Recent searches
Search options
Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/
@aral How else do you believe the folks behind Mastodon could get paid livable wages? As it stands today, they each make very little; and can't even afford non-profit rates for open positions. Biz can at least attract SV donors, which is where so much capital is otherwise being burned by enshittified shit.
@ninavizz Yep, Biz can attract Silicon Valley money. And Silicon Valley money comes with Silicon Valley expectations and goes to entities compatible with Silicon Valley goals.
How else? Many ways. Sadly – and all too predictably – the EU dropped the ball by not funding it properly and stipulating its own demands to forestall corporate capture.
But are there other ways? Yes. Are there other ways if you’re chasing growth über alles? Probably not.
@aral We briefly chatted about this, though. There really isn't, today—and considering Eugen supports himself, another adult, and two pets, it's not right to expect him and his family to personally take the hit for today's scant funding for public interest tech. Mastodon would at least need a full-time development director, and even then there's barely enough. Barely. TorProject and many others subsist on USAID & the US Dept of Defense. Our community needs better.
@ninavizz Indeed. We’re living this ourselves and have been for the past however many years. I had to sell two family homes to stay independent. Laura contracts with the mainstream so we have a roof over our heads as I work on the free/open stuff. This is why I spoke at the parliament about how we must fund tech from the commons (https://ar.al/2019/11/29/the-future-of-internet-regulation-at-the-european-parliament/). And this is why I’m building Domain so that it can be sustainable in this current (shit) system. But you must also limit growth.
@aral Do we really want the growth limited of the primary federated platform functioning as the world's Shitter replacement? I honestly don't see Mastodon going for "unicorn" (blick) growth, but instead to meet community demand. The world does want usable, accessible, and easy to access social platforms; and this is truly the only one with a reasonable entry curve. Discord is ok, too; but Matrix, too hard. Most others, also too obscure or hard.
@ninavizz Of one instance and one org, yes. Of the protocol and platform, no.
@aral I guess that's where I disagree. Non-nrrds and folks leaving proprietary/for-profit media need the "gateway-friendly" mastodon.social instance and experience, imho, to learn about the fediverse and to feel emboldened enough to take the next step(s). To really force the failure of for-profit tech, a much more massive migration has to happen; and (almost) anything possible, I want to support.
@ninavizz Well, now that Threads is federating, they don’t even need that, they can just use Threads. I guess time will tell where things go but I wish we could learn from the mistakes of the past. Regardless, I should start caring far less about what Mastodon is doing and focus on the alternative I’m working on.
@aral Threads is part of facebag, which we all know uses people's data for ad targeting, LLM training, etc. So, we still need both the org and the one instance, as well as the platform and the protocol—which don't matter, if they can't be usably accessed by our parents and other non-techies.