this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 72 points 6 months ago (4 children)

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At a "non-profit" (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For non-profits (like 501(c)(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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's an abuse of non-profits for financial engineering. They're intended to work exactly like companies, except without a monetary profit for shareholders.

Source: Got plenty of blank stares when I tried to set up a non-profit, "you're not yet big enough to think about tax evasion", they'd keep telling me 😒

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Them's who has the gold, makes the rules.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

It's not a good ratio, but assuming they managed to fill the three developer positions they were intending to when this interview was given last year and no one has left since then, that's 5 full time employees to 5 board members. I can't find more up-to-date numbers on the employee count unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is the enshittification fast-track, it feels like.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

How so?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Is the board paid? I thought it was a volunteer position, where you meet based on a certain cadence and vote on enterprise matters.

I'm also quite wary of corp/venture/capitalist influence on masto/fedi/décentralisation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I would presume it's not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.

For the moment, they're working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it's hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well, fuck. It was fun while it lasted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This isn't both concerning and also totally in line with every move Gargon's made along the way. Nope nope nope!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I don't necessarily agree that this is concerning. I never thought of gargron of making good moves either though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Workers co-op

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Source?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Primary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So anecdotal? Have you worked in a worker’s coop? It’s hard to see how some workers taking advantage of others would be worse than the owner taking advantage of them but if you have seen it maybe you can explain how.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I've had family fund one, worked for some as a contractor, and had friends work for some more. They're all bankrupt now, and all of them for the same reason I've already explained.

It's worse than working for someone else, because they're funded by the workers themselves. When a worker's coop goes down, workers not only lose their jobs, but also all the capital they've put into it. Some fall into a sunken cost fallacy, try to refloat it... but without fixing the fundamental problem of having owners (workers) who don't care about the business, they eventually lose even more capital, often get in debt, and also lose their jobs.

When an owner takes advantage of a worker, at least the worker can look for another job without having to pay for the privilege.

Coops work well when members are business-savvy, and when they have a very limited scope with minimal capital investment, allowing members to leave at any time with minimal loss.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ok, this doesn’t seem to be the overall picture in the economic literature but thanks for sharing your experience. Given that, I can see why you hold those views.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I don't know about literature, but both the lawyers and notaries involved, warned everyone of the risks. I was also an idealist and skeptical of their advice at the time... then spent several years trying, to no avail, to make people understand what was at stake... until the warnings became reality... and again, and again, and again.

If it's not in the literature, then it should be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Love me some Anark—I did watch this but I don’t remember seeing much detail on how community governance works. Is it in there and I missed it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

From what I understood after I watched it and looked into it a bit more is that individuals have roles within the organization and are able to decide their own actions on how to fulfill that role. The actions are informed by the collective understanding of their goals and norms that are formed during their frequent meetings (which are very different in vibes from regular corporate meetings).

This is how I understood it works for most decisions but there a few decisions that fall back on voting which after the vote occurs the individuals are expected to carry out whatever was voted on.

So like it says in the video it is a largely informal structure but one that seems to work very well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

So the employees who are employed by donations, or all contributors? Not trying to throw a wrench in your suggestion, just wondering what this would look like for masto

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

I think this can be both a benefit and a risk, since Mastodon is still what it is and won't change because of a board. Biz could provide Eugen a lot of insight, but by the same risk, Eugen may want out and turn Masto profitable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summaryMastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained increased attention following the Twitter acquisition as users sought alternatives to X’s would-be “everything app” that felt more like the old Twitter of days past.

As part of the “fediverse” — or the open social web made up of interconnected servers communicating over the ActivityPub protocol — Mastodon benefits users who no longer want to be locked into a centralized social network that can be bought and sold to new billionaire owners, like Musk.

“…we have received a notice from the same tax office that our non-profit status has been withdrawn,” wrote Rochko on the Mastodon blog.

Mastodon’s day-to-day operations were unaffected by this change, as most of its income comes from the crowdfunding platform Patreon.

It also received donations from Jeff Atwood and Mozilla at $100,000 apiece, which allowed the company to hire a third full-time developer this year.

In addition to Biz Stone, other board members include Esra’a Al Shafei, a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org; Karien Bezuidenhout, an advocate for openness and experienced board member across sustainable social enterprise; Amir Ghavi, a partner at law firm Fried Frank, where he’s the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice; and Felix Hlatky, the chief financial officer of Mastodon since 2020, who originally incorporated the project as a nonprofit LLC in Germany and helped it raise additional funds.

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