A Primer on Mastodon's New Board Members
With Mastodon founding a US-based 501c3, the question has come up: who are the board members? What do they do? And why were they chosen?
We dug into Mastodon's new US-based non-profit entity, and checked out who their board members are, and what they've accomplished in the past.
Some parts of the Mastodon community are hostile towards VC Funding, AI, and cryptocurrency, particularly because of their entanglement with enshittification and hype cycles. These people are worried that this relationship will lead Mastodon down an unhealthy path that prioritizes the wrong things. It’s a totally understandable concern, but it’s important to remember the mission and purpose of Mastodon’s US entity: to manage and raise donations in the United States. This is not an executive department making decisions for the Mastodon project, and they aren’t shareholders expecting to make some kind of financial returns. A healthy board requires a diverse set of opinions and experiences that educate the real decision-makers so they can get multiple perspectives on problems they need to solve. It seems like this board’s variety of backgrounds has been set up to do exactly that.
...This really doesn't soothe my concerns at all! Actually, up until right now, I hadn't even been paying enough attention to have concerns. So... if anything, this article has inspired concerns I didn't already have.
It's like if the server at a restaurant came up to you and said "now I know what you're thinking... we did in fact recently hire some cannibals. But they only work in the business office, not the kitchen!"
Yeah I had no idea. Now I have one and I'm immediately considering moving to a different fedi microblog platform. I've already lost quite a bit of trust for Rochko due to his extreme eagerness to federate with Meta.
The people who are in charge of collecting donations and deciding how those funds are used absolutely have power that can be used to exert control.
The caníbals are in the kitchen and now have control which can be used to decide on the procurement of food.
Seriously, if the damn creator of mastodon it's making 60k Eur in Germany, there's no hope for Foss being sustainable.
