You are confusing cause and effect and you are making a pointless distinction.
If all it took to qualify as a non-profit was to eliminate profit redistribution, we would have every sole proprietorship or small LLC entity turning itself to a 503, and then distributing its excess profit as salaries.
The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not.
Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.
Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.
What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.
The money wasn't donated yet. This is their stated goal.
Yes, I am saying that we would be better off by having this money put somewhere else.
I know. The second question is meant to cover this...
Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I'm wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.
We need to grow our annual operating budget to €5 million in 2025.
What for?
How many active users are going to be served by mastodon.social and mastodon.online? Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?
How many more users are going to join the Mastodon network of servers thanks to the missing features that are planned to be released this year?
Trust me, bro. I am not moving the goal posts, bro. All I need is one example that fits exactly what I want so that I can bring myself to contribute with a few dollars per month. No, paying a small business provider that can reinvest the resources to keep the ecosystem open is not the same, bro... If "the commons" don't help, why should I, bro...
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I think I am ready to give up on this conversation.
The worldviews are too different. It makes no sense to make this distinction about "beneficial to companies" and "beneficial to communities" and it actually seems to me like a misunderstanding of why corporations exist in the first place.
Also, sorry if this is harsh, but you are repeatedly showing an inability of abstract thinking. I talk about the Japanese and your reaction is to ask "where is the Japanese Reddit"? Really? Are you expecting that different cultures will converge to the exact type of equivalent artifacts, just with different colors?
(Anyway, I'd posit that the "Japanese Reddit" is misskey, but I already dread the thought you will respond with some silly pontification about how misskey looks more like Twitter than Reddit)
Maybe it is time for to cut my losses and accept that this whole discussion is a waste of time.
The problem is not with the federated model, per se. Matrix is federated and it has 100M+ users.
The problem is a cultural one: Mastodon promoted federation along the idea that instances should be aligned with its member's identity. It's a mistake of their own doing, which was reflected on their own UX and marketing copy for a long time.