Eugen's vision for Mastodon was centered on user choice, community, and freedom. Now, we're formalizing that commitment with the formation of a new European non-profit entity. Eugen will transition to an alternative role in the team, with a new CEO to be announced very soon. Stay tuned for updates on these changes.

#MastodonNonProfit

Yours sincerely,

John Mastodon.

Honestly, I'd love to see Mastodon as a viable Twitter alternative, but by now I think it never will be. It's a completely different experience. When I open Mastodon, I see a maze of text, 3rd degree replies to I don't know what, and a star button that essentially nobody but me uses, because it does (almost) nothing.

I understand that some people like this type of experience, but me (and a lot of other ex twitter users who went to bluesky instead) would've preferred something else.

Great to see the continued commitment to open, decentralised technologies in the EU specifically.

We have known for a long time, but it feels more prevalent than ever, that social media can not be controlled by the US. Looking forward to it!

Under what comes next, you are still promoting the "Fediscovery" project.

Despite it being described as supporting multiple "discovery providers", the text says »This will specify how an instance will “feed” content to a discovery provider to index. And how a discovery provider can be queried to actually search and discover content.«

Nothing is being said about why there would ever be a need for a more than a few big providers, once it is established that the big ones "work". As usual, centralization is looming here, by a few corps "generously" offering high-speed "discovery" for "free".

Also, nothing is said about providers sharing results of the indexing, to enable true fediverse-wide search - instead, the proposal almost inevitably points to a set of a few providers that everybody needs to feed if they want posts to be found.

"Hope" will not change that hence just saying »We want to specify how a discovery provider works and interfaces with a Fediverse server instance. We hope to inspire several competing implementations of the specification.« does not make much sense.

Nothing is said about who outside of the Fediverse gets to query a provider, or to process the data that has been extracted from a fediverse server feed - and for which purposes. It's even expressly mentioned that »These “providers” might serve other purposes than just search and discovery«

»The protocols and implementations will respect user privacy«, but the text only offers "shoulds":

• »Our reference implementation will respect this setting and only ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place.« (note the telling words "respect" and "ingest" here, it does not even seem consensus that providers are "fed" by Fediverse servers).
• »All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.« Should?
• »Fediverse Discovery Providers should only ever index content clearly marked as “public”.« Should?
• »Fediverse Discovery Providers should honor these settings and only index user data and content from users who have opted-into that.« Should?

Another red flag: »This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish. But rest assured that we are committed to continue working on this even after this first project has ended, so we will be able to make adjustments later on.«

More privacy after the first implementation is out? And no: With Mastodon being the driver of this, and with the current wording, we can not "rest assured".

❤️ non-profits with a good purpose.

Please explain new Euro not-for-profit organization. Is this a trust that controls the mission?

"We will continue day-to-day operations through the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity, which will become wholly owned by the new European not-for-profit entity. The Mastodon GmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany. The existing US-based non-profit entity, the 501(c)(3), will continue to function as a fundraising hub."

Placing IPR in a non-profit trust is a model that should be used more extensively.

Such a trust's constitution can enshrine their future use, including licensing within specified constraints, ensuring all future use of the copyright, patents or brands contribute to social and community benefit.

"The people should own the town square"

Who could say it any better? Social media has to be a part of our public infrastructure or else it is just a tool of public manipulation and oppression.

It is antithetical for social media to be owned by a corporation.

You should also consider changing hosting providers, outside the United States.

#Mastodon #Fedi #Fediverse #ActivityPub

This is great.

What I find amazing and very frustrating is that even when opinion journalists address these issues seriously and thoughtfully they almost always fail to mention Mastodon -- as here:

"We need to support the creation of other platforms that are designed not to amplify lies and hate, or to just suck our personal data and sell us things, but to promote a better conversation."

theguardian.com/technology/202…

Elon Musk and the new world order: the hijacking of the global conversation

How can we publicly debate policy in the face of the rising – and polarising – influence of the X owner and others whose only aim is to serve themselves

^{Peter Pomerantsev (The Guardian)}

whew! this is good. this is really, really good. had no idea Germany stripped y’all of the non-profit status and that’s why you had to incorporate in the US.

so this will ensure the USA has no jurisdiction over Mastodon the software company, the software, correct?

the only quibble would be the TLDs: .social and .online are controlled by USA providers. there’s still vulnerability to abuse of power with the TLDs being under USA jurisdiction.

"Nous transférons la propriété d'actifs clés à une nouvelle entité européenne sans but lucratif,...."

Comme elle n'est JAMAIS nommée, mon petit doigt me dit que ça pue.

@thibaultmol
"There is nothing in the software that limits this speech."

Let go of the deceptive idea of "the tech itself." The truth is that there is nothing "in" the software at all. Its only animating force is the people using it. Trying to separate technology from people is a fool's errand at best; it actively covers up bad deeds done by people using technology to do them at worst.

@ombremad @Mastodon @Captain_Jack_Sparrow

@SallyStrange @ombremad @Captain_Jack_Sparrow as I mentioned in a previous reply. I had skipped over the blogpost also talking about the two main servers they have. (I knew the existed obv, just read over the section of the blogpost where they talked about them).

So I understand the reason for the original reply better now.

I don't want else to reply honestly

it's difficult to take these steps right, with all the legal and organizational implications they carry.

I wish you good luck.