[ Reposting this comment to make sure it appears publicly ]

Evan, first of all, in case you didn't see my later comment after my post, I want to link to it here. My main point there is that we need to start thinking about pump.io as a community-oriented volunteer project now, and that's a good thing. Everything will take longer, but such projects have a long history of producing much better, longer-lasting results that VC-funded stuff.

I don't have a lot to give, but I'd happily give $5 toward a Kickstarter. But, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about, I suggest you team up with the FreedomBox people and see if they have money left.

I've been critical of FreedomBox because it took on too much. It tried to make a home server for all network services everyone could imagine where 'hard reboot' was the only sysadmin task. But, pump.io actually seeks to be what the FreedomBox said it would be on the social networking part, so you should at least talk with them about helping you with fundraising.

Related to that, I encourage pump.io to apply to be a member project of Conservancy. (Of cousre, as a member of our Evaluation Committee, you'd have to recuse yourself of course from discussion about joining post-applying.) That would bring to bear the (albeit) meager resources of Conservancy to help with your fundraising and other efforts. We may be even able to get you gratis VPS's for pump.io if you don't have them already

As you know from your work on the Eval Committee, no one eval committee member can assure acceptance of an application, but I would strongly support your application and I expect other eval members would to. The downsite for you is it would mean E14N letting go of the project, which may be just too painful to consider after all the work you put into.

Evan, thnk you again for all you'e done: since we started autonomo.us, I truly think you are the only one who did more than "just talk" about what freedom for network services should be. You have worked for almost a decade now non-stop to make it happen. While we don't have a solution, you put a lot of great code out there and our community learned a lot. True federated social networking is one of the hardest technical problems our community has ever tried to solve, so any progress forward is impressive.

Thank you, Evan, for all you have done. You are a true hero of software freedom. (And I'll be nominating you for the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, BTW, and I hope others will too. :)