“The people should own the town square”

Mastodon, the only remaining social network that isn’t a fascist hellhole like Twitter or Facebook, is changing its legal and operational foundation to a proper European non-profit.

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.

[…]

It also means a different role for Eugen, Mastodon’s current CEO. Handing off the overall Mastodon management will free him up to focus on product strategy where his original passion lies and he gains the most satisfaction.
↫ Official Mastodon blog

Eugen Rochko has always been clear and steadfast about Mastodon not being for sale and not accepting any outside investments despite countless offers, and after eight years of both creating and running Mastodon, it makes perfect sense to move the network and its assets to a proper European non-profit. Mastodon’s actual control over the entire federated ActivityPub network – the Fediverse – is actually limited, so it’s not like the network is dependent on Mastodon, but there’s no denying it’s the most well-known part of the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is the only social network on which OSNews is actively present (and myself, too, for that matter). By “actively present” I only mean I’m keeping an eye on any possible replies; the feed itself consists exclusively of links to our stories as soon as they’re published, and that’s it. Everything else you might encounter on social media is either legacy cruft we haven’t deleted yet, or something a third-party set up that we don’t control. RSS means it’s easy for people to set up third-party, unaffiliated accounts on any social medium posting links to our stories, and that’s entirely fine, of course.

However, corporate social media controlled by the irrational whims of delusional billionaires with totalitarian tendencies is not something we want to be a part of, so aside from visiting OSNews.com and using our RSS feeds, the only other official way to follow OSNews is on Mastodon.