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Mastodon announces its transition to a non-profit structure


A decentralized social network organization Mastodon said on Monday that it plans to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and transfer ownership of the entities responsible for the core Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means that one person will not control the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks run by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

While the exact details have yet to be finalized, it means that Mastodon’s current CEO and founder, Eugen Rochko, will hand over the management parts of the organization to the new entity and focus on product strategy.

The organization said it will continue to host mastodon. social and mastodon.online servers where users can register and connect to an ActivityPub-based network.

“When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was to create the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a goal, a quick fix that allowed him to continue operations. From the beginning, he declared that Mastodon would not be sold and would be free from the control of a single wealthy person, and he could ensure that because he was in control, the sole final decision-maker,” Mastodon said. blog post.

The company was established last year US-based non-profit organization with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for more funding and grants. As a result, the organization simultaneously lost its non-profit status in Germany.

A new European-based non-profit organization, Mastodon GmbH, will fully own the for-profit organization, the blog post noted. The organization is in the process of finalizing the location of the new institution.

“We are taking time to choose the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. We will then determine what other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and continuity,” the post said.

“We will be focused on creating appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole and serve the community responsibly.”

Ownership of open source projects has been a recurring news topic in the past few months. For example, people’s control is in question certain WordPress community projects It’s in the hands of Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. With today’s new structure, Mastodon seeks to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making authority.



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