Mastodon is no longer a non-profit organisation in Germany
The open-source social media platform Mastodon now has to pay more taxes on donations in Germany. A US non-profit has now been established.
(Bild: davide bonaldo/Shutterstock.com)
A German tax office has revoked the non-profit status of the decentralized open source microblogging service. This was reported by Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko in a blog post. According to Rochko, the tax office did not give a reason and one can "only speculate as to the cause".
Mastodon gGmbH was recognized as a non-profit organization by the same tax office in 2021, which has now withdrawn this status. Rochko writes that they were sceptical at the time as to whether the development of free and open software would be recognized as non-profit by the German tax system – and were all the more pleased when the application was approved. In concrete terms, the non-profit status meant that Mastodon had to pay less tax on donations.
What has changed from the perspective of the tax office is unclear to Rochko. He writes: "Our activities have been the same since 2016: We produce free, open-source software and operate a free service for the public in the form of mastodon.social. We pay employees, developers and designers as well as hosting and service fees [...]. We promote the cause of decentralized, privacy-friendly social media. Most of our revenue comes from the crowdfunding platform Patreon."
Continued operation not at risk
However, the continued operation of Mastodon is not jeopardized by the tax office's decision, Rochko emphasizes, as Patreon does not require non-profit status and income from Patreon does not count as donations. In fact, Mastodon has not issued a single donation receipt since 2021.
However, donations are to be collected in the future, which is why Mastodon has now founded a non-profit organization ("501(c)(3) non-profit entity") in the USA. The board of the new organization includes Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Larger donations have already been collected, with Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood and Mozilla contributing 100,000 US dollars each. The money would make it possible to create a third full-time developer position – until now, the Mastodon core team consisted of only two people.
heise online is also represented on Mastodon and operates its own server.
(jkj)
