European CommissionYour data. Your feed. Your control.
The fediverse was built on communities, not corporations, deciding how they interact.
The Digital Services Act now brings that same accountability to the rest of the web.
DJGummikuh@EUCommission is that the reason Mastodon had to register in the US as a non-profit because european/german law was so cumbersome that it was not worth the hassle?
ikuturso 🇪🇺@DJGummikuh @EUCommission what do you mean? it's not like they stopped being a German non-profit so they still have to deal with EU/German law.
@ikuturso @EUCommission actually they did https://www.heise.de/en/news/Mastodon-Laut-Finanzamt-nicht-mehr-gemeinnuetzig-9701352.html
this is not about being bound (or not) by german law, they obviously are in regard to german users, this is about having to pay taxes like a for-profit company without transparent rationale.
@DJGummikuh assuming that is outdated now since they still say they are a German non-profit as of 2026.
edit: correction, while the gGmbH that lost its non-profit status is still operating the current plan is to transition to a Belgian AISBL.
It was YOUR claim that the law is supposedly so cumbersome it isn't "worth the hassle" for them to deal with it. You now seem to have pivoted to something entirely different.
@ikuturso not really, no. They WERE a german non-profit 2021-2024, but the ministry of finance suddenly said no. They don't do that out of petty feelings but because they follow the laws, which historically are kinda obscure when it comes to non-profits. Until today I did not know that the US non-profit was created independently of the german one, I thought it was their "way out" of the quagmire that is german legislation.
@ikuturso what rubs me the wrong way is the fact that the european commission now is happy about Mastodon and calls it "european" while our legislative often causes a lot of suffering for startups and innovators to protect their vested interests (just see the german solar industry for example). Mastodon is a germany-founded project not BECAUSE of Europe but DESPITE.
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESwell after the trump election mastodon pivoted right back to europe
however europe may suck in your estimation, it's doing better than the usa
it's all relative
as an american all i can do is envy you. that doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for better. aim for better, i feel you
@benroyce please, stay safe! I fear it is going to become a LOT worse for the US before it gets a chance of getting any better (from my point of view, at this stage the only way out would be all out civil war or break up of the union) but I still hope I'm wrong.
@benroyce in all fairness, with this completely polarized and commercialized version of democracy, voting cannot really change anything. While the republicans at this point clearly are fascists, the democrats also have severe internal problems and from what it looks severe corruption issues. Are they better than the reps for the country? Clearly. But again, that's a tremendously low bar, and "better" by far does not mean "good" 😕
agreed but better is still better
ideally we take over the democratic party and hollow it out. get 50 Mamdanis
Toni Aittoniemi@benroyce @DJGummikuh Europe does have a stronger history for standing up to people’s rights against corporations.
But USA and UK have pushed Neoliberalism hard on us. For 50 years. We are quite in the deep, and many countries could flip in the coming years.
IMO we are not cutting our dependencies to the US fast enough. Those trade deals and foreign investments is how they get US and Russian money to the far right here at home. 🤔