Re:Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit
by ramesh31 on Saturday April 27, 2024 @12:13PM
(#40181065)
Ehh good for them. But I'm sure anyone who's spent time working in a non-profit can attest, it's a pretty quick path to becoming bloated with admin and immobilized by politics. They'll inevitably bow to sponsor pressure or end up broke and irrelevant. See W3C et. al.
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Mozilla where one CEO salary could pay 10 devs.
At 6.8 mil $ per year salary (2022), could hire ~130 developers from Europe. Probably more when looking at Eastern Europe.
Re:Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit
by deadlydose on Saturday April 27, 2024 @12:47PM
(#40181376)
I was thinking Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy as soon as I saw the title.
> a pretty quick path to becoming bloated with admin and immobilized by politics.
cool, then someone can fork and launch their own Masto alternative or some other AP compatible software can grab mindshare. I don't see this as an issue for the ActivityPub ecosystem (and I personally love the Masto project, but diversity in the AP ecosystem just drives everyone to be better.)
In other sectors of OSS I 100% agree with your point.
But for a social network that lives or dies by the network effect, the outlook isn’t good for a Mastodon that gets forked.
the Mastodon network isn't really Mastodon, but the wider ActivityPub protocol ecosystem.
We have been a non-profit since Mastodon gGmbH has been founded and our biggest issue is our lack of funding to hire more people full-time, not politics or admin overhead. We do not expect this to change anytime soon.