Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon's new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko
So... by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.
At a "non-profit" (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.
Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We're watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.
For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.
Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.
That's an abuse of non-profits for financial engineering. They're intended to work exactly like companies, except without a monetary profit for shareholders.
Source: Got plenty of blank stares when I tried to set up a non-profit, "you're not yet big enough to think about tax evasion", they'd keep telling me 😒
It's not a good ratio, but assuming they managed to fill the three developer positions they were intending to when this interview was given last year and no one has left since then, that's 5 full time employees to 5 board members. I can't find more up-to-date numbers on the employee count unfortunately.
This is the enshittification fast-track, it feels like.
How so?
Is the board paid? I thought it was a volunteer position, where you meet based on a certain cadence and vote on enterprise matters.
I'm also quite wary of corp/venture/capitalist influence on masto/fedi/décentralisation.
I would presume it's not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.
For the moment, they're working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it's hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.
Permanently Deleted
Were Nazis allowed to deliberately ‘run rampant’ on Twitter pre-Elon? That’s a hot take.
Musk’s buying Twitter had nothing to do with it being ‘monetised’ as far as I see. Musk just offered such a stupidly large amount that the board had to say ‘OK, sure.’
It's definitely true that Twitter consistently failed to raise the expected profit for stockholders, which is probably why they appreciated the wild overshot that Musk offered. I sort of appreciated that the company could stay so uncommercial for as long as it did, running only on hype.
Did Nazis use to "run rampant" on there before? Maybe not straight up, clear cut Nazis but there were some people who really dogwhistled in that direction going way back.
What do you mean by Mastodon selling out to Meta? Isn't Meta just building an ActivityPub based platform so we can talk to their users as far as I know. If they want to talk to us, then the onus is on Meta to stay compatible. If they aren't, then we just continue on as we have.
You're correct. ActivityPub is an open protocol and Meta, or more importantly anyone else, can use it however they want.
I view the bigger issue as Meta is hostile towards humanity's privacy and freedom, and Mastodon leadership view Meta joining the Fediverse as an unqualified win. Meanwhile, I don't think Meta is interested in ActivityPub as a protocol to make Instagram Threads more appealing, I think they're overall much more interested in what data the can gain, and sell, analyzing the interactions between their own user pool and the rest of the fediverse that user pool interacts with.
Well, fuck. It was fun while it lasted.
There are any number of Mastodon forks out there. Misskey and its forks are really good. Pleroma and Akkoma are good, and so is Friendica.
Mastodon has always been an exercise in attention and influence seeking for Gargon. The rest of us don't need him or it. It's just a trademark.
This isn't both concerning and also totally in line with every move Gargon's made along the way. Nope nope nope!
I don't necessarily agree that this is concerning. I never thought of gargron of making good moves either though.
I would like to do more research on alternative non-profit governance structures. In my experience, non-profit boards seem to be just another mechanism by which the wealthy control decision-making in society. However, I don’t know what kind of structure would be better.
Workers co-op
So the employees who are employed by donations, or all contributors? Not trying to throw a wrench in your suggestion, just wondering what this would look like for masto
I think this can be both a benefit and a risk, since Mastodon is still what it is and won't change because of a board. Biz could provide Eugen a lot of insight, but by the same risk, Eugen may want out and turn Masto profitable.
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Mastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained increased attention following the Twitter acquisition as users sought alternatives to X’s would-be “everything app” that felt more like the old Twitter of days past.
As part of the “fediverse” — or the open social web made up of interconnected servers communicating over the ActivityPub protocol — Mastodon benefits users who no longer want to be locked into a centralized social network that can be bought and sold to new billionaire owners, like Musk.
“…we have received a notice from the same tax office that our non-profit status has been withdrawn,” wrote Rochko on the Mastodon blog.
Mastodon’s day-to-day operations were unaffected by this change, as most of its income comes from the crowdfunding platform Patreon.
It also received donations from Jeff Atwood and Mozilla at $100,000 apiece, which allowed the company to hire a third full-time developer this year.
In addition to Biz Stone, other board members include Esra’a Al Shafei, a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org; Karien Bezuidenhout, an advocate for openness and experienced board member across sustainable social enterprise; Amir Ghavi, a partner at law firm Fried Frank, where he’s the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice; and Felix Hlatky, the chief financial officer of Mastodon since 2020, who originally incorporated the project as a nonprofit LLC in Germany and helped it raise additional funds.
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