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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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So... by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.
At a "non-profit" (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.
Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We're watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.
For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.
Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.
That's an abuse of non-profits for financial engineering. They're intended to work exactly like companies, except without a monetary profit for shareholders.
Source: Got plenty of blank stares when I tried to set up a non-profit, "you're not yet big enough to think about tax evasion", they'd keep telling me 😒
Them's who has the gold, makes the rules.
It's not a good ratio, but assuming they managed to fill the three developer positions they were intending to when this interview was given last year and no one has left since then, that's 5 full time employees to 5 board members. I can't find more up-to-date numbers on the employee count unfortunately.
This is the enshittification fast-track, it feels like.
Anti Commercial-AI license
How so?
Is the board paid? I thought it was a volunteer position, where you meet based on a certain cadence and vote on enterprise matters.
I'm also quite wary of corp/venture/capitalist influence on masto/fedi/décentralisation.
I would presume it's not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.
For the moment, they're working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it's hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.