Hello @GirardR1006 and welcome to our Forum! 🐋
At first, thank you very much for raising this topic. I think the Funkwhale Collective should be as transparent as possible, especially when it comes to our finances. We are fully funded by donations these days and we should not take any risk to reduce the trust in the Collective. So its important people care for our handling of the finances.
That being said - the current situation is not ideal. You mentioned our opencollective page, and we collect a lot of donations there. But we don't really use opencollective the way its intended: The Funkwhale Collective is the financial host for the Funkwhale project and all donations are payed off to our bank account. So there is basically no expense tracking on the opencollective profile, I think it might be a good idea to add a note there to avoid confusion in the future.
Furthermore we have several additional sources of income: Member fees and bank transfers. Those are also not tracked on the profile.
In the past the financial report was published on our website: https://funkwhale.audio/de/support-us (scroll down). Because of the project handover in the last year and a lot of required bureaucracy the new Team just gained access to the bank account in December. The plan is to update the report published on the website, but this takes some time since we need to collect all the information and sum them up.
Nonetheless you are right - The collective owns about 4000€ and your analysis that this is too less to hire someone and too much to let it decay on the bank account holds totally true. Please note, that additionally we have a Funding by NLNet, which is not used right now because we lack people who want to work on those features. This means we probably don't even lack the ability to hire someone, but we also don't have anyone who is interested to do payed work right now.
All this is probably a matter of the right communication: We need to communicate that there is the funding, search for people doing work, advertise the donations, organize crowdfunding... You name it. All this would be required to target your long term goal to have a payed team working on Funkwhale. But the sad truth is: Nobody in the team has the time to do it without reducing the amount of work which is spend on the code base, user support, documentation, collective organization, build the roadmap, writing blogposts, doing social media communication... And speaking for me - I am not an expert in finances or communication and marketing, which might be a barrier to.
So, to sum it up: We are currently trying to catch up with maintaining our finances, we can discuss how to spend the money we have, but in order to do big steps, we need people who are willing to take tasks and responsibilities to make this work.