identify and share the collective wisdom of what works and what doesn’t work so that apps and platforms can benefit from best practice, build a healthy and safe network, and then have IFTAS pay for the bits independent operators can’t afford themselves. Over the past 18 months IFTAS has raised over $400,000 which has supported Fediverse moderators and administrators with our projects, our advocacy, our services, direct support to Fediverse moderators and developers, and more. In case it needs to be said, I’ve never been paid by IFTAS (or anyone or anything else since 2022), my wife works and it’s her support that has allowed me to take on this work full-time. Trust and safety sounds boring, often is boring – except for when it’s traumatic – and is not something that I’ve been able to convince anyone to pay for in any meaningful way. Everyone I speak to thinks the work is vital, that our achievements to date are meaningful, but is “not aligned with our current funding goals”. We’re down, but not out. The above is my signal to all who use our services that we are reaching the end of the road, but we’re not quite there yet. Stay tuned for March 1 or so to hear what I think we can continue to do to support our community. I have to put this notice out now so that people who rely on our services can begin to plan for alternative support. Given the tilt we are seeing in the large corporations that operate the biggest networks, I believe it has never been more important to sustain the open social web. I commit to working with any and all other groups in the space who are able to continue building safety into our shared spaces. I will do everything I can to sustain the community we’ve built for as long as I can. I am working non-stop through end of February to see what can be done, and come March I’ll announce where we are at and what we think we can do going forward. It’s been a privilege to work with so many dedicated teams and individuals in this space, and I hope to continue contributing in any way I can regardless of the outcome for IFTAS. <div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-icon-text sd-sharing"><h3 class="sd-title">Share this:</h3><div class="sd-content"><ul><li class="share-email"><a class="share-email sd-button share-icon" data-email-share-error-text="If you're having problems sharing via email, you might not have email set up for your browser. 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