Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko rejected more than five Silicon Valley VC offers for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to protect the platform's nonprofit status
It's cool that @Gargron is rejecting funding from VC firms. But this is all the more reason why Mastodon needs donations. And not just Mastodon—everyone who's building free and open source Fediverse apps. https://arstechnica.com/...
@Gargron turns down VC investment for Mastodon, bless him. That's not to say that there are not investment needs & opportunities atop the Fediverse: back-end (there are already hosting services; I could see others for storage …
@djtaktix@mstdn.social @Techmeme@techhub.social The oft missed fact (by #clueless #technology #journalists) is that Rochko does not really “own” Mastodon as a service or as a piece of software. …
Have a lot of respect to Eugen on non-profit decision @joinmastodon . Though we chose to raise money back in the days I still think beautiful parts of cyberspace are public good and mostly funded by the people. https://twitter.com/...
what are the odds this goes the way other Twitter alternatives did? Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to protect non-profit status https://www.ft.com/...
Once while I was working for a non profit in a project w a large technology company, an executive slapped the table and said “this would be so much easier if we could just buy you” Like yeah that was the point https://twitter.com/...
In the early days of the Internet, most services were academic-built, open-source, and non-profit. This is why internet tools like the web work. I wish open protocol were still part of the current culture. https://www.ft.com/...
Membership model is hard. Mastodon has >2.5 million monthly active users but only 8,500 donors. It raises just £25,000 a month. https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Investors fail to realize that the key feature of mastodon is that it can neither be bought nor yield a profit. And that's why it's so beautiful. We can have nice things! https://www.ft.com/...
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It's the difference in paradigms.” https://www.ft.com/...