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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.........
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.’
It’s definitely true that Twitter consistently failed to raise the expected profit for stockholders, which is probably why they appreciated the wild overshot that Musk offered. I sort of appreciated that the company could stay so uncommercial for as long as it did, running only on hype.
Did Nazis use to “run rampant” on there before? Maybe not straight up, clear cut Nazis but there were some people who really dogwhistled in that direction going way back.
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.
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.
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.
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 😒
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.
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.
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