So… by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.
At a “non-profit” (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.
Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We’re watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.
For non-profits (like 501©(3)'s) that’s not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.
Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.
This is the enshittification fast-track, it feels like.
Well, fuck. It was fun while it lasted.
There are any number of Mastodon forks out there. Misskey and its forks are really good. Pleroma and Akkoma are good, and so is Friendica.
Mastodon has always been an exercise in attention and influence seeking for Gargon. The rest of us don’t need him or it. It’s just a trademark.
This isn’t both concerning and also totally in line with every move Gargon’s made along the way. Nope nope nope!
I would like to do more research on alternative non-profit governance structures. In my experience, non-profit boards seem to be just another mechanism by which the wealthy control decision-making in society. However, I don’t know what kind of structure would be better.
Workers co-op
I think workers coops are definitely better than private ownership but it seems like there should also be some involvement of the broader community being served (or negatively impacted in some cases) in the case of non-profits.
Workers coops tend to fall apart when they’re made of non business savvy workers who just want to do their job. They tend to delegate the business “chores” onto someone more savvy… who ends up simply stealing from them.
Source?
Primary.
So you don’t have one then? I’ve seen plenty of research on worker coops, and I’ve never seen any that supports this idea. Without any evidence I’m left to conclude that this is just capitalist apologia.
I have first-hand experience, actually too much of it. Feel free to conclude anything, you can even set up a worker coop and get your own data; be the change you want in the world, and all that.
Biz Stone, who allowed Nazis to run rampant on Twitter, so he could monetize it and sell it to Elon Musk? That motherfucker? Man, Mastodon first selling out to META in a closed door non disclosure pow wow, now this. The Mastodon folks wanna get paid. Alas, and so it goes…
What do you mean by Mastodon selling out to Meta? Isn’t Meta just building an ActivityPub based platform so we can talk to their users as far as I know. If they want to talk to us, then the onus is on Meta to stay compatible. If they aren’t, then we just continue on as we have.
I view the bigger issue as Meta is hostile towards humanity’s privacy and freedom, and Mastodon leadership view Meta joining the Fediverse as an unqualified win. Meanwhile, I don’t think Meta is interested in ActivityPub as a protocol to make Instagram Threads more appealing, I think they’re overall much more interested in what data the can gain, and sell, analyzing the interactions between their own user pool and the rest of the fediverse that user pool interacts with.
Please look up ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ Meta should be met with open hostility in the fediverse. Mastodon losing nonprofit status in Germany, moving to the states and then appointing this guy leads me to think that mastodon has been compromised
OK, but did you read the comment you were replying to?
Were Nazis allowed to deliberately ‘run rampant’ on Twitter pre-Elon? That’s a hot take.
Musk’s buying Twitter had nothing to do with it being ‘monetised’ as far as I see. Musk just offered such a stupidly large amount that the board had to say ‘OK, sure.’
They absolutely were, without question. That said, there’s nothing this guy can do to make that happen on Mastodon instances he doesn’t own.
Just a quick reminder that Twitter was banning 10s of thousands of accounts of extremists that breached its terms of service, including a certain ex president of the US. It was imperfect, but ‘running rampant’ is a stretch
How many times did Trump show his true colors before getting banned? Twitter’s moderation policies were better pre-Musk but they were far FAR from acceptable.
It seems like we agree on the facts, and I certainly won’t disagree that it’s worse now, but I would characterize Twitter’s (pre-Musk) response to extremism as “measured, lacking and lethargic”, before I would use “imperfect”, which still implies “pretty good” and from my perceptive it was not good enough to make me want to use it. I think maybe we just have a different tolerance for hate speech.
