this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Mastodon announces transition to non-profit structure | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 177 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I'd encourage people to read the article, because it's pretty no-nonsense and has some other interesting details and background information. It's not very long, either!

But here's the important part that the headline speaks of:

Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

It also differentiates it from Bluesky. It was just Twitter's endeavor to spearhead decentralization, just like Threads. Jay Graber has Bluesky's users by the balls and at their whims just like Musk has Twitter. Anything proprietary and for profit will always eventually enshittify. Threads was born already enshittified and Bluesky is on the early part of the curve.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago

Nothing of substance to add, but for the record Jay Graber is a woman

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It isn’t proprietary though. You can run your own instance. Not decentralised atm but nothing indicating they aren’t pushing towards that.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It is proprietary, only the Authenticated Transfer protocol is open. Thus far saying it is decentralized is a controversial topic, depends on the definition of dencentralization. A regular user can only hope to host a Personal Data Server, without any real or consequential power over the network, though. Relays are not practical to be hosted by anyone but huge companies. And even then, the content and data is still under absolute power of Bluesky.

For example, if a Mastodon server decides to censor something and you don't agree with said decision, you can change servers and still access the content and participate on the Activity Pub stream. But, if BlueSky decides to censor you or someone else, you are out of luck. Even if you host you own server, the canonical repository of the network activity is under absolute power of BlueSky.

You could host your own AT network, but it is not clear how or even if it will be able to interact with other AT networks or the canonical BlueSky network.

Here's some sources:

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

https://next.ink/158967/bluesky-est-il-decentralise/

https://tormentnexus.substack.com/p/is-bluesky-really-decentralized-its

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

imo bsky is not 100% of what we want, but it has roads out of their system… its not decentralised exactly, but you can build bridges and that’s super important

the main reason people stay with facebook, twitter, reddit, etc is what’s called the “network effect”. for social media, it’s hyper important to get people onto the platform, otherwise it’s not social (reddit and lemmy a bit different: you still need a self-sustaining amount of people, but the more you get to the “people you know” platforms, the more you need as close to everyone you can get to keep people there)

now, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc have no functionality to allow people off-platform to contact people on-platform (and visa versa), so if you leave the platform you loose all those connections - the first people to move have a terrible experience because the platform is pretty much useless (there’s no social in the social media)

bsky at least changes that part so now we can bridge: bsky users can interact with mastodon users, which means that in the future it’ll be much easier for people to make the choice to leave, if they choose to: they don’t have to give up the creators they follow, or family and friends… there might be a slightly degraded experience, but i’d argue that’s pretty negligible

heck, i’d even prefer to trade twitter for threads at this point: imo facebook as a whole company is worse that twitter, but threads at least allows that off-ramp

if facebook itself were federated, who knows maybe one of these days i could convince my parents to move to friendica

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Relay only costs a few hundred to run, regular people are already doing this. Also have Jetstream as a lightweight alternative.

Barrier is running your own AppView, but people working on that:

https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q

The lack of decentralisation atm is not inherent and reflects the early growth stage. If they started to act like wanks there’d be a greater push to fork and build up parallel instances. Last I checked they were still working on improving the scalability of the protocol before building it out.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

@TheGrandNagus

@fne8w2ah @technology
The important thing here is this avoids what happened with (and sorry i have to mention this ) #wordpress where one guy personally ran the org that guided the development of the software and then created dependencies on a central site he personally owns to control updates and access to plugins
Ownership of #trademark terms are important and open structures for things like.joinmastodon.org is as well

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago

In the past few months, the ownership of open-source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.

The steps taken linking Mastodon > Fediverse > Wordpress > Matt Mullenweg makes sense and is the kind of publicity/damage control the platform needs to get ahead of.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

The Fediverse is a great idea, but tbh there’s a lot about the current generation of apps that is centralised in other ways that will doubtless compromise them later. As we can see from how even instance mods can behave, any concentration of power at all can and will lead to fief building. The aim should be to allow the network paradigm to have enough plurality and redundancy to outlive such politicking.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago

This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.

could this be cause for concern down the line? i mean this as a genuine question. i don’t really know how these things work. my understanding is some weird non-profit and profit mixture is what led to problems at openAI. but that said, i also know that the people at the company make a difference, and sam altman is very likely much worse than the mastodon CEO. anyways, it would be nice to know more about this relationship between the profit and non profit side of things.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Iirc, Mozilla has a similar structure and it causes some problems with donations