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It depends what the alternative is. A vacuum is worse for example.

There's no power vacuum. There's now a Mastodon nonprofit organization with an executive director and leadership team.

So worse... a committee.

It's an open source project. What exactly are you expecting?

Keep in mind that every for-profit publicly-owned corporation has many shareholders, as well as a board of directors, which is, gasp, a committee!

yes, but they typically hire a singular CEO to drive a cohesive vision and strategy with the check that they can fire the CEO at anytime.

Yes, and Mastodon has an executive director (as I already mentioned), which is basically the nonprofit equivalent of a CEO.

Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't sure that's what that role was intended to do.

A committee from the beginning would definitely prevent something from really ever starting. Could you imagine Linus working under a committee to get Linux running?

At some point, you do have people that need to step back. If you turn it over to another single person, they could pivot and "ruin" the product. By turning it over to a committee, hopefully, any ruinous ideas get overruled. At least in theory

Right, and it's TBD if that will turn out to be more or less effective. I'm hopeful, but more voices isn't always better.

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