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.
"We’ve always been worried that developing Free and Open Source Software would not be recognized as a charitable cause by the German tax system, so we were glad when the tax office originally approved our non-profit status in 2021. But now we have received a notice from the same tax office that our non-profit status has been withdrawn. This came with no advance warning or explanation."
Apparently chanting "free and open, free and open, free and open" while raking in sh1t-t0ns of money didn't fool the German tax authorities
So move to the United States, where the tax system and the IRS are deliberately intended to benefit the rich
@FinchHaven@aral what on earth makes you say they are raking in shit tons of money? That doesn't sound too likely for a team with the grand total of two full-time deveopers (to be increased to three now) so do you have something to back that with?
@FinchHaven@vetehinen They’ve also received $100K each from Jeff Atwood and Mozilla according to their latest blog post. Not-for-profits are allowed to accept donations. It’s kind of a core thing.
(My issue is with who they’re listening to and being guided by, who they’re accepting donations from, who they are aligning themselves with, and the success criteria they’re adopting.)
@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.
@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.
@ninavizz@aral I don't know what the tax situation is like in germany, but gargron's claims to not be taking money from venture capitalist also came with the declaration that his full time job pays about twice as much as mine does, so it's not like they're getting paid nothing.
@lucretia@ninavizz To be fair, it’s at least half of what he’d be getting if he had a job at a well-funded tech company in the mainstream. And, more so at a Google or a Facebook.
This isn’t about Eugen’s compensation. Eugen should be compensated and be able to live a comfortable life given what he does. Heck, asshats who work at Google and Facebook do. Why should people have to sacrifice to do good? (1/5)
No, this is about Silicon Valley influence, the wrong success criteria, and loss of control.
And, if the EU didn’t have its head stuck up its own arse, it would have already made sure that Mastodon could be kept in the EU and those working on it well compensated while also ensuring that the correct success criteria (hint: NOT growth at all costs but decentralisation) were set. But not with this EU Commission and its fixation with the Single Market above all else. (2/5)
@aral The EU is also in a precarious state I suspect, following Brexit and with other matters of the world (Ukraine, Putin, Drumpf) happening. I am very with you, but just as I left public-interest tech for for-profit for my own sanity living in the US & supporting both my parents and a disabled partner, Eugen and Mastodon deserve stability. I'm cautiously optimistic, that that is all this is about. How to sustain, in a world not yet ready to properly fund a commons.
They probably see Mastodon becoming a US entity and having Silicon Valley folks on the board as a sign of success when it is an abject failure of the EU, and all its costly PR initiatives (Next Generation Internet, etc.) It’s the Web story with Tim Berners-Lee and CERN all over again. And we know where that neoliberal and corporate capture left us. (3/5)
All that said, the one thing this isn’t about is how much Eugen makes. If we’re saying any old asshat engineer at Google has a right to a comfortable life but folks working on free and open source don’t, let’s not expect too many people to do the former as a full-time occupation. (4/5)
If, on the other hand, maybe we’d like more folks to contribute to the commons and maybe not even be captured by Silicon Valley how about this radical idea: Fund them so they can live (at least as well) as any mediocre yes-person at a mainstream tech company. (5/5)
@lucretia@ninavizz (And, of course, you should be making more too. In a sane world, we shouldn’t even have to worry about it but here we are, struggling to get by because we refuse to fuck people over with our skills and knowledge.)
@lucretia@aral Financially supporting two adults and two pets is expensive; and living perpetually broke, especially with the pressure of running a major piece of internet infrastructure, isn't sustainable.
@aral what? This seems fine to me? The code is still open. Anyone can contribute. You can still spin up a new instance of you want. What is bad about this?
@aral@RosePuckey Your earlier declarative statement that "another Mozilla emerges" makes it hard to believe you've done anything but make up your mind already.
@MisterMoo@aral@RosePuckey christ have people never heard of things like "pattern recognition," "history repeating itself," or just the completely reasonable act of "making predictions based on real-world events"???
The overall trend with the FOSS world lately has fucking sucked. Org after org is gradually falling into the same predatory, money-grubbing, privacy-invading, user-exploiting bullshit the big companies do. Supposedly "for survival." People are rational to be sick of it.
@MisterMoo@aral@RosePuckey there are ZERO REASONS to give any tech company the benefit of the doubt in the current climate. Every sus move a FOSS org makes that looks like the same enshittification we've seen over the last 20 years has a crowd of breathless goobers saying "what makes you so SURE?? Nothing's happened YET!! It could be different, YOU'RE ruining everything with your CYNICISM!!"
How fucking gullible can you be? How many times do they have to do this before people get it?
I really don't want to start hosting yet another service, but looks like I won't have much of a choice before long…
Guess I'll add evaluation of AP implementations to my ever-growing agenda so I can make sure I can get away from an implementation that will try to monetize its users in the foreseeable future. :/
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