> I am worried however that Mastodon will soon cave to the pressures of capitalism, and begin introducing profit-focused changes that undermine its original mission.
I appreciate that concern, and allaying this is among the reasons that we're getting the AISBL in place and talking more about the mission we have. We certainly have no intention to introduce profit-focused changes, nor do we have investors to satisfy that might push us along that path.
FWIW our 2024 report is being finalised at the moment (we spent much of this year working on other structural and administrative matters around this org change), and a 2025 report will follow.
Mastodon gGmbH does not have an operating presence in Nepal - but it is not the whole of Mastodon (or the Fediverse) by any means!
I had a quick look at the maps I could find that indicated the locations of Mastodon server instances, and I was not able to find anything local to their - of course that's not to say there is not one or more. It is important to the network that there should be many Mastodon instances, in many places, so it would be great if there were some!
oh, neat, I knew about tut and toot (two other TUI apps), but not this one - I'll have to add it to the community section of our next engineering blog post.
I would say that it is a coincidental happening to that drama. As Eugen mentioned in a thread on Mastodon, this has been under consideration for quite a long time, certainly before the nuclear events that kicked off the WP drama.
for clarity Biz Stone is on the board of the 501(c)(3) fundraising entity that was incorporated in the U.S. in early 2024. The new EU non-profit entity doesn't yet exist, or have a named board.
> it's actually not spelled out which form the new European non-profit is incorporated in
Correct, this is underway, and we're looking in to the right option for the organisation. As of right now, we have options, but the new entity is not finalised so it is not possible to spell out the format yet.
As I posted elsewhere when this was asked yesterday: "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."
Now, I cannot give you a line-by-line account of the budget estimate that went into that number (you can look at the 2023 report https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/12/annual-report-2023/ with the 2024 report coming sometime in Q1 of this year I think, more timely anyway; and you'll see that's a big upswing / optimistic forward-looking goal); but, it is lower than some other non-profits, foundations, and other efforts elsewhere.
So by all means ask whether that number is valid, but also look around at other OSS efforts. I'd also point out that these are critical times for the future of the open social web, and we (all of us) need to sustain it.