Technology

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.

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.

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

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.

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.