Funding a non-profit organization is hard to begin with, but the challenges feel that much bigger in a niche space such as decentralized social networking. IFTAS, the Fediverse’s standout Trust & Safety organization, put out an update earlier this month concerning their 2025 budget, and the struggle to keep the lights on,

…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.

Jaz-Michael King, IFTAS Founder

The post goes on to highlight the organization’s projected budget of 1.2 million US dollars, $300,000 of which could be covered by grant applications, provided those grants get approved. With a significant financial shortfall, IFTAS may be forced to shut down services and rethink the scope of what their organization can provide.

What does IFTAS do?

In addition to providing a social space and playbooks for moderators across a growing amount of Fediverse platforms, IFTAS also provides core infrastructure projects to make lives easier for admins and end users alike.

Two of their biggest services so far include FediCheck, a mechanism for synchronizing curated blocklists for instance admins, and CCS, a content classification service designed to detect and report on CSAM across the network. Both services are relatively complex pieces of software, expensive to run, and require a dedicated team with expertise to operate.

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.

Jaz-Michael King, IFTAS Founder

Why is this important?

When it comes to decentralized social spaces, there just isn’t an effort quite like IFTAS. It’s a huge institutional effort to take on a difficult, ugly, and seemingly intractable program: making the Social Web safer for communities within it.

While there are a few worthy independent efforts for moderation tooling, such as db0’s fantastic FediSeer project, there really aren’t any initiatives operating at the scale that IFTAS does.

How You Can Help

The non-profit’s announcement ends on a somewhat hopeful note, but there’s no sugar-coating things: the organizationd desperately needs funds to continue developing and providing services for the network. IFTAS highlights a few specific things related to fundraising that would really help:

• Share the organization’s fundraising overview with people who might be interested in supporting it.
• Pledge a donation to IFTAS. Small individual donations can make a huge difference!
• Help connect IFTAS with philanthropic organizations that can support them. Non-Profit foundations and private companies can provide a lot of institutional support, part of the challenge is knowing where to look.
• Advocate for funding Trust & Safety efforts in addition to IFTAS.
• Support platforms and instances that use IFTAS services, to help heighten their visibility and social impact.

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