I’d encourage people to read the article, because it’s pretty no-nonsense and has some other interesting details and background information. It’s not very long, either!
But here’s the important part that the headline speaks of:
Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.
It also differentiates it from Bluesky. It was just Twitter’s endeavor to spearhead decentralization, just like Threads. Jay Graber has Bluesky’s users by the balls and at their whims just like Musk has Twitter. Anything proprietary and for profit will always eventually enshittify. Threads was born already enshittified and Bluesky is on the early part of the curve.
It isn’t proprietary though. You can run your own instance. Not decentralised atm but nothing indicating they aren’t pushing towards that.
It is proprietary, only the Authenticated Transfer protocol is open. Thus far saying it is decentralized is a controversial topic, depends on the definition of dencentralization. A regular user can only hope to host a Personal Data Server, without any real or consequential power over the network, though. Relays are not practical to be hosted by anyone but huge companies. And even then, the content and data is still under absolute power of Bluesky.
For example, if a Mastodon server decides to censor something and you don’t agree with said decision, you can change servers and still access the content and participate on the Activity Pub stream. But, if BlueSky decides to censor you or someone else, you are out of luck. Even if you host you own server, the canonical repository of the network activity is under absolute power of BlueSky.
You could host your own AT network, but it is not clear how or even if it will be able to interact with other AT networks or the canonical BlueSky network.
Here’s some sources:
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
https://next.ink/158967/bluesky-est-il-decentralise/
https://tormentnexus.substack.com/p/is-bluesky-really-decentralized-its
Relay only costs a few hundred to run, regular people are already doing this. Also have Jetstream as a lightweight alternative.
Barrier is running your own AppView, but people working on that:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
The lack of decentralisation atm is not inherent and reflects the early growth stage. If they started to act like wanks there’d be a greater push to fork and build up parallel instances. Last I checked they were still working on improving the scalability of the protocol before building it out.
In the past few months, the ownership of open-source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.
The steps taken linking Mastodon > Fediverse > Wordpress > Matt Mullenweg makes sense and is the kind of publicity/damage control the platform needs to get ahead of.
This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.
The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.
could this be cause for concern down the line? i mean this as a genuine question. i don’t really know how these things work. my understanding is some weird non-profit and profit mixture is what led to problems at openAI. but that said, i also know that the people at the company make a difference, and sam altman is very likely much worse than the mastodon CEO. anyways, it would be nice to know more about this relationship between the profit and non profit side of things.
Iirc, Mozilla has a similar structure and it causes some problems with donations
This is good news and will affect its dozens of users.
There’s dozens of us! Oh wait, yeah.
