His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
I take it that you missed the whole WordPress situation that developed over the last couple of months?
It’s about control over the intellectual property (trademarks, copyright) as well as control over the company which pays the developers. One does definitely not want a single person in control of these things, otherwise they can hold the whole project hostage (like Mullenweg is accused of, in the case of WordPress).
Additionally, the change also gives them a preferable tax status than the previous arrangement.
The computer program called Mastodon was (and still is for now) completely controlled by Eugen Rochko. In the future it will be controlled by a non-profit.
See this and this for more info.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.
The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.
Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.