The main question: what does this mean for MetaFilter and the MetaFilter community?The short answer: not much! Day to day operations aren't changing, staffing isn't changing, and basically nothing happening with the change of ownership directly affects anyone other than me and mathowie. So this isn't news about something happening to the site in any visible, obvious way, but it's still kind of aso it's something I wanted to let the community know about in detail, both in terms of what's happened with the transfer and of where we're going next.Matt and I have talked periodically about the idea of him giving up ownership of the site ever since I took over managing the business in 2015 when he left for Slack. It's remained a hypothetical for a couple years; as it is, Matt's been almost entirely unplugged from the site already, handling a few monthly/quarterly/yearly business administration issues but otherwise totally hands-off of MetaFilter, and so the day-to-day difference between owning it and not has been close to nil.But there are still some implications of ownership. The ultimate legal and financial liability was still Matt's, and, because of some of the details of how he set up the company's accounts back in the day, it has also been difficult to totally untangle him from the company while he remains the owner. So he's been carrying around stress and responsibility tied to continuing to own it, without much upside.In tandem with all that, Matt's absentee ownership has also left me with incomplete control over some details of the business administration, a situation which has been manageable but at times needlessly complicated and stressful for me and the rest of the team.So I've been talking with Matt, and talking with the MeFi staff, for the last couple months about the possibilities and details of improving the situation for the future. And after a bunch of discussion we settled on a plan where I take over ownership of the company, Matt completely divests himself of any liability for and financial entanglement with MetaFilter, and he leaves with a final withdrawal of money in exchange for giving up all ownership of the site.The change is as minimal as we could make it: from Matt as sole shareholder of MetaFilter Network Inc. to me as sole shareholder, with everything else kept the same. We've done it this way for a couple reasons:1. This setup keeps the transfer of ownership simple and lets us move forward more quickly and with less legal expense.2. Of the possible alternate plans involving a more complicated sale or a simultaneous restructuring of the business, none made compelling financial or legal sense right now.Those possible alternate plans -- in terms of who exactly owns the site and how, and of alternate business structures like creating a 501(c)(3) entity -- are things I'll continue to look at, though based on the research I've done and professional advice I've sought over the last couple months it's unlikely that MetaFilter as the business exists right now would benefit from making any of those changes. That might not be the case in the future, so it'll stay on my radar.My top priority for MetaFilter is and has been maintaining the continuity of the community and the site long-term. I want MetaFilter to stick around, and to keep being MetaFilter. I've spent the last two and a half years, since Matt left for Slack, doing what I can to further that goal; taking responsibility for ownership of the site means I can do so with greater confidence.When I started working here ten years ago, I was proud already of MetaFilter's longevity and its unique community presence on the web; I still feel that way today. I don't know what the web, or the ad economy, will look like in ten years, or five or even two, and we could see changes good or bad, small or large, to some of the basic assumptions underlying MetaFilter as a business. The future is the future, and I can't predict it.But I can say this: I believe in MetaFilter as a place, as an idea, as a community. Whatever uncertainty there is about the future, Icertain that the core of what this place has been for the last 18 years, the ethos of thoughtfulness and decency and togetherness that define MetaFilter as a community, can and will persist.And my goal is to support that idea, to support this community, as long as I can, however I can. MetaFilter, imperfect and idiosyncratic as it may be, is important. It's important to me; it's important to all of you; and it's important to an internet at large that continues to struggle with cultural toxicity and cash-before-community profit motives.People ask me sometimes what I see myself doing in the future. Sometimes they ask because I've been telling them about something that's been hard, something that's been tiring, something that I don't like about how things are going or how something went down on the site. I think they think ten years is a long time to work somewhere, or that I'm complaining because I don't like my job. So they ask.And I tell them I hope I'm still doing this. I tell them the hard shit is just hard shit, and it passes. I tell them I love my work, that I love this place, that you don't find your dream job often if you ever find it at all. I tell them that if it had to come down to it, I'd be doing this for free in my scraped-up spare time, digging cash out of the couch to keep the lights on. MetaFilter is one of the most important things in my life, and that's largely because it's such an important part of so many other people's lives. It's worth the effort.That's what owning MetaFilter means to me. It means being able to say that I know that, at every turn, I can do whatever is best for the site, for the community, for the MetaFilter staff. It's a daunting responsibility but one I'm grateful for the opportunity to take on; I'm thankful for the trust folks have put in me over the years and I intend to continue to vindicate that trust in the years to come.One unavoidable outcome of this process is that we have less in savings than we did before. I worked out a compromise with Matt that leaves us with a reasonable basic buffer of savings to work with, but it's important to me that we build that buffer back up to help insure against any future financial shocks.Consequently, we’re launching a new fundraising push today, to help bolster the site’s financial situation. I’ve include more details in a separate post dedicated to the fundraising , but in brief I want to reiterate how important the generosity of the MetaFilter community over the last few years has been to our ability to continue to operate the site for you all. It has made a fundamental difference in our ability to maintain a workable level of staffing and keep the site functional on the technical side. I can never really say thank you enough for that, but at the moment I need to ask for more help from those who can afford it so that we can secure MeFi’s future as much as possible.That’s the news. I’m really glad I’m able to be a steward of something so important to me and others, and I’m glad to have the future of the site be a little more certain and our business operations more streamlined and self-contained now.I want to thank you all again for being part of this community, for being individually and collectively the reason this place exists and the engine that makes it go. And I want to thank my fellow team members for sticking through all the bumpy moments and tough stretches and weirdness this place sometimes throws at us and helping me keep MetaFilter working.If you have any questions, concerns, etc, feel free to chat about it in here or, if you prefer to, mefimail me or drop the mod team a line via the contact form