The current chaos in WordPress caused by Matt seems like a good time to remind folks that the Mastodon “community” websites and trademarks are 100% owned by one man, despite pleas from current and former project members to make Mastodon a foundation with a board.

81 comments

    1. @pedrosanta @avdi Ehhh fck. I don't begrudge a guy or gal making some coin on their hard work, I just wish there were more models for it besides capitalism and the consolidation and enshittification it entails.

    1. No it’s the same situation, Matt owns everything. A foundation means little if you never “got around” to giving the foundation it actual control over anything.

  1. @avdi The WordPress Foundation has a board, but it seems to be Matt plus two people with no current relationship to the product or foundation.

    So it’s not just a matter of going through formalities, Mastodon will have to do it in a credible, non-gameable way.

    1. Let’s be real here: there were no formalities with WP. Not only is the WP foundation Matt and two cardboard cut-outs, it turns out per recent filings that it owns NOTHING – not the website, not the repository, not the forums, and not the trademarks. There is no foundation involved in WP ownership, there’s just Matt. There also *happens* to be a foundation with a barebones website that issued a scholarship once a year.

    1. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Contributors asked him to put them under a foundation; instead he put them under a nonprofit owned by only him.

  2. @avdi I think one of the worst things to come out of the Twitter exodus was everyone thinking Mastodon *was* the Fediverse, and big instances are the way to go.

    Still hoping some other #Fediverse platforms emerge that are operationally sane to deploy & maintain.

    1. @Magnus KI4OTK I guess they don’t even have to emerge.

      Hubzilla has been around since 2015, for ten months longer than Mastodon. It’s a “decentralised social CMS”, think Facebook meets WordPress the blogging platform meets WordPress the CMS meets DropBox meets Google Web Services etc. plus features that neither of them have.

      It’s a feature monster, but it happily runs on a bog-standard LAMP stack, and it’s said to require fewer server resources doing so than Mastodon with a tiny fraction of the features. Unlike Mastodon, you don’t have to hack into the source code for extra features or to change certain parameters.

      Oh, and it can be deployed using Docker. Without having to build your own Docker containers by hand. Even without having to download ready-made and potentially outdated Docker containers. hubzilla-docker automatically generates three Docker containers, one of which installs an always up-to-date Hubzilla the natural way by cloning the git repository.

      CC: @Avdi Grimm

      #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Docker

    1. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Contributors asked him to put them under a foundation; instead he put them under a nonprofit owned by only him.

    2. My understanding is that Mastodon GmbH (or gGmbH?) owns the trademark (etc), Eugen’s the owner of Mastodon GmbH, and the US wing has no ownership or governance relationship to Mastodon GmbH (or at least didn’t in the spring, when they were launched). But that’s just my understanding, I don’t know of definitive public sources for most of this.

      @liaizon@wake.st @avdi@avdi.codes

    1. Which is solely owned by Eugen, to the disappointment of his collaborators, who wanted a foundation. And now isn’t even a nonprofit anymore. I really wish folks would do their research.

  3. @avdi yeah, I think this is also why forking code and making different versions of code compatible with each other is super important. In addition to WordPress, I think the recent issues the NixOS community faced is a good example. Having project forks provides users with a level of autonomy and stability in case the main repo goes belly up for some reason or if they want features the core developer(s) don't/won't add.

  4. @avdi But Mastodon can be fork and you can just remove Mastadon's logo. So there's no one holding you back from hosting your own instance. It's just like a FOSS blueprint for Twitter, right?

  5. @avdi From reading his occasional writing, I'm pretty sure that, two or three years ago, if you suggested to MattM that he would do and say the things he is doing and saying today, he would sincerely say you were full of shit. People can surprise themselves in terrible ways.

  6. @avdi Hmm. Where would you suggest migrating to within fedi? I've been looking for another place for a bit, preferably one like you're talking about (one that's managed well, not owned by one person, etc)

  7. @avdi At least we can all export and move over if we want/need/feel like it. None of us are that "invested" in a singular service/website; we only have one thing in common: we are all on the Fediverse (and nobody can stop us :-))

  8. @avdi it should have never come to this. Co-mingling a software project with a social network was a mistake. There should have been clear lines.

    e.g., nobody demands Postfix make a foundation with a board because its job is to route emails, not foster the Postfix Community.

    Mastodon should have just stuck to being an upstanding citizen of the Fediverse instead of pushing its own branding so hard

    1. @feld @avdi Maybe it's because I joined Mastodon relatively recently, but to me it looks like its goal, maybe even in branding (at least the look and feel part of it), is to be a sort of clone of TSNFKAT. Which IMHO isn't a good omen… (besides hurting usability and compatibility)

    2. @feld @avdi It's Eugen Rochko. There is one person responsible for this conflation and he did it deliberately, from the beginning for his own benefit. If you talk about the WordPress debacle, people specifically say the name of who is doing it.

  9. @avdi Welll… Mastodon is at least built on standards that are implemented elsewhere, so it's a lot easier to move when shit hits the fan.
    I think, at worst, you'd lose userdata (because database schemes might not be compatible) but you can probably write things to make that migration doable…

    In the case of WordPress, well… If you wanna move to a "competing implementation"… There aren't really any "other WordPresses", they are completely different systems (themes and plugins won't be compatible) so you'll need to rebuild pretty much everything from scratch.
    Sure, you can fork WP but now you've also added additional development to do.

    1. @landley @avdi I mean, of course they’re not unproblematic, but at least there are points of possible leverage there in a way there aren’t with “the whole thing is legally entirely in the power of one unstable asshole”

  10. @avdi Mastodon does not own the protocol and is not the only software that can use the protocol. The Fediverse does not depend on Mastodon. Mastodon depends on the fediverse.

  11. @avdi Thing is though, the Mastodon guy isn't an American techbro. And also: there are alternatives to Mastodon and as far as I can tell, ActivityPub isn't a dictatorship.

    I don't tbh find it all that threatening if WP goes pearshaped, either. I could just rebuild my websites with a different CMS if I have to. A nuisance but not the end of the world.

  12. @avdi
    It's not just the virtual world.
    I was watching the Summer Olympics sailing, & saw they were racing Lasers, a small, fast single-handed sailboat.
    Except these didn't have the Laser sunburst insignia on the sail, these were "ILC", or International Laser Class, which came about because of bickering about who owned the design, as it was made by licensees in many countries, and the original designer holds the trademark on the sunburst logo, and won't play nicely…

  13. @avdi Not a 1:1 comparison, but given what we're going through in openSUSE wrt SUSE S.A. right now (luckily it's still "friendly" at this point) the time to sort this out is certainly now.

    Rather than relying on "trust me bro" sort of thinking.

    1. With WP we’re in the middle of an object lesson of just how much havoc, distress, legal jeopardy, and loss-of-faith can happen when an open-source community doesn’t realize one man owns the trademarks, major pieces of community infrastructure, domains, and the forums where everyone discusses development of the software. As far as I can tell, ALL of that is true of Mastodon, including the largest and “default” Mastodon instance.

      1. @avdi

        You realise that most successful open source projects have a single owner or owning organization, moral if not actual owner?

        The WP debacle is more about fractured community and competing enterprise aims. That also isn't a rare situation.

        But it's not common in federated software. Forks and evolution are common, they live and die for all the usual community reasons including ego.

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