Hello everyone! I'm Buster Neece, the creator and lead developer for the AzuraCast web radio management suite.

First of all, a huge thank-you to everyone who supports AzuraCast on any platform, whether it's here or GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Ko-fi or elsewhere. I depend on your support to survive, so your support makes a significant and direct impact on my quality of life.

Now, a word about this update: on November 8, I got an e-mail from our fiscal sponsor, the Open Collective Foundation, with a subject "Action req'd" and a text saying the org "invites (read: requires 🙃)" me to submit an annual update by December 21. I misread "req'd" as "requested" and didn't understand what "🙃" meant in an official e-mail, so I ignored this message as I was quite busy. The next e-mail I got from them was today, telling me in much clearer terms that my required update was due...today. They sent me this e-mail with zero days notice, and it was the first one they had sent that clearly said it was required. I won't lie, this pisses me off a little. So, before I get into what we've done this year, let me talk about one of our strongest challenges we've faced this year: OpenCollective itself.

Update: Okay, so clearly some wires got crossed here, but it only further illustrates what an absolute cluster OpenCollective's setup is. AzuraCast *isn't* sponsored by Open Collective Foundation, or OCF, it's sponsored by the very similarly-named Open Source Collective, or OSC. These are both fiscal hosts you can use on OpenCollective. Why OCF, who isn't my fiscal sponsor, sent me first a joking e-mail voluntelling me to submit an annual report, then a second one the day it was due saying it was required all along, is beyond me. However, to be clear, this isn't a requirement imposed upon us by OSC, who *is* our sponsor. So it's not their fault, but something still went wrong, and everything I say here about OpenCollective as a project is still 100% valid in my eyes.

OpenCollective is already unlike any other platform my project uses to sustain itself in that it involves a level of bureaucracy that, while I'm sure it's helpful for larger organizations, is 100% out of place in single-maintainer organizations. Basically, if I want to get the donations you send in, I have to submit an "invoice" requesting that I kindly be paid my own money by myself. Not only does this introduce a multi-day delay between donations arriving here and eventually being deposited into my bank account, but the goalposts on what this request has to include are ever-changing and seem to depend on who you get to review your transaction; I've had some get sent back to me because I needed to put a "date of service" on the invoice (the date is always "the whole time since the last invoice", but bureaucracy dictates that I say that explicitly), and some sent back to me because I wasn't clear enough on what I specifically did for the project (the answer to which is, almost always, "everything").

Combine that with the incredibly unpredictable payout times, involving what are sometimes weeks of delays during which rent and groceries become a dangerous uncertainty for me, and the bizarre and poorly-explained bureaucratic hurdles I have to go through (see: this report), and OpenCollective is easily the most frustrating and painful experience I have in trying to sustain myself as a free and open-source software dev. This is not how Patreon, Ko-fi, etc. conduct themselves, and if you're interested in making sure that I get access to your donation as quickly and reliably as possible, I'd encourage you to use those services instead.

Anyway, onto some good news!

2023 was an immensely productive year for AzuraCast. Here are just a few of the things we got done, alongside countless little tweaks, bug fixes and other improvements:

Looking forward, we have a ton of great feature ideas that have been submitted to us via https://features.azuracast.com/ and many of them are on our big to-do list. How fast I'm able to get around to those things depends heavily on my physical and mental health, so I don't want to give any estimates on things, but I can confidently say that AzuraCast continues to be a huge priority of mine and to occupy a great deal of my time and energy, and I have every intention of continuing to maintain it into 2024 and beyond.

Regardless of your plans this holiday and new year season, I wish you good health and happy times, whatever form that may come in for you. While I know my role in most people's lives is quite small, I know how much joy there is in the music and community that internet radio can bring, and I hope my work has made your life just a little brighter this year.