This episode is presented by Invest Puerto Rico.

If you believe your business can go anywhere, Puerto Rico is the place.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Bilan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Last week, META announced some controversial changes to its content moderation policy,

so to talk about what that change means for users and how

decentralized social media could potentially replace the likes of meta, we're joined by

Macedon's CEO, Eugene Rochko. Eugene, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Well, thanks for coming on. Super excited to talk to you. So for those who don't know,

Eugene is the creator of Mastodon, which is a decentralized

open source social networking platform founded in 2016 that aims to compete with the likes of X,

threads, and blue sky. And actually, Eugene, you've had some fresh news this week, right? You plan to

create a non-profit in Europe and hand over ownership to it. Can you explain briefly what that

means to our listeners and why you're doing it? Yeah, exactly. So, so far, I've been the sole owner of Mastodon's

assets and copyright, assets including trademarks. What we're doing is we're starting a new

non-profit that will own all of these trademarks. And this is meant to avoid future issues that seem to become more

common in the open source world where there's just a conflict between the project lead and

the community in terms of like trademark enforcement and so forth. And it's just producing risks

for the project going forward and for the community as well in terms of this sort of power being

misused. It also unlocks more potential for fundraising for Macedon because there is a limit to

how much people and funds and organizations are willing to donate if there is like a single owner

versus just being in a foundation and having a board of directors and a more traditional

...