Amir Ghavi is an AI and crypto ghoul and Biz Stone literally cofounded Twitter, this new seems to be about what I've come to expect from mastodon team by this point
The people in charge of maintaining Mastodon in particular though need to establish some kind of legal entity and that needs legal recognition somewhere.
Welp, don't like that. US nonprofit is a huge misnomer. For the most part they're used by the wealthy to create businesses that don't need to pay taxes.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting mass downvotes. The non profit system in America is where the wealthy go to create tax free income. The CEOs of non profits still get huge salaries. Just seems out of line with the vision of a true non profit IMO. That's why I call it a misnomer. Non profits are almost never set up to do what they actually say they are trying to do. They're often just created to get public favor and money laundering.
All I'm saying is generally when those in big tech establish a non profit, it's for the wrong reasons, or it eventually becomes the wrong reasons. Look at open AI. They had a non profit and and profit side. The non profit side essentially controlled with the for profit side did, then when they ousted the CEO for doing things that were clearly in the interest of profit over the betterment of society, the CEO had set it up so that without him the open AI ship began to sink. Then those on the board that were against him were ousted from the board. It was a hostile takeover.
I'm not saying that's going to happen with mastadon, I'm just saying they have some key players that are investors and/or long time workers in big tech and it puts a bad taste in my mouth.
The open AI governance model was doomed to fail, however, and structurally had no chance to work. By ignoring human nature and greed, things ended up with the profit side getting backing from a massive for profit company and employees voted with their pocket instead of sticking to some mission statement idealized by the non-profit board.
Germany has historically been pro-open source and the EU was just saying that the Fediverse is here to stay
That's a matter of politics. The tax authority doesn't care about the political stance of the German government. They also sometimes just take weird decisions that seem pretty random, but it's nothing political.
We’ve always been worried that developing Free and Open Source Software would not be recognized as a charitable cause by the German tax system, so we were glad when the tax office originally approved our non-profit status in 2021. But now we have received a notice from the same tax office that our non-profit status has been withdrawn. This came with no advance warning or explanation. Earlier this year we went through a successful tax audit, which in fact resulted in some favourable adjustments as we’ve been paying too much tax. Our tax advisor immediately submitted an appeal to the decision, but so far, we have no new information.
Pretty silly for something literally used by the European Union and other European Governments. Am I right in thinking the German Government is one of those?
I was wondering the same thing. Maybe in the USA it is easier due to our relaxed (almost non-existent) business oversight from the government? Not sure.
I don't know the answer but they pointed this out further in the press release:
However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.
I'd assume that this is for a reason, too. If it were advantageous to run your company out of the EU people would probably do so sometimes.
blog.joinmastodon.org
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