Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg
Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg
Mastodon shifts to nonprofit ownership, calls for $5M in donations to expand.
His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don't use Mastadon cause I don't care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
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What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
- That's giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
- The article does not even hint at the existence of source code, and the announcement itself doesn't talk about changes in that aspect either, so I don't think that's what's happening here.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it's not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Of course you can fork it, but you can't call it Mastodon. That's trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.
The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.
Sure, but I think that's far less important than in a walled garden situation..
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.
I take it that you missed the whole WordPress situation that developed over the last couple of months?
It's about control over the intellectual property (trademarks, copyright) as well as control over the company which pays the developers. One does definitely not want a single person in control of these things, otherwise they can hold the whole project hostage (like Mullenweg is accused of, in the case of WordPress).
Additionally, the change also gives them a preferable tax status than the previous arrangement.
Someone is still in charge of the git account. No matter how many commits there are being made, unless the owner of the repo approves to merge them, it's not happening.
And sure, someone could create a fork that includes their changes if they aren't being merged, but then this separate fork might at some point lose compatibility with the original software. And on a purely semantic note, this fork wouldn't be the original mastodon either.
its an org, it can have multiple owners.
Once it is an organization, yes, that's the whole point. Right now it is still an individual, that's the point I was trying to make.
no it's not? https://github.com/orgs/mastodon/people
unless we're talking about different things?
That's a virtual structure in github, not a legal construct. Those organisations have owners (minimum 2), but if they collude and go rogue, they can do quite a lot of harm. (See also https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/roles-in-an-organization).
A formally incorporated nonprofit organization has statutes, organs, supervisory boards and all that by which they must adhere, so once set up properly, the software would be fully protected from malicious intent on a legal level.
...but you were talking about the git project in the parent comment? the rest of the thread is about company structure.
Noj profit does not have owners per se, but it is still controlled by somebody
I was thinking specifically about the github.
Ain't he putting it under a non profit structure?
dunno. they were talking about git so i was assuming we were talking about git.