It is more important than ever that the social web is not controlled by corporations. Today, Mastodon is taking another step towards its founding ideals: independence and non-profit ownership. We're transferring ownership of key assets to a new European not-for-profit entity, ensuring our mission remains true to a decentralised social web, not corporate control.
We need to grow our annual operating budget to €5 million in 2025.
What for?
How many active users are going to be served by mastodon.social and mastodon.online? Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?
How many more users are going to join the Mastodon network of servers thanks to the missing features that are planned to be released this year?
there’s a big difference between running a service on volunteers, and having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an infrastructure spend. There’s also an amount of legal work involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements we’re looking at.
Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I’m wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.
Can it? Because I wouldn’t try to run a social media company with less than that. It’s kind of shocking they make do with a tenth of it. Which I guess is helped by being staffed by the equivalent of a mid-sized McDonalds franchise.
If I was going to spend that much on anything beyond servers and full time employees I would spend it on marketing, though.
Nobody wants to spend money on legal work, but at a certain point it becomes necessary. It’s not like they met up in a board meeting, discussed where money could best be spent, and decided that lawyers should be a priority.
However, if Mastodon goes down this path and does it well, they can create legal precedence that might benefit all open/federated social media organizations that follow. Especially in the current climate we could benefit a lot from having a strong social media actor representing the interests of an open web, in opposition to the armies of lawyers hired by the fascists of commercial social media.
Of course, when I donate to Mastodon I imagine all my money goes to developers. But rationally I’m aware that this might be a bit utopian.
I did not, in fact, make a social media company. Rochko did.
And hey, I mostly agree with the diagnosis in your link. As always with business pitches, I’m more skeptical of the leap in logic from the diagnosis to the proposal for an alternative.
Also, if a software developer tells me they will have a project done in a year I immediately walk away. Show me a production plan or don’t give me a deadline. But hey, that’s just me and you’re not actually pitching.
For now, if Flipboard gets there with Surf we can revisit and talk about whether they needed 5 million and a year or not. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, but also don’t think it’s going to explode. I’m ready to be proven wrong, though.
Yes, I am saying that we would be better off by having this money put somewhere else.
I get the notion, however social networks do have an inordinate effect populations and how they think. Spending 5M€ on say, poor communities would help those poor communities (short or long term, dunno), but they could still be influenced by a shoddy social network (or multiple). Whether that sum effect is positive or not is debatable.
It’s very difficult to make a judgement on utility of such a (comparatively) small sum and its target.
To be honest, I’m much more concerned about how people spend their money when they go shopping: buying non fair-trade goods like chocolate, clothes, coffee, phones, and so on, where they spend sums orders of a magnitude larger than a paltry 5-10€/month on mastodon.
They are also the main developers of the Mastodon software. It is not just hosting the service. The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not. The only way to get the quality needed is to have some full time lead developers. Also they need some proper admins to run the websites. Mastodon social is at 250,000 active users right now, but it is also fairly likely to grow fast with what Elon is up to with Twitter. Just to compare Twitter used to have 7500 employees, with a 1000 today.
The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not.
Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.
Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.
What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.
Well the fact is yes, Mastodon is still relatively small compared to Facebook, X or Bluesky. Mastodon has actually 7,616,908 users total: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon. Which is a huge number, but most likely a lot of bot accounts and non-active account to be honest.
Now the reason why is Mastodon is not as large as Bluesky is debatable. I actually blame ActivityPub protocol and the complex nature of trying to become a federated platform.
Let’s be honest now, most people do not care (or don’t have the technical knowledge) to understand federation or decentralization. Hence people will just jump to the easiest solution: A big centralized server, aka X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky. Same for search engines like Google.
Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things.
What for?
They said what for in the previous section, improving Mastodon’s “usability, discoverability, and trust & safety”. They tried to fundraise for a head of trust and safety last month, but failed. My impression is this is them trying to raise general donations to the project to pay for things like this, instead of individual campaigns for individual things.
Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?
I thinks so, given the previous paragraph links to their sponsor page and says as such.
Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things
I am not questioning the need for money. I am questioning the amount.
And yes, the reason I am asking this is precisely because I don’t believe the “not-for-profit” leads to better outcomes than any for-profit one, and I do not share the belief that all for-profit endeavors are bad.
To illustrate the point: I’d take good old Craigslist making more than $600 million per year as a tool against Big Tech and unethical corporations than any of these feel-good initiatives from Mastodon.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this not-for-profit vs for-profit diatribe. If you mean that things like culture and structures matter more than the a project’s legal status, then I agree, but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance. The things Mastodon (the company) is seeking to improve are highly technical and specialised, where people working on them need good cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience, and understandably demand a high wage.
but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance.
The “particular issues” I have with Mastodon (or rather, with its leadership) are rooted in its cultural values.
I think that presenting itself as the saviors of civil online discourse is ineffective. It sounds good for this tiny majority that is already here, but does nothing to bring the masses that are still stuck inside the walled gardens of Big Tech.
The difference between for-profit and not-for-profit firms is not whether one makes money and the other one does not. It’s what’s done with that money. The difference is whether the net income is given to the firm’s major shareholders or kept within the firm.
You are confusing cause and effect and you are making a pointless distinction.
If all it took to qualify as a non-profit was to eliminate profit redistribution, we would have every sole proprietorship or small LLC entity turning itself to a 503, and then distributing its excess profit as salaries.
I’m definitely not doing that. I’m pointing out that the commenter above is correct and you appear to have a misconception about what non-profit means.
What for?
How many active users are going to be served by mastodon.social and mastodon.online? Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?
How many more users are going to join the Mastodon network of servers thanks to the missing features that are planned to be released this year?
there’s a big difference between running a service on volunteers, and having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an infrastructure spend. There’s also an amount of legal work involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements we’re looking at.
Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I’m wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.
Can it? Because I wouldn’t try to run a social media company with less than that. It’s kind of shocking they make do with a tenth of it. Which I guess is helped by being staffed by the equivalent of a mid-sized McDonalds franchise.
If I was going to spend that much on anything beyond servers and full time employees I would spend it on marketing, though.
Nobody wants to spend money on legal work, but at a certain point it becomes necessary. It’s not like they met up in a board meeting, discussed where money could best be spent, and decided that lawyers should be a priority.
However, if Mastodon goes down this path and does it well, they can create legal precedence that might benefit all open/federated social media organizations that follow. Especially in the current climate we could benefit a lot from having a strong social media actor representing the interests of an open web, in opposition to the armies of lawyers hired by the fascists of commercial social media.
Of course, when I donate to Mastodon I imagine all my money goes to developers. But rationally I’m aware that this might be a bit utopian.
So insightful, so grown-up, so convincing, and then
Sometimes I despair.
Oh no :(
deleted by creator
Then don’t make a “social media company”. Change the game.
The goal is not to “compete” with social media companies. The goal is to build tools and digital infrastructure that can let people communicate with each other (a) cheaply, (b) without intermediaries and © with robust protections against malicious actors of varying scale.
Give me 5 million euros and one single year, and I can definitely build it. Fuck, give me half a million and I’ll do it.
I did not, in fact, make a social media company. Rochko did.
And hey, I mostly agree with the diagnosis in your link. As always with business pitches, I’m more skeptical of the leap in logic from the diagnosis to the proposal for an alternative.
Also, if a software developer tells me they will have a project done in a year I immediately walk away. Show me a production plan or don’t give me a deadline. But hey, that’s just me and you’re not actually pitching.
For now, if Flipboard gets there with Surf we can revisit and talk about whether they needed 5 million and a year or not. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, but also don’t think it’s going to explode. I’m ready to be proven wrong, though.
What are you suggesting? That the money donated to Mastodon not be used on Mastodon?
The money wasn’t donated yet. This is their stated goal.
Yes, I am saying that we would be better off by having this money put somewhere else.
I get the notion, however social networks do have an inordinate effect populations and how they think. Spending 5M€ on say, poor communities would help those poor communities (short or long term, dunno), but they could still be influenced by a shoddy social network (or multiple). Whether that sum effect is positive or not is debatable.
It’s very difficult to make a judgement on utility of such a (comparatively) small sum and its target.
To be honest, I’m much more concerned about how people spend their money when they go shopping: buying non fair-trade goods like chocolate, clothes, coffee, phones, and so on, where they spend sums orders of a magnitude larger than a paltry 5-10€/month on mastodon.
They are also the main developers of the Mastodon software. It is not just hosting the service. The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not. The only way to get the quality needed is to have some full time lead developers. Also they need some proper admins to run the websites. Mastodon social is at 250,000 active users right now, but it is also fairly likely to grow fast with what Elon is up to with Twitter. Just to compare Twitter used to have 7500 employees, with a 1000 today.
Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.
Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.
What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.
I don’t agree at all with the lack of ambition.
Well the fact is yes, Mastodon is still relatively small compared to Facebook, X or Bluesky. Mastodon has actually 7,616,908 users total: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon. Which is a huge number, but most likely a lot of bot accounts and non-active account to be honest.
Now the reason why is Mastodon is not as large as Bluesky is debatable. I actually blame ActivityPub protocol and the complex nature of trying to become a federated platform.
Let’s be honest now, most people do not care (or don’t have the technical knowledge) to understand federation or decentralization. Hence people will just jump to the easiest solution: A big centralized server, aka X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky. Same for search engines like Google.
The problem is not with the federated model, per se. Matrix is federated and it has 100M+ users.
The problem is a cultural one: Mastodon promoted federation along the idea that instances should be aligned with its member’s identity. It’s a mistake of their own doing, which was reflected on their own UX and marketing copy for a long time.
Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things.
They said what for in the previous section, improving Mastodon’s “usability, discoverability, and trust & safety”. They tried to fundraise for a head of trust and safety last month, but failed. My impression is this is them trying to raise general donations to the project to pay for things like this, instead of individual campaigns for individual things.
I thinks so, given the previous paragraph links to their sponsor page and says as such.
People aren’t going to donate for unimportant things.
I am not questioning the need for money. I am questioning the amount.
And yes, the reason I am asking this is precisely because I don’t believe the “not-for-profit” leads to better outcomes than any for-profit one, and I do not share the belief that all for-profit endeavors are bad.
To illustrate the point: I’d take good old Craigslist making more than $600 million per year as a tool against Big Tech and unethical corporations than any of these feel-good initiatives from Mastodon.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this not-for-profit vs for-profit diatribe. If you mean that things like culture and structures matter more than the a project’s legal status, then I agree, but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance. The things Mastodon (the company) is seeking to improve are highly technical and specialised, where people working on them need good cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience, and understandably demand a high wage.
The “particular issues” I have with Mastodon (or rather, with its leadership) are rooted in its cultural values.
I think that presenting itself as the saviors of civil online discourse is ineffective. It sounds good for this tiny majority that is already here, but does nothing to bring the masses that are still stuck inside the walled gardens of Big Tech.
The difference between for-profit and not-for-profit firms is not whether one makes money and the other one does not. It’s what’s done with that money. The difference is whether the net income is given to the firm’s major shareholders or kept within the firm.
You are confusing cause and effect and you are making a pointless distinction.
If all it took to qualify as a non-profit was to eliminate profit redistribution, we would have every sole proprietorship or small LLC entity turning itself to a 503, and then distributing its excess profit as salaries.
You mean 501©, and distribution of excess profit would at minimum evoke an excise tax and might cause loss of 501© status.
You are right about the code , but you are also making my point about why it matters if the whole endeavor is classified as for-profit or not.
I’m definitely not doing that. I’m pointing out that the commenter above is correct and you appear to have a misconception about what non-profit means.
it’s not (only) for the instance. This is for paying full time jobs to manage and develop the software
I know. The second question is meant to cover this…