Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon’s new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced over the weekend. The service from Mastodon, a decentralized open source social network and rival to Elon Musk’s more like the old Twitter of yesteryear.
Mastodon only partially fits that bill. Although the service resembles Twitter in many ways, it relies on different infrastructure. Part of the “fediverse” — or the open social web made up of interconnected servers communicating via the ActivityPub protocol — Mastodon benefits users who no longer want to be locked into a centralized social network that can be bought and sold to new billionaire owners, like Musk .
Although Mastodon was already established as a non-profit organization in Germany in 2021, the creation of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States will allow the company to receive tax-deductible donations and other financial support. This change also comes as Mastodon has inexplicitly lost its non-profit status in Germany.
“…we received a notice from the same tax office that our nonprofit status has been revoked,” Rochko wrote on the Mastodon blog. “This happened without prior warning or explanation. Earlier this year we underwent a successful tax audit, which actually resulted in favorable adjustments because we were paying too much tax. Our tax advisor immediately appealed the decision, but so far we have no new information,” he said.
Mastodon’s daily operations were not affected by this change, since most of its revenue comes from the crowdfunding platform Patreon. He also received donations from Jeff Atwood and Mozilla of $100,000 each, which allowed the company to hire a third full-time developer this year.
However, being established as a nonprofit allows Mastodon to communicate how it differs from other social media companies. Although becoming a nonprofit in the US will help Mastodon regain its status, the company wants to remain based outside the EU.
In addition to Biz Stone, other board members include Esra’a Al Shafei, human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org; Karien Bezuidenhout, openness advocate and experienced board member of sustainable social enterprises; Amir Ghavi, partner at the law firm Fried Frank, where he is co-head of the technology transactions practice; and Felix Hlatky, Mastodon’s CFO since 2020, who initially incorporated the project as a nonprofit LLC in Germany and helped it raise additional funding.
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