Mastodon Is Transferring Its Ownership to a New Non-Profit

The Mastodon Team blog:

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.

Though there’s a lot going on right now in the social media space, with Meta’s policy zig-zag last week still reverberating, this change seems like it’s more in response to avoiding what’s going on with WordPress and Matt Mullenweg, where “WordPress” is open source and the trademarks are owned by a foundation, but that foundation has licensed the WordPress commercial trademarks exclusively to Mullenweg’s for-profit company Automattic, to protect and wield as he sees fit.

The big difference is that WordPress is almost unfathomably popular, and Mastodon is a niche platform for sophisticated social networking users.

★ Monday, 13 January 2025