Personalizing Systemic Change + An AMA with the Project Mushroom Team: Project Mushroom's Latest
Joshua P. Hill on Personalizing Systemic Change
"It’s not one or the other, it’s not the personal or the systemic, it’s the personal oriented towards the systemic, and empowered to be a part of the collective force to change the world at scale," writes spore.social member Joshua B. Hill in a recent post:
In "Moving from 'The Personal is Political' to Systemic Change," Joshua explains the tendency that we have to view solutions in either personal or systemic terms, and discusses the need to find a healthy middle ground, especially when faced with a problem of the scale of the climate crisis. You can find the article in Joshua's newsletter New Means, which you can subscribe to on Substack:
Joshua P. Hill
Ask-me-anything with the Project Mushroom Team
On August 6, Project Mushroom hosted a virtual Ask-me-Anything (AMA) to discuss the recent challenges we've been facing, and our plans for moving forward. Here's a summary of some of the main topics that were discussed during the AMA:
- Our Mastodon server for spore.social experienced an outage between August 1-3. This was due to a routine server maintenance task that wasn't completed, and which none of our active team members had the expertise to resolve quickly. Recognizing our need to have a professional and reliable hosting solution going forward, we've now migrated projectmushroom.social and spore.social sites to be hosted by the fine folks at toot.io, who have been providing hosting for decentralized social networks for the past 13 years. Thanks for bearing with us through this process.
- Meg Ruttan Walker addressed the recent data breach in which Project Mushroom subscribers were signed up for the Currently newsletter without consent. The Currently newsletter is not the same as the Project Mushroom newsletter, and the project is no longer affiliated with Currently. We received none of the Kickstarter funding, and Project Mushroom is being supported financially only through paid newsletter subscriptions.
- We're actively recruiting volunteers who would be interested in helping to write and edit the Project Mushroom newsletter, which is a great way to increase your involvement in the project and meet some other members of the team. The time commitment is roughly 2-3 hours per newsletter, and we're aiming to have enough volunteers that we can rotate newsletters among different team members. You'll be supported by team members who will show you how to use Ghost, the platform we use to write newsletters, and who can help generate ideas for newsletter content. If you are interested, DM Craig Sloss on spore.social, @CraigSloss@spore.social.
- We've committed to providing transparency into how financial contributions to Project Mushroom are being used to support the project, and have set up a page to track revenue and expenses incurred following the separation from Currently, our former parent company. Our primary expense is the server running the spore.social and projectmushroom.social servers, with smaller expenses for the server hosting the newsletter and the service for sending bulk e-mails.
- Our current newsletter fees are sufficient to pay our expenses, but we would like to be able to start paying stipends to our moderators. We've added information to the About pages on spore.social and projectmushroom.social explaining how to support the project financially, such as subscribing to the newsletter or making a one-time contribution.
How to get involved in Project Mushroom:
Project Mushroom is a Mastodon-based social network focused on climate and social justice. If you're not in the space yet, you can click here for an in-depth guide on how to get started on either our projectmushroom.social or spore.social servers.
Project Mushroom recently became independent of its former parent company, Currently Weather Service, and is now fully led by the community. Paid subscriptions to this newsletter now go 100% to funding Project Mushroom expenses, which are primarily server costs. We've recently added the option to make a one-time contribution as well. If you have the means, please consider joining the 190 other supporters who help us keep the lights on!