Ars Technica: “Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg”

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta’s decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called “property” and gay people to be called “mentally ill”) by calling bans on such speech out of touch with mainstream discourse.

Mastodon is hoping to provide an alternative social network for users who are potentially frustrated with their lack of control over their timelines and content on other networks.

But to achieve the envisioned independence for all users, Mastodon’s structure needed to evolve, the blog said, as the community grew to about 1.5 million monthly active users in 2023. Remaining headquartered in Europe primarily, Mastodon’s day-to-day operations will be managed by the new European not-for-profit entity, establishing a new legal home for Mastodon.

Ashley Belanger

Good intentions, but there is already precedent of a company starting out as a nonprofit with good intentions on paper, only to succumb to investor pressure once its product became a hit – on course, I’m talking about OpenAI.

Granted, I feel this is unlikely to happen with Mastodon simply because I struggle to see this social network ever becoming a global phenomenon like ChatGPT. Microblogging networks have proliferated after Musk started dismantling Twitter, but none of them have achieved critical mass, and people are still bouncing from one alternative to another after Zuckerberg spoiled the fresh feel of Threads with his recent policy changes. From the outside, Mastodon also appeared the most convoluted and fractured among these choices, and the much-touted interoperability with Threads will likely remain a distant project, after the CEO Eugen Rochko warned that Mastodon will take action on hate speech and any Threads accounts violating Mastodon’s existing policies.

Then there’s the question of funding – alas, we’re not living in a utopia where developers code for free and servers run on good will. The current model for Mastodon relies on donations from users, but I’m skeptical of how sustainable that would be. The only examples of long-standing organizations funded by donations are Wikipedia and Mozilla – but honestly just Wikipedia, as Mozilla derives most of its ‘donations’ from Google.

Wikipedia is quite different from a social network; it has basically a static site with a dedicated team of contributors updating the information. While I’m not familiar with the details of their expenses, I think Mastodon would have extra costs, namely for moderation and marketing, that are largely irrelevant for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is also much more widely known, so it has a much larger potential pool of donors than Mastodon’s barely 2 million active users. I suspect that Mastodon is likelier to land in the Mozilla nonprofit trap, with one or a handful of large donors, who can then effectively control its decisions despite the nonprofit structure.