https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342603/mastodon-non-profit-ownership-ceo-eugen-rochko
Eugen’s heart has always been in the right place. Mastodon is AGPL so anyone can always fork and take it in whatever direction they want. The nonprofit is probably a good step, many well governed open source projects follow this model.
However: growth in the software industry isn’t really about freedom or governance. Never has been. It’s about DISTRIBUTION: in essence how many deals do you strike to get more copies of your software out in front of more users.
The giant titans of the industry like Google and Microsoft all have fundamentally the same story. They pursued an aggressive distribution strategy coupled with exclusive dealing, at any cost. For Google it was paying whatever they needed to pay to be the default search engine in all the browsers they could. They were so megalomaniacally focused on it that they created their own browser, pumped so much money into it and did so many deals, that it became the default and dominant one. So insanely focused, they invented Android and made it the most popular mobile OS in the world – largely gave it away for free – just so that it could default to Google services. And as we know, 95% of people never change from the defaults.
For Microsoft the story was very similar – at the very beginning they were super aggressive about getting everyone to use their version of BASIC, then DOS, then Windows which finally sealed the monopoly. It was all about doing deals with anyone and everyone who was manufacturing a PC. Once they had a secure position they implemented exclusive dealing – “You can only preload Windows and Office on those PCs you sell or there will be consequences.” Thus the Windows monopoly was locked in and largely persists to this day.
You will see echoes of these monster strategies in the ascendance of virtually all tech giants, why is Meta so massive? They did a lot of viral marketing when it was new and that was a big factor. But aside from that the big amplifier was that as the beginning of the mobile revolution they fixated on getting their app preinstalled on every new phone. For a while social + mobile = Facebook was the world, and that was enough to create the company of today.
BTW the distribution dynamic even explains why the world is so tech heavy today. Marc Andreesen famously said “software is eating the world” – why is that? Because unlike all other forms of business, the marginal cost of serving your software to one more user is zero. Maybe some pennies. It is easier to go from 1 customer to 1 billion with software than with anything else in history. So any time you go up against software with some other kind of business, you are fighting a losing battle, the economics are against you.
So, what distribution deals has Mastodon done? None that I know of. This is an Achilles heel of many benevolent open source projects, they just don’t focus on the distribution. So they are always going to get beat by a company that does, regardless of the ethics.
What the solution is, I don’t know, I would love to see AGPL’ed social software cover the Internet.