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The organization has already transitioned to a nonprofit in the U.S. but is still working to set up a nonprofit in Belgium, or an AISBL, to replace the German entity, which lost its nonprofit status last year. Once established, the Belgian nonprofit will be the future home of the organization. In the meantime, the U.S.-based 501©(3) c nonprofit will own the trademark and other assets.
Very important step.
You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/
People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.
Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.
We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.
and yet i still dont know how to use mastodon
What are you struggling with? Look for a server (that isn’t mastodon.social) that fits your interests, sign up, browse the local or global timeline, follow interesing people, have fun!
Not OP, but…
Finding a single server that fits my interests is the first stumbling block. I follow 30-40 communities here, so I need to pick just one focus, which kinda sucks, TBF.
So I picked one, It was too quiet, but it was a start, then I started looking for interesting people. Hardly anyone famous, the few that I did find ended up being the ones that turned out to be creeps in the news, even assuming they were real accounts, which is probably a generous assumption. When I finally found the few people I wanted to follow, they gradually disappeared over time to Bluesky.
WIth their community lines being split per server and no discovery other than randomly finding someone with your tastes while bebopping around on your server. It wasn’t a good experience.
Respect. He built something bigger than him and then knew that it was time to transition.
But will they continue to moderate content by German leftist standards?
Why
Read the article!?
I also recommend reading Eugen Rochko’s own post about it, as Andy Piper linked to as well.
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Articles are incentivized to elaborate beyond what is even remotely necessary, link back to no one but themselves themselves, repeatedly, and to serve ads and extract personal information for sale while they’re doing it.
So you’ll have to excuse some of us looking for the tl;dr
I’m gonna call it: lazyness
I’m gonna call it: apathy
Then why bother asking here?
Edit: oh wait, you weren’t the one who asked. My bad.
You’d be far more accurate if you said “news sites” or something instead of “articles”.
It’s not a universal truth, but it’s kinda’ true of techcrunch.
No tangible difference.
I love and hate how Eugen starts this whole project, leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet, sets up institutional guardrails to make sure it will not be corrupted by any one individual gone mad with power, gives away his position after 10 years once he’s sure the organization is in good hands, and then concludes in reflection that he does not “have the right personality” for running a project like this.
I hope it has not been to hard for him, and that he’ll look back at it all as a positive experience in spite of the negative interactions. I don’t think any sane person has a personality that is “right” for the kind of abuse public figures receive on the internet. But from the perspective of Mastodon and the Fediverse, it seems pretty clear that he was exactly the right type of personality for the job—including by stepping down when the time felt right.
I get it and don’t hate it. If one of my projects took off like that and gained traction the absolute LAST thing I’d want to be is CEO of the whole damn thing. That’s just not who I am. I’d hope I’d be able to find and hand it off to someone more qualified for that position. So I totally get where Eugen is coming from as I would have done the exact same thing.
What I hate about it is that this unwillingness to be in a position of power is so correlated with actually being suited for it.
100% this.
I was on a non profit board where the founder realized he wasn’t the right person for the job after 20 years of growing the org. It finally got to a point that he felt like the growth was beyond what he ever imagined or wanted.
He was, on every metric, very successful. He grew the org from nothing, got millions of dollars in donations, amassed a huge base, and no one would have thought different if he just kept going.
I remember sitting down with him one-on-one and asked him why. He thought about it for a minute and said, “It’s time for someone to make it even better.”
Looking back, I think I see the exhaustion. To constantly innovate, to push people forward, to push the org, the mission…it was all one person at a time. He reached a point in both age and in life that it just wasn’t something he could keep doing.
He loved the mission so much he knew it deserved better.
If that isn’t leadership, I don’t know what is.
leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet,
Everybody switched to BlueSky, not Mastodon. So, I feel like this whole project has been a failure, especially in the marketing dept.
BlueSky barely got started in Feb, and people immediately jumped ship from Twitter by the millions. Mastodon started nine years ago, and people hardly know what it is.
Bluesky hardly challenges the establishment as far as I can see, they’re just more venture capitalists waiting to enshittify.
How is Bluesky nowadays? Seems very quiet the last time I checked
Everyone who was on Twitter that couldn’t handle X moved, it’s hopping, their algorithm is as good at discovery as Reddit or Twitter. A great deal of my social network that was on facebook moved right over.
Interesting, I guess it’s language dependent, my main social circle doesn’t speak English.
Thank you for sharing
Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.
That’s nice of him to acknowledge that.
Eugen has always seemed pretty clear-eyed about this kind of thing.
I don’t think so. He often hold down PRs and when push them almost all the times makes sure that they wont be compatible with the majority of activtypub implementations.
“This kind of thing” being big picture dynamics of how to run a social media project.
I’ve also had a mastodon PR stall, but I think they get so many, many with competing demands, and have so few staff, that it’s not really surprising that it’s a bit mess on that front…
That may have been some time ago? The team has been larger than just Eugen for quite a while now. In terms of “won’t be compatible with the majority of AP implementations”, is there a specific PR that has been changed to make something incompatible? I’m not sure I understand what you are describing. I’d love to know where we can improve, here.
Groups
Mastodon doesn’t have groups?
That first post is very good. I really appreciate the way he’s handled the first 10 years, and I hope he has fun doing whatever he does next.
