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Huge kudos to @Gargron and friends here:
"Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual."
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/
People love to shit on Eugen, but he coulda sold this place to VCs many times over. He hasn't. He's took a financial hit working on here, for sure.
Mastodon is one of the only orgs I know where every full time payroll staff member (only 3 for 2024) earns more than the CEO.
https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%202023.pdf
People often ask me how they can donate to the cyberplace.social server. They can't, I can afford it.
Please donate to Mastodon centrally instead if you can afford it - the donor base is down about 30% year-on-year https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors
@GossiTheDog @Gargron The devil is in the details here. OpenAI is a nonprofit as well. Non profit is a tax designation. The corporate charter determines how the nonprofit is run, for the public benefit or the directors' benefit.
@profdc9 @GossiTheDog @Gargron Sure. But context matters.
OpenAI is backed by venture capital to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The "nonprofit" label was always a deception.*
*) except for the fact that OpenAI is very far from being profitabel, natch.
@slothrop @GossiTheDog @Gargron If Mastodon achieves it's goal of being a widespread social media platform, the billionaires will come for it with their lawyers. And if the corporate structure allows for it, they will get it. So it is definitely worthwhile to carefully structure a non profit so that it's purpose is very clear and the structure does not allow this purpose to be subverted.
@profdc9 @slothrop @GossiTheDog @Gargron
This sounds great. Is that what's happening?
@profdc9 @GossiTheDog OpenAI has not been a non-profit for the past six years.
@profdc9 OpenAI is also racing to lose that status though
@profdc9 @GossiTheDog OpenAI is not a non-profit anymore, afaik.
@GossiTheDog I pay for my personal vps, and donate to mastodon via patreon as well.
@GossiTheDog that's nice, for sure. But I wonder why you need a "CEO" if the team is 4 people, tbh. Workplaces don't need to cosplay a big cooperation.
@jollysea @GossiTheDog he is also a full time dev. Ceo means he takes executive decisions
@guites @GossiTheDog there are other models of governance far more suited for small teams than "one person takes executive decisions"
Pappas (he/him) @GossiTheDog I didn't know dopatwo made the illustrations. That's a great choice! I love his work!
@GossiTheDog truly inspiring but this was 2023 I believe.
@GossiTheDog that's pretty common for businesses with that little employees.
Few years ago a statistic got headlines that half of the small companies in Amsterdam payed the employee better than the employer.
@GossiTheDog @Gargron Hopefully this will prevent any sort of photomatt moment
@GossiTheDog Yes, much respect to @Gargron here. It takes a special sort of person to found and build something, and then, at a certain point, step back and hand it over to others. Many founders never manage this, and certainly not gracefully.*
I'm also not jealous at all of Eugen's task of sorting through non-profit rules in different EU countries. I've done that before. It wasn't fun.
*) not thinking of anyone in particular here, no, not at all
BTW, I don't understand what is the legal status for now : if Mastodon is legally a US organization, it's subject to FISA so could be forced to add a backdoor to the code and do it under gag order ?
What is done to address that ?
@lienrag @slothrop @GossiTheDog @Gargron For one thing, the code is on Github, so it is open to inspection and is versioned. If you were concerned that today's version has a backdoor, you could download yesterday's and run it. This was true before the nonprofit transition.
More relevant though, everything on Mastodon is public (except for your login credentials and stuff like that), so there's not a lot of benefit to sneaking in a backdoor.
Bill Cole 
@lienrag @adamrice @slothrop @GossiTheDog @Gargron Sure, but there were some very special circumstances there, most notably a solo maintainer who was on the verge of just abandoning the project. He let the attacker in and there were very few people really watching closely.
Even in that case the compromised package was noticed within days and replaced with uncompromised code.
@lienrag @slothrop @GossiTheDog @Gargron Why would it be an American organisation when its founder and project owner lives in Germany?
@GossiTheDog @Gargron this is great news! was hoping this would happen.
@GossiTheDog @Gargron there's like a hundred ActivityPub implementations now, so the point of selling Mastodon (the software) and .social would be quite futile. But still kudos. Common digital public goods are very much needed.
@GossiTheDog - This is going to sound pedantic but I have a very specific intentional point:
Eugene did not create this place. He created one app on the fediverse (a popular app! An instrumental app! Without that app, the fediverse might not have succeeded! But he created the app.).
@jerry created this place (infosec exchange). You created Cyberplace Social.
I say this because the *Fediverse* is the place. If Mastodon fails, we use another app (like glitchsoc here on infosec exchange or Misskey etc).
@tinker @GossiTheDog @jerry IMO, what needs to be made is hardware nodes to broadcast/receive fediverse content and nothing else. If there's no easy, plug n play, router-like, black-box style option for people to use, it'll take way too long for network growth to outpace the monolithic approach being bored into the blocs by BigTech. The SaaS model that turned human life inside out needs to be flipped on its end. Power back to the people.
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Call me what you want, a realist, a pessimist, a cunt, but this feels a bit kneejerk-y after the Meta ToS change considering he was rolling out the red carpet for Zuck
@GossiTheDog Trying out Mastodon again and since the feed showed your post as the first one I saw I thought I'd ask you...
Why do people love to shit on Eugen?
@iguanaguy @GossiTheDog Because he doesn't universally agree with all of the people who want various different features for Mastodon and he's only one guy.
And maybe he's not the smoothest operator when interacting with people that he is disappointing.
It can be for different reasons, for example his mod team on Dot Social censor Palestinian voices for ridiculous reasons. He equivocates on Threads and tacitly endorses it when literally every other respectable Mastodon instance knows when its time to pull the plug on that hate speech platform. He promotes Dot Social as the default instance on the official app, leading to massive centralization at odds with the promise of federated social media, maybe other reasons too
Also @grumpybozo mentioned that people want different features, and for context I'd add that in particular some people interpret his failure to prioritize the ability to limit who can reply to your posts as a failure to look out for vulnerable and minority users who can get harassed this way. Still he's made massive contributions and his recent decision to transfer copyright and ownership commands a lot of respect
@GossiTheDog @Gargron Yeah I can't imagine how much VC would pay to destroy one of the few truly independent social platforms remaining with even a hint of reach. Yuckerberg was willing to massively "overpay" for Instagram because an independent for-profit social platform was a threat - an indie nonprofit social platform? I'd guess more money than the fediverse could possibly raise.
@GossiTheDog @Gargron For Trump political operatives to inquire of career civil servants as to who they voted fir in they last election as a condition of continued employment is a typical dick move from authoritarian regimes
Yes, there are other unresolved issues, but Eugen deserves credit for this. Good to see a move in the right direction when others are selling out and other platforms turning to shit