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I suspect you're not saying this in the obvious literal sense. Signal is a nonprofit that provides video and chat you can attach files to and there are various
by nonameiguess 3y ago
I suspect you're not saying this in the obvious literal sense. Signal is a nonprofit that provides video and chat you can attach files to and there are various other open protocols that have existed for decades with open-source clients you can use to hook into the network.
If you want one producer to many consumers, many producers to one consumer publishing platforms, those also exist. PBS and NPR are nonprofit platforms anyone can consume from and anyone can attempt to publish to, but they have to adhere to basic content-worthiness and editorial standards.
What I think you really want, and why YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok became so popular in the first place, is a platform to which anyone can publish anything, provided it isn't illegal or offensive to the platforms' more limited but not completely non-existent content guidelines, and some sort of promotional feed for that content gets directly pushed to consumers to facilitate discoverability of producers who are not already famous by some other means.
File storage seems largely orthogonal from the consumer point of view. People can already put more video than they can watch in a lifetime, more text than they can read in a lifetime, on disks they personally own. It's the producers of regularly-uploaded, new multimedia streaming content that need someone else's disk space to serve their own content from. The dilemma seems obvious here. If you place no restrictions other than it can't be illegal on what anyone can serve to others, you've promised the world effectively infinite disk space. How can a nonprofit do that, keeping in mind that nonprofits need to have some sort of mission that puts them in a legal category making them eligible to incorporate as a nonprofit in the first place? For PBS and NPR, they serve an educational mission that qualifies them under 501(c)(3). But in order to do that, they need to have an editorial standard. They have to publish content that is actually educational.
I'm actually curious now how Signal qualifies, as Signal Foundation is also a 501(c)(3). The IRS gives the following guideline:
> The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.
Pro Publica's database lists them under the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities category "Community Improvement, Capacity Building / Business and Industry" (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...), but this isn't a legal category.
I guess ask a lawyer, which I am not, but I suspect a prospective YouTube/TikTok replacement trying to convince the IRS they deserve to be exempt from taxes is going to have a tough time.
- nonameiguess 3y agoAlso, to all the people asking how developers get paid by a nonprofit. The IRS publishes the tax returns of all US nonprofits and the return includes a list of top compensated employees. Here is Signal's for 2020: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_2022010619398981.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_... They have three software developers earning between $457k and $602k per year.
- Podgajski 3y agoI just wanna publicly thank you for bringing this to peoples attention in a data driven way.