No, they don't.
Federation-wise, there's not a single word on federation. They talk about decentralization, not federation. To quote my other comment:
> Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?
As for the business model, I really need more than "atomic digital units of value" and "our ambitions go way beyond that". The last sentence does tell me something, but that something directly contradicts their stand on decentralization.
As for why they aren't a non-profit, they generalize pretty much every non-profit and say that they "don't grow exponentially" (without defining what they mean), and they mention names that do indeed grow year after year.
At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Besides, their reasons for not running a decentralized service do apply for a federated service as well, and as far as I can see, they're using the terms synonymously anyway.
Whether those are good enough arguments, that's another debate.
>At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Well, it's still their answer, and that's what my post was about.
This seems to go to far. Give the users control over their data in your system AND give them control over how their data is sent to other systems.
Edit: In the linked issue, OpenBook CEO said that you can't delete mastodon accounts, but Mastodon got that feature a couple weeks after his post:
Depending on how you define "system", being unable to track and/or delete data federated out might put you in a hazardous position around GDPR. It's not just about users controlling their own data. It's also about system operators being able to enumerate who they shared data with, what safeguards and processes they follow, and so on.
The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project. A social network, project management, ActiveDirectory/LDAP all-in-one? As a side project to fund a social network?
To me it sounds like they want to do what most other social networks do, make businesses pay for their profiles and features.
The trading part I'm doubting as well. That's something quite difficult to set up and scale. So it doesn't bode well when they don't offer a proper explanation.
Here's their take on the business model:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
>We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
>Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...