About the "donations are not coming in" issue...actually they are. And quite a bit for efforts centralized mostly around a relatively small platform like Mastodon.
Putting on the data scientist hat: https://gist.manganiello.tech/fabio/dd05601140544dc696c33caf39e9945c
We've got on average $4000-4500 donated every day to #GazaVerified accounts. $31.5k raised over the past 7 days.
If they were to be distributed in a perfectly fair way, then the average family will get $177/week. Which is usually sufficient to cover many needs.
But they aren't. And this is the root issue I outlined already a few months ago - but not much has changed since then.
There are about 10 campaigns that raise >$1000/week (and, despite that, those accounts keep asking for donations on a daily basis, basically taking away from a limited pool resources that should be distributed fairly), another 10 that raise >$500/week, and then a very very long tail.
Even though the average campaign would raise $177/week, the median line is only ~$50/week.
Of course those who are below that median line complain that donations are not coming in - they're all getting stuck at a few campaigns at the top.
I have made the campaigns dashboard and the campaigns bot to boost the most underfunded campaigns, but many keep donating on a more irrational basis, leaving many families without any support.
On the other hand, I also feel uncomfortable to tell donors how to allocate their money. I've been trying to make things fairer for a while, and also expose all the data on the funding, but if someone wants to donate only to a certain person or group of people they should be free to do so.
So rather than fighting against the current of irrational human nature perhaps it's best to embrace it. And perhaps smaller support groups rather than an everyone-mentions-everyone campaigns system would be better. Because as the number of accounts increases inequality isn't getting any better - it's actually getting worse. And if it starts to pass the message that those who mention the most are those who raise the most then this will degenerate into uncontrollable spam and we may lose a lot of sympathy from instance admins.
