@jonmsterling For the last year I've put the majority of my energy into trying to fund what could reasonably be called a FRO. On the whole I did not succeed yet, and every time I failed I've given up more and more moral boundaries. It's also explicitly short-term: first try to hire a postdoc or 2, and then worry about what happens after that
For infrastructure costs that are smaller than 1FTE salary level I'm currently fairly optimistic that crowdfunding could actually work, because that's how this very mastodon server works