Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
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Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#12Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196, where the article is different.)
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#13Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
It's a story about a different company and being a public benefit corporation is different than being a non-profit.
It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#14Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
Is B Corp a real thing? It's not equivalent to non-profit and they can always stop being B Corps. Wikipedia lists Nestle Nespresso as a B Corp example, not very inspiring.
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#15Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots w…
I use both Mastodon and Bluesky.
I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#16Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
> the UX has improved considerably.
Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#17> ownership moves to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere in Europe, with the exact location still to be finalized. The organization is currently headquartered in Germany, where it was a nonprofit until its charitable status was stripped last year. So it sounds like Mastodon was run by a non-profit, but the non-profit ran afoul of some legal issues, and they're now creating a fixed version? This seems to be ad…
The difference is that the previous non-profit was a not-for-profit corporation (gGmbh). This legal form is roughly analogous to most US non-profits (501(c)3 Inc.) and meant that as founder, Eugen Rochko still had more or less full control over the organization. As I understand it, the new organization is supposed to be a non-profit association (e.V.), which is a distinct type of organization under German law that en…
> enables people to become voting members of the NGO.
Only if the current management approves. You can keep control over the club, if you wish, you just need two or three people helping you.
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#18> ownership moves to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere in Europe, with the exact location still to be finalized. The organization is currently headquartered in Germany, where it was a nonprofit until its charitable status was stripped last year. So it sounds like Mastodon was run by a non-profit, but the non-profit ran afoul of some legal issues, and they're now creating a fixed version? This seems to be ad…
The difference is that the previous non-profit was a not-for-profit corporation (gGmbh). This legal form is roughly analogous to most US non-profits (501(c)3 Inc.) and meant that as founder, Eugen Rochko still had more or less full control over the organization. As I understand it, the new organization is supposed to be a non-profit association (e.V.), which is a distinct type of organization under German law that en…
The Open Home Foundation (Home Assistant, ESPHome, etc) is a similar contemporary example. It's organized as a Stiftung in Switzerland, which as I understand it is somewhat analogous to a US 501(c)(3) private foundation, in so far as it is an independent legal entity that can't solicit donations directly from the public and isn't necessarily run democratically like an e.V.
There are non-profit associations in the US (notably 501(c)(6) business leagues) but I don't know enough about them or about e.V. to speak about the differences.
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#19I'm not very optimistic about the technical direction of Mastodon.
Mastodon had a minimal HTML-only interface before, you could read posts and replies of each profile.
They removed it some time ago, now you just see a blank page if you don't have JS, and I think it's a huge mistake; it was a clear albeit small advantage over mainstream social networks.
Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
#20Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?