We have an e-mail address that people can use to contact us. That is used for communication with new people until they come to their first event where they can join the Signal group.

Creating a new group every year sounds like something that might work, but it might also lead to some confusion. For example, if you try to find something someone wrote a while back. I'll think about it. Thanks for the idea.

To prevent bots and too many inactive accounts, we only add people to our local group's Signal chat that we have met in person or that someone already knows. Also, remember that you can reset the invite link. This can help when you get overrun by bots. 

I think it makes sense to make it not too easy for people to get access to the group chat so that it feels private and personal, so people are less shy about writing there. 

We still need a good way of handling the problem of inactive accounts in the Signal group. If a person turned up only once three years ago, maybe they no longer need to be in the group. But what is a good way of having an overview, which accounts can be removed and which can't? Especially one that has as little overhead as possible. Does any of you have any Ideas about that? How do you handle this?

We currently have about 90 accounts in our group chat and maybe 20 or so people that actually write stuff in there and that come to events. I'd like to bring these two numbers closer together, so new people don't think they write to 90 people when something like 70 of them will probably never read it.

Nice, thanks for updating your post with the additional data. 

But I think there is an error in the new graph. The bars for Founders Pledge are in the color of Longview Philanthropy and the bars for Longview Philanthropy seem to be missing.

(edit: no longer true, post has been updated to fix this)

There is also this post by Luke Moore and Sjir Hoeijmakers. They only compare 2023 and 2024, but they have also included funding data for Founders Pledge, Logview Philantropy, Macroscopic Ventures and a lot of smaller funders/grantmakers/evaluators/fundraisers. And they calculated that when including all of those, funding has actually increased. Mainly because of more funding through Founders Pledge and Navigation Fund.

A follow-up of his post with newer number is now available: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds

Thanks for the post. I am also currently sending out applications and encouraging messages like this are highly appreciated right now. 

I found that linked post from Scott Alexander quite interesting, but it seems like the numbers are no longer up to date. The paper he cites is from 2003. I think the political landscape has changed quite a bit since then. If I had to guess, I'd say political donations have become larger. It would be interesting to see more recent figures and if these are still small for their impact.

This is just an intuition of mine, and not thoroughly researched, but it seems to me that if we consider all sentient beings, there are many possible futures in which the average well-being would be below neutral, and some of them, especially for non-human animals, would be quite easily preventable. This leads me to believe that marginal resources are currently better invested in preventing future suffering than in reducing the risk of extinction.

Just a minor correction: The author of "The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better." is Max Roser, not Mark Roser.