This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.
We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.
A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?
This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.
I met Stallman once when he was pamphleting outside a beloved book store because they were using meetup to organize a book signing. The guy is consistent.
I used to make so much fun of RMS in the late 90s. Then I met him and my entire view on that man changed. He absolutely is doing the world a favor and it would benefit everyone to think long and hard what a world would be like without GNU today
He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.
I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.
Eugen's presence is felt and appreciated in the community, but I can also understand why he stepped down. It's hard to represent so many people who don't always agree with you. I think back to Jack Dorsey's final days at Twitter with the NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers - he truly did not understand that his leadership had passed it's prime. The honorable thing for him to do was pass on control to someone responsible, but instead he spent his final days polarizing Twitter and guaranteeing it's own critical insolvency.
Eugen took the honorable route - I hope he remains vocal and influential in the community. It sounds like he knows himself extremely well and I applaud his honesty about the temptation for ego to ruin big projects. Most of us can't imagine the pressure in his shoes.
I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.
Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody
And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that other people say (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where nobody runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.
IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.
Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.
Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.
The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if someone else could see them, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.
I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue you for making it available on your server, even temporarily.
From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.
In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.
There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/) with its light and low-tech UI.
Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).
Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.
One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.
Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is good (and they are all flagged to death which is good), but neither do they make this comment section some kind of cesspool that would show why one is correct to distance oneself from Mastodon.
This feels very analogous to my experience with the place. As a Black person (who absolutely loves the idea and model), it's weird.
Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ever experienced via strangers on social media. E.g. some mild doxxing, you aren't really Black etc.
(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)
> with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything
That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times.
As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.
Of the group of black people, he found a group where he shared 97% of views.
I think in the US there is 'black culture' and having a black skin, and I understand your point that skin color should not be assumed to be related to a view. But I don't think that's implied here.
a) They used 'Black' as opposed to 'black', which often is used specifically to mean a particular culture around african-americans specifically, not just a signifier of skin tone.
b) The charitable interpretation is that they are Black and that they share 97% of their views.
Its impossible to think you agree with 97% of any group without assuming everyone from that group thinks the same way. Even people from just one country don't think the same way due to color of skin, if we were to assume the point is only about americans.
They didn’t say “agree with” they said “97% similar views.” This seems like a pretty informal measurement, and we don’t have much insight into what it really means.
Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl racial slurs if there wasn't the threat of being banned or flagged.
They're normal people - some of them good and some of them bad - some bright and some dim.
I'm not trying to be mean when I say this: don't kid yourself into thinking you're in a club with the cream of the crop, anywhere - you're just setting yourself up for disappointment in the best case and horror in the worst case.
People who think HN is specially smart are funny. They mistake active moderation by the community with intelligence when the registration form doesn't have an acceptance exam, so literally no reason to believe that.
I think very few people on this forum would qualify as intellectuals, most are just ordinary people. Now, some users certainly present themselves as Renaissance polymaths, but typically they just suffer from Engineer's Disease :)
Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
> Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.
A couple of decades has taught me that there's no hard boundary between those two sets. The concept of "public intellectual" itself is a bit suspect, since it becomes just another form of celebrity and/or cult leader.
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing.
The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.
Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things.
In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.
I think that in general the plain linear format is bad for debate. You always end up with one or two - often barely on topic! - threads dominating, and everything else below gets barely any attention.
For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.
It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.
There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.
You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.
There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.
That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.
I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).
Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.
It's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces.
I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread.
It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.
I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. Not sure what other communities you’re referring to, but my experience over decades of forums and social media is that HN consistently somehow avoids the toxic fate of so many other sites and services like it.
> I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here.
That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere.
These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive.
For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.
It wasn’t that great 10 or twenty years ago either. I ran a sizable community in my county in the late to mid 2000s and got death threats, human feces mailed to my home, calls and visits to my place of employment and constant threats of various kinds of lawsuits.
Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.
Kind of funny how you complain about people being mean to you and then accuse a high percentage of them of being apes flinging shit. You have some unresolved issues.
Here's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space.
I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Graber and two names with zero googleable internet presence in the last decade...
I would love to love Mastodon, but discoverability was so incredibly difficult that I just gave up. I can find people and topics so much more easily on Bluesky. The starter packs are nice too.
Does Mastodon have starter packs (lists of people to follow posting on a particular subject area, which ideally you could just click once and follow everyone)?
Personally I've always built my follow list via manual snowball sampling, so Mastodon discoverability is almost exactly the same as on twitter, except without the useless suggestions that I have to ignore at the start.
There's really only one trick to it, search for a hashtag and use the people there to get the list started, then it's the usually check at who's posting interesting stuff and who they in turn are reposting to find potential follows.
This is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
This used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
I'm not entirely sure, I wonder if that is related to the "fight" between fans of ActivityPub and fans of Bluesky AtProto where he was personally involved.
Because both protocols can actually interface together, we had people on both side of the 2 networks talking to each other in the same thread (which is truly impressive when you think about it)
Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.
It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.
Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).
Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.
It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.
> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have
Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense).
Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality.
Influencers don't go on mastodon because they can't "go viral". They can't spew dramaslop or whatever other psychological trickery to gain a greater reach.
Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them.
---
It's also not growth-hacking to a reach critical mass usage before rug-pulling its users into a pit of every expanding service enshitification.
That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks.
It's the social media network from a parallel universe where the non-profit Wikipedia/Wikimedia purchased Twitter and Discord, merged them together then got rid of the mic rooms.
There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.
I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.
The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.
But we are not talking about you. Mastodon is not culturally or technologically meaningful. It had 2.5 million users few years ago, now there are 700,000 users and numbers go down.
How can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?
There are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.
I don't really care for inactive users, I do post, and people reply to me, and i follow a bunch of people that post. I follow a bunch of hashtags so discover posts outside of my immediate circle. No ads, almost no trolls, no bots, haven't seen spam in a while, it's a great experience as a daily user.
The way you paint it feels akin to the people going back rural or even to the middle of the forest, but in the digital scape which has the possibility of being seen just following a (sometimes quite esoteric) URI.
The beauty of OG Twitter was that talking to void is all that was needed. People pumped in tons of interesting contents and it worked(I'd argue it still does work, for lots of IT relevant topics).
The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.
Well, it's just fragmented. It's hard to find people that I used to follow on Twitter. It's hard to find posts on topics I'm interested in, outside of my instance.
> I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.
This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.
Mastodon is a bubble worse than when you enable all the activity/history/etc on Google and get always "things related to what you search".
The community is so "conforming" on certain topics that you will rarely find different opinions and those get flagged etc. I was in one of the main instances, and I noticed a change at the end (like when a tiny 1% becomes 1.1% and then 1.2%, or let's say more outspoken, but it wasn't enough) before I decided not to be there anymore.
About the influencers: They are there too, it's just different how it works. But one way or another I always stumbled upon their posts, although I really disliked them because they basically foster that bubble. They are just there to be the first in a less saturated market, like the first influencers of YouTube or so. And while you believe they are not there to influence you, watching the same crap every day passively influences you, even if you don't feel it.
This made me go "back" to X, whose main issue is for me the huge amount of bots or repetitive content, which you cannot just fight with manual tooling.
And X made me go back to no social media, except for time to time to see fun stuff or (very likely) unrealistic videos. Which is ok sometimes to decompress a bit.
So in a way I have to thank Mastodon for making me see that I am just not cut out for social media.
I see bots that import from/link to other sources, bots that are clearly someone's attempts at automation. Then "classic" ad spam bots and countless porn/drawn lewd content profiles and even instances that contain nothing else.
Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
> Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash
This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon
Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
I tried two different instances and two different accounts, following people and really extensive post filtering and it still happen.
Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload.
It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
I also just read the timeline of followed accounts, and even a list of 'must-reads' for the high-value people, but I'm also aware that this isn't the way other people liked to use Twitter/Mastodon.
Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash"
Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/
I think the fediverse is great but: the specific desire for "more people that you already know coming to the Fediverse" is good; the general desire "more people" is not such a useful goal.
Yeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people.
People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.
For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.
Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
> And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.
User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"
ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes
The thing I really don't love about ATProto is its decision, or that of its dominant implementation to enforce a schema ("lexicon") on content, limiting interoperation between disparate software. This violates the Old Internet idea of software being liberal about what it accepts.
For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.
ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of over-complexity
People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?
I wish it were better. I really want to move to it, but they’ve somehow managed to even make something as simple as liking a toot unintuitive. Boost and favorite don’t fit the bill.
That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy, and all of the dark patterns of social media that the fediverse is designed to avoid.
People shouldn't be posting to get the endorphine rush from clicks or to satisfy metrics. They should post whatever they want, whenever they want. If you like what someone posts, you can follow their account, or better yet the hashtags they use. That should be sufficient.
Not having a like button seems like a good design choice TBH.
> That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy,
No, this is the digital analogue of a non-verbal expression. Basic table stakes - unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
>unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
In the context of social media most human behavior is addiction-reinforcing, because that is the behavior that those platforms are designed to reinforce. The medium is the message.
Mastodon is alright; it could be much better. And I find that disappointing. Mastodon is where some of my techie friends live (the less sociable types generally, which is ironic IMHO). Bluesky seems to have a much broader appeal. They both aspire to federation. So why not federate them together? I'm sure there are technical challenges but those aren't the reason this is not happening.
The Mastodon community actively pushes back against federating with other networks, discoverability features (having content indexed for search), or sane security mechanisms (like signing your content). This is IMHO what is holding back Mastodon. It could be better but people push back against improving it and therefore it stays a bit niche and meh.
It's basically open source twitter but minus all the loud mouths using that to self promote, spam, troll, attack each other, etc. Twitter was really nice too before the masses showed up.
Bluesky basically adds content signing, discoverability, and a few other things a to the mix. It's similarly free from all the nasty things on Twitter.
It's less federated than it could be (it was designed as a federated protocol but effectively is centralized) because big company reflexes seem to be taking over there. That's an interesting dynamic. But there's enough open source stuff there that a mastodon bridge would be feasible. And IMHO stronger crypto would be good for Mastodon. I don't see the logic of defaulting to publishing content unsigned. How is that a thing in 2025?
If i logged into my account, its probably just some german hackers, some weird people, and a bot that posts the current big ben chimes in an amusing way. I love it. Empty is good.
To me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity.
Decentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
My mastodon account on mastodon.social (the official instance of Mastodon gGmbH) was deleted without a reason after I criticized the former GDR. Not going to donate another €100 this year.
There’s not really an “official” instance. That one is one of thousands of equal peers.
I say this not to explain to you, but to clarify a common misperception that it’s somehow the “real” Mastodon. It’s not, in exactly the same way that Gmail is not the “real” email.
It seemed like the point was to say they aren’t going to donate money to a project that doesn’t respect their right to free speech.
Sure, an account could be made on a other instance, but that doesn’t change the mindset behind how the instance run by the maintainers is handled, which we can only assume will influence the project as a whole.
Sure, I could see that. I just wanted to clarify that mastodon.social is an instance, not the instance. It’s not a special blessed server. If you turn on your own new server tomorrow, other servers will treat it identically to that one.
Also, moderation policies vary wildly. The instance I run moderates much differently than mastodon.social, which tends to get a lot of criticism for being seen as chronically under-moderated, if anything.
Just to clarify, my account was banned without a reasons mentioned. The „reason“/cause field is empty. I didn’t insult anyone, I didn’t break any laws, I didn’t call to unalive people. I didn’t violate TOS. I just dared to criticize the praise of the former East German regime, called it an „Unrechtsstaat“ which is not a controversial opinion and even part of the school curriculum. They shot their own people ar the border.
I think at least one of their moderators was insulted by that personally.
I believe you. I absolutely would not have suspended your account for that. But in so many other cases, they’re too slow to respond to reports of spammers, scammers, etc.
I reported several spammers impersonating with posts like „click here to verify your account“ phishing links and they disappeared in less than 2 minutes. There is little arguing about malicious content, it‘s about political and „tone“ related moderation. You can‘t be successful by just doing X but with an authorian left point of view. It‘s just the other side of the populistic, hateful spectrum. Some people want it, I get it. I‘m still running several accounts on other instances publishing open data and aggregating news (cycling and chess related) but the content I want to read is not created by people on the Fediverse.
And? That's the beauty of it, i'm sure there's more to it to your story, but if truly you were banned for something silly, you can join another server (or even create your own!), there's a lot of alternatives.
Would you say that people who donate one hundred euro or more every year should receive some form of special treatment when it comes to their account status? Not sure why that detail is relevant. That is a very American point of view tbh, not sure why a fellow European would be parroting such currency-focused viewpoints. It's not a good look
I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"…
(I read it the same way, too.)
(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)
Agreed. I need a larger font on a lot of sites nowadays, but HN is probably the one that behaves best with simple browser zoom. I have it set to 125 or 150% depending how tired my eyes are..
> For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M.
Absolutely. That is either "Teileinkünfteverfahren" (60% of 1 Million EUR are taxed, 40% are tax-exempt) or "Abgeltungssteuer" (Government takes a 25% cut). Fun fact: there is no tax on winning the lottery in Germany!
You pretty much pay taxes on everything in the EU. In Germany there are ways you can reduce the total tax you have to pay and as far as I know you wont have to pay social security contributions on that. It'll still be 6 digit tax amount.
His salary from Mastadon annual reports 2021-2023 were 28,800, then 36,000, then 60,000 euros annually (reports for 2024 and 2025 are not released yet), so unless he had side gigs or deals, I wouldn't expect he has a ton of savings at the moment. Glad he is getting a decent payout with his exit, though unfortunately a windfall like this in one year offers less take-home than if he was paid this over several years.
I really hope he's able to find success and better work-life balance in his future endeavours
> We deeply appreciate the generosity of Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark.
> We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025).
Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure.
Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".
A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation.
I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
A quick google suggests more than a third of Germany pays for supplementary private health insurance (Zusatzversicherung) in addition to what their taxes take care of.
Generally charitable foundations figure that you can withdraw 3% per year from your savings and never run out. Remember you have to account for not only good years, but also really bad years, so even though you can average 10% over the long term in the stock market there will be decades that you are negative. There are also bond investments that are safer, but have worse return. And inflation is always eating into your savings so if they don't grow by that much every year (on average) eventually you will run out of money.
3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
> You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Or he could scrimp and put four hard years towards making manager at McDonald's. If he gets it, then he can demand they match 44k a year (his passive income at that point) or he walks.
He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.
The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.
(I'm going to assume that we actually withdraw slightly more than 3% to cover taxes, so that we are getting $30k/year after taxes).
I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.
The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.
A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.
That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.
I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.
You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.
We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.
We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.
Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
well and septic is cheaper than city services. However the city services are a small monthly cost while the well/septic is a big one every 20-30 years: budgeting is easier
30k gross, not net, so it's about equal to the median salary.
I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.
Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
thankfully nobody's forced to live in the Bay Area. With a million in the bank you could live off the interest in Portugal or an even cheaper city in Asia without touching the principal. Frankly on 40k you can even live here in Germany comfortably where Eugen hails from too.
Found it interesting they've lost status as a non-profit for tax exemption in Germany, and now establish a non-profit in the US for attracting investors while dev and ops remain in a German gGmbH.
>A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation.
>
>As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
My understanding is that the non-profit in the US exists exclusively to handle fundraising from US donors who might not be able to give to non-US organizations for tax reasons.
Or for a tax receipt. I give modestly to Wikipedia, but their lack of a Canadian entity means I direct the bulk of my giving toward entities that I get the CRA kickback for.
Though if you are in the US odds are you don't need this tax deduction anyway. Few people understand how US taxes work and so give their accountant all their deductions because they know tax deductions exist. They don't realize that the standard deduction applies and they don't/can't deduct anything.
Before the SALT cap of $10K, it could easily matter. Prior to the cap, I itemized deductions every year - easy if you have a mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and both spouses work. In those days the standard deduction was $12K, and just our state taxes exceeded that amount - forget about mortgage + charity.
Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better.
And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.
Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.
The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down.
I do wonder though if you have people doing it for the money, would that help or hinder?
One fairly busy forum I cofounded and "moderated" on, we intentionally call the moderators "Janitors" in an attempt to dissuade the sort of people who wanted "a powerful role" from even wanting to ask. It sorta mostly worked, largely because there were 7 very like minded cofounders of that forum who stared it as an escape route when a previous version was sold to a forum-monetising company (Vertical Scope, from memory).
I think it's good for the future of Mastodon as a decentralized platform to not depend essentially on any one person. After all, the web itself no longer depends on Tim Berners-Lee. That doesn't diminish their accomplishments, which were never about king-making.
Truthfully, the web never did depend entirely on Tim.
He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all.
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
Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though. I kind of know what it is, but I am not really using it. We could need, say, some replacement of Twitter-owned-by-billionaires.
> I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realise that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process.
Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.
Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.
The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).
I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.
Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.
Even networks like HN and Reddit are filled with outrage and groupthink these days. I think the kind of person that spends all their time on social media gets stuck in a weird epistemic bubble which consists of ragebait posts and opinions that fish for community approval (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc.) Sitting in that soup for too long probably warps your sense of what's actually happening in the world around you. The folks that don't want to deal with this just opt out of the open web.
I think open forums on the Internet are a bit of a lost cause unless you specifically tune your algorithm to derank ragebait, pile ons, and karma fishing. YouTube did this and the comment section improved dramatically. Though it's obviously important to remember that the draw of YouTube is the videos and not the comments, unlike microblogging sites.
YouTube is an incredible story. It used to be memed as the worst comment community of all time. But then whatever they did to it made it the mildest thing on Earth, and it has really improved that site. As you point out, that works only because no one really goes there for the comments. Except perhaps for the famous slag one:
> Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah...
> The sea-gulls around dusk, would often ride the intense thermals created by the super-heated air, drawing cooler air up from below the slag pits, combining with the hot air whoosh it would go, rushing up the precipitous cliffs, man-made mini-mountains of slag, there they would fly along the thermals updraft about 100 feet up and nearly parallel to the rail car dump line. Their white underbelly's "glowing" brilliantly orange, phoenix like they hovered there almost motionless reflecting the bright yellow-orange and red hues of the cooling slag. It was like they were on fire it was so bright in the fading light of the day. It was the only beautiful sight to see in an otherwise desolate and foreboding wasteland of glassy rock-like congealed blast furnace slag.
What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox.
> the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
This used to form spontaneously around shared events and hashtags. But ultimately the culture war poison comes for everyone. Elon is just the highest profile example of someone who got rage-poisoned and then took it out on everyone else, and is now using the platform to automate rage-spreading. Like a crap version of 28 days later, infectious viral rage.
> Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour.
Somewhere, HN moderators talk about this concept: Bad behavior is a cancer and spreads through the community.
Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.
It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.
Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.
"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job." -- Bill Murray
I was poor and recognizable in a tiny niche related to open source tools and 100% this was true. The recognition creates envy and ambitious people invest extra effort to sabotage you... Often, people who are rich see you as a threat and go all out war on you... And you don't have any buffer or support so you have to be 10x better just to stay afloat. Convincing people to work with you is much harder since you can't offer them any money and must offer pure equity... And your reputation, which fades over time, is the only thing that makes such equity potentially valuable.
OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.
In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.
After the taking Tesla private tweet that got him in trouble with the SEC he hired some people, but that didn't last long. Tesla had a PR team until a few years ago but he probably did not listen to them very much.
His companies have certainly had PR teams a various points in time. Tesla even does advertising now. But the topic is specifically about the man himself which is independent of his companies. Most very rich but (un)popular people have personal PR teams.
Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with.
Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans.
Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home solar/battery people, and spaceflight fans.)
> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic.
It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.
> and spaceflight fans.
As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today, even if I have more issues with him today than I did back then. I can confidently say that many spaceflight fans feel the same as I on this. People overstate his controversial opinions (and being a nazi is not one of them) and understate his past achievements (and continued achievements).
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.
> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today
Elon is a rare human being.
He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).
And he is also what his worshipers think (a generationally incredible technical and business visionary).
Most people, whether ordinary or extraordinary themselves, have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.
A small segment sees both sides clearly. I find it a painful experience. Overlapping extremes of inspiration and damage. But reality isn't all bubblegum and glitter go pops.
He’s an example. He has to burn massive amounts of money to counteract the fact that he wants to be the town asshole in public constantly.
If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right
> I have so much passion for Mastodon and the fediverse. The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape. And from my perspective, Mastodon is our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses. This is why I’m sticking around, albeit in a more advisory, and less public, role.
You can claim the opposite of the fediverse. The fediverse became an ultra left-wing (in terms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, not human rights). If you write one positive thing about AI/LLM based coding and you will be tarred and spring-loaded. People use Fediverse for venting, less for creating and sharing original content. Some creators on TikTok provide much more insightful content than most of the Fediverse users (searchable users/tags/posts).
IMHO social networks, centralized or decentralized, are doomed to be exploited (financially, politically) or die in boredom and self-policing. If you can find and maintain a productive niche inside the cr*p , it may work.
I was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon?
In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups?
Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.
People want to get entertained and informed. Very few original content is available and sharing of content from other platforms will lead to harsh reactions from self-claimed activists. I got insulted from completely random people who don’t follow because I didn’t remove an UTM key from an URL I shared.
In general the tone went super harsh and cult like. While neo nazis dominate X, the authoritarian left dominates on Mastodon. People call to dispossess „the rich“, „fight capitalism, support my gofundme“, antisemitism and open support of Hamas and other BS.
If you dare to reply and ask for rationality, you will get attacked personally. It‘s a toxic service like Twitter but just the other way around, and way too few insightful or funny content to lure new users. „Run your own server“ is also BS because discoverabilty is very poor.
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.
Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?
> It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.
Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
Just remember Marx created Capitalism as a strawman to argue against. Marx of course couldn't tell people the classical liberal ideas (not to be confused with what we call liberal today) of freedom were bad things - they would not like being told freedom is bad. So he found something he could push to 11 and argue against that.
He defined what "capitalism" meant, did he not? Just using the word isn't some fringe rhetoric, it's mainstream economics. Neither is categorizing ideologies after they happened - of course new ideologies would frame themselves in the noblest ways possible, so we need unrelated people as a second opinion to put their ideas into concrete terms. Insisting that we must call it "freedom" or even "classical liberal freedom" is like me creating an ideology that professes "universal happiness and free prosperity of wonder" and then insisting that everyone must call it that, regardless of what the ideology entails and whether it results in universal happiness or not.
sure he defined it. However what he defined is not what anything is based on or is so it isn't nearly as useful a term as supporters like to think.
clasical liberalism is a lot more complex than what he defined, and that is the system most of us live in. Calling it capitalism is wrong, as is thinking ecconomics based on that term matters much in the real world
I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing.
I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.
No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.
If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.
Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just include the link preview in the toot. Add a disclaimer on the UI saying "link preview comes from toot" if it makes you happy. Then Mastodon can be a good web citizen and not a force for evil.
It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things.
There are other examples. He single-handedly prevented quote tweets from being implemented in Mastodon because "they lead to toxicity", disregarding the benefits of quote tweets and the barrage of feedback supporting it.
Meanwhile, Bluesky implemented QTs in a perfect way: you can detach your post from quotes or prevent quoting entirely if you want, but the feature is there.
This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time. I don't know if we can blame him on that. The opinion started changing once the community grew bigger after the twitter migration and after Bluesky implemented it in a more sensitive way.
For anyone reading, quote tweets are now available on Mastodon.
> This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time
Eugen didn't refer to the community when he declined implenting it. So, no, community wasn't a parameter at the time regardless what their opinion was.
This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post.
There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it.
But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen personally is "blocking progress" like there's some grand conspiracy (Instead of the much more boring reality of limited dev time and having to prioritize things).
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt 7 years ago. But it has been 7 years and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more useless traffic every time someone links to a site.
7 years of "limited dev time"? How much money have the world's webmasters had to pay out of their own pockets, so that nobody developing Mastodon has to spend their precious dev time on being a good netizen and not wasting other peoples' resources?
This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string just to fuck with webmasters - ostensibly they wanted the user agent to look a little bit nicer, but what they did was evade everyone's existing blocking rules, and cause 100,000s of webmasters to have to update their blocking rules for what should've been a solved problem.
Mastodon servers' collective behaviour DDoSes the sites its users link to. They just do. They don't have to, they've never had to, but they do. And they've been in no hurry to fix it.
I've never used Mastodon and I'm not part of its community. But it irks me that its community has completely failed to remediate its collective bad behaviour, for years.
Having read the relevant discussions in Mastodon's issue tracker, my view is that it's Eugen Rochko's ideological belief that you can't just include the link preview details along with the post (which you totally could do, and it would solve the problem)... and that has led to years more DDoS than there ever needed to be.
[Admittedly, we now also have the problem of completely amoral "AI" scraping companies, who have zero qualms about pumping millions of requests into webservers, knocking them offline, completely eschewing all common indexing behaviour... but that doesn't make Mastodon's behaviour acceptable because it's no longer the worst source of callous DDoSing]
I don't know there's an assumption involved. I think for many people, it gives them the opportunity to act out on anger, shame, and other emotions they've internalized. They smell 'blood in the water' and know they can get away with it.
It seems like strixhalo is a pipe-cleaner part of sorts and the real deal may have to be Medusa Halo. That one could be a monster. The bad news is that it sounds like it's a long way off (2027 sometime) so who knows what Apple M5 or M6 Max could look like by then for competition.
This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.
We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.
A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?
Just my 2cents
This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.
Even Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.
I met Stallman once when he was pamphleting outside a beloved book store because they were using meetup to organize a book signing. The guy is consistent.
I used to make so much fun of RMS in the late 90s. Then I met him and my entire view on that man changed. He absolutely is doing the world a favor and it would benefit everyone to think long and hard what a world would be like without GNU today
He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.
I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.
Eugen's presence is felt and appreciated in the community, but I can also understand why he stepped down. It's hard to represent so many people who don't always agree with you. I think back to Jack Dorsey's final days at Twitter with the NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers - he truly did not understand that his leadership had passed it's prime. The honorable thing for him to do was pass on control to someone responsible, but instead he spent his final days polarizing Twitter and guaranteeing it's own critical insolvency.
Eugen took the honorable route - I hope he remains vocal and influential in the community. It sounds like he knows himself extremely well and I applaud his honesty about the temptation for ego to ruin big projects. Most of us can't imagine the pressure in his shoes.
I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.
Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody
And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that other people say (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where nobody runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Just use your server only for you, and ingest the federated feed.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.
IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.
Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.
Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.
The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if someone else could see them, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.
I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue you for making it available on your server, even temporarily.
From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.
In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.
There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/) with its light and low-tech UI.
Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).
Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
Do you know about gotosocial? That’s pretty much exactly what you’re describing.
Never heard of it. Thanks! I'll take a look.
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.
One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
What’s impractical about that? It seems like a great idea.
Well, I guess doing any big open source project is a bit impractical.
I wonder if it would be possible to (as a hack) come up with a set of scripts to smoosh the general Mastodon server into this shape…
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
Even Eugen himself set to position of labelling opposite opinions (1) and censorship. Fediverse, in Mastodon way, actually feeds social bubbles.
(1) https://ibb.co/qY082NjX
Looks like the inmates won again:
Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.
Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can see what Rochko means.
Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is good (and they are all flagged to death which is good), but neither do they make this comment section some kind of cesspool that would show why one is correct to distance oneself from Mastodon.
This feels very analogous to my experience with the place. As a Black person (who absolutely loves the idea and model), it's weird.
Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ever experienced via strangers on social media. E.g. some mild doxxing, you aren't really Black etc.
(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)
>(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)
What do you mean?
> with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything
That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times.
As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.
I think his point is that we all have more in common as humans than differences, and yet the differences prevail, which is a shame (and unhealthy).
So we make our own choices about where we spend our time, and some of us simply disconnect.
> interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything
Maybe because you say things like that? In what world is people's skin color related to their views?
Of the group of black people, he found a group where he shared 97% of views.
I think in the US there is 'black culture' and having a black skin, and I understand your point that skin color should not be assumed to be related to a view. But I don't think that's implied here.
I don't think that's what they were trying to imply there.
Unfortunately that's what they wrote? What other interpretation could there be?
a) They used 'Black' as opposed to 'black', which often is used specifically to mean a particular culture around african-americans specifically, not just a signifier of skin tone. b) The charitable interpretation is that they are Black and that they share 97% of their views.
Its impossible to think you agree with 97% of any group without assuming everyone from that group thinks the same way. Even people from just one country don't think the same way due to color of skin, if we were to assume the point is only about americans.
They didn’t say “agree with” they said “97% similar views.” This seems like a pretty informal measurement, and we don’t have much insight into what it really means.
Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl racial slurs if there wasn't the threat of being banned or flagged.
They're normal people - some of them good and some of them bad - some bright and some dim.
I'm not trying to be mean when I say this: don't kid yourself into thinking you're in a club with the cream of the crop, anywhere - you're just setting yourself up for disappointment in the best case and horror in the worst case.
People who think HN is specially smart are funny. They mistake active moderation by the community with intelligence when the registration form doesn't have an acceptance exam, so literally no reason to believe that.
Plenty of people trying to hurl racial slurs here, but they're mostly all shadow banned and not really truly participating in the discussions.
I think very few people on this forum would qualify as intellectuals, most are just ordinary people. Now, some users certainly present themselves as Renaissance polymaths, but typically they just suffer from Engineer's Disease :)
Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
> Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.
Why do you have to wonder? Are people on HN just abstract text to you? Just talk to people.
I promise you, you can be both.
A couple of decades has taught me that there's no hard boundary between those two sets. The concept of "public intellectual" itself is a bit suspect, since it becomes just another form of celebrity and/or cult leader.
HN comments rarely resolve only into personal insults. It's sometimes accompanied with the actual arguments but never just insults
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
I would never, ever want to have anything to do with running any kind of online community these days, or even anything adjacent to one.
Let's salute dang for his service.
For real though. The moderation on this site is on point.
I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing.
The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.
Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things.
In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.
I think that in general the plain linear format is bad for debate. You always end up with one or two - often barely on topic! - threads dominating, and everything else below gets barely any attention.
For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.
It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.
There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.
You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.
There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.
That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.
I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).
Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.
It's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces.
I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread.
It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.
I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. Not sure what other communities you’re referring to, but my experience over decades of forums and social media is that HN consistently somehow avoids the toxic fate of so many other sites and services like it.
> I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here.
That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere.
These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive.
For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.
It's on-par with extreme moderation to the point where they will flag/mute whoever disagrees with them
It wasn’t that great 10 or twenty years ago either. I ran a sizable community in my county in the late to mid 2000s and got death threats, human feces mailed to my home, calls and visits to my place of employment and constant threats of various kinds of lawsuits.
Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.
Kind of funny how you complain about people being mean to you and then accuse a high percentage of them of being apes flinging shit. You have some unresolved issues.
I think when you get literal shit mailed to you, it’s ok to think that people can be shit-flinging apes.
"Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour" -- Rochko
rhymes with
"You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, you get like a million messages, right, of stuff that come in. It's usually not good," -- Zuckerberg
Kudos to Rochko for starting Mastodon and having the grit to guide it through 10 years of explosive growth!
> and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit
This is refreshing and exemplary; especially in the light of recent wordpress, rubygems, or similar power struggle dramas.
Here's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space.
I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Graber and two names with zero googleable internet presence in the last decade...
What do you dislike about Biz Stone being on the board? He’s a mensch with a highly relevant credential by all accounts I’ve heard.
Nothing "real", just a knee-jerk reaction to him being a Twitter cofounder (and patent holder).
I would love to love Mastodon, but discoverability was so incredibly difficult that I just gave up. I can find people and topics so much more easily on Bluesky. The starter packs are nice too.
Does Mastodon have starter packs (lists of people to follow posting on a particular subject area, which ideally you could just click once and follow everyone)?
There is an open proposal to implement it without some of Bluesky's downsides.
https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections
The main downside being the ability to opt out of starter packs (they can be a source of low quality interactions).
Personally I've always built my follow list via manual snowball sampling, so Mastodon discoverability is almost exactly the same as on twitter, except without the useless suggestions that I have to ignore at the start.
There's really only one trick to it, search for a hashtag and use the people there to get the list started, then it's the usually check at who's posting interesting stuff and who they in turn are reposting to find potential follows.
I have this impression too, I open Mastodon and the timeline usually doesn’t have many interesting things.
This is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
This used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.
@dang if possible please stick this reply to the top, @gargron is the author himself (the CEO stepping down)
Which controversial topic did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse?
Why would it be their responsibility to succeed at topics in the fediverse more than it's your responsibility?
So which topics did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse @Maken?
I personally failed to push harder for DIDs so switching servers without losing followers is easier.
A thread with a user that devolved into name calling.
Or the Twitter fight where he encouraged people to DOS the rival.
Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.
Do you mean dox?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
I know we must have some terminally online fediverse users here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.
I'm not entirely sure, I wonder if that is related to the "fight" between fans of ActivityPub and fans of Bluesky AtProto where he was personally involved.
Because both protocols can actually interface together, we had people on both side of the 2 networks talking to each other in the same thread (which is truly impressive when you think about it)
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115074431325055303
Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.
It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.
Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).
Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.
It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.
> ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).
$300M? Or $1.5T? Because $300B isn't tiny compared to $1.5B.
Do you mean $300M for ByteDance? Because $300B dwarfs $1.5B and $3.4B.
> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have
Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense).
Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality.
Influencers don't go on mastodon because they can't "go viral". They can't spew dramaslop or whatever other psychological trickery to gain a greater reach.
Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them.
---
It's also not growth-hacking to a reach critical mass usage before rug-pulling its users into a pit of every expanding service enshitification.
That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks.
It's the social media network from a parallel universe where the non-profit Wikipedia/Wikimedia purchased Twitter and Discord, merged them together then got rid of the mic rooms.
There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.
I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.
The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.
Here is the thing. None of that matters to me. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.
But we are not talking about you. Mastodon is not culturally or technologically meaningful. It had 2.5 million users few years ago, now there are 700,000 users and numbers go down.
How can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?
There are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.
I don't really care for inactive users, I do post, and people reply to me, and i follow a bunch of people that post. I follow a bunch of hashtags so discover posts outside of my immediate circle. No ads, almost no trolls, no bots, haven't seen spam in a while, it's a great experience as a daily user.
The way you paint it feels akin to the people going back rural or even to the middle of the forest, but in the digital scape which has the possibility of being seen just following a (sometimes quite esoteric) URI.
The beauty of OG Twitter was that talking to void is all that was needed. People pumped in tons of interesting contents and it worked(I'd argue it still does work, for lots of IT relevant topics).
The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.
I walked away a long time ago when I realized how fragmented and prone to drama it was.
Well, it's just fragmented. It's hard to find people that I used to follow on Twitter. It's hard to find posts on topics I'm interested in, outside of my instance.
sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago
> I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.
This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.
Mastodon is a bubble worse than when you enable all the activity/history/etc on Google and get always "things related to what you search".
The community is so "conforming" on certain topics that you will rarely find different opinions and those get flagged etc. I was in one of the main instances, and I noticed a change at the end (like when a tiny 1% becomes 1.1% and then 1.2%, or let's say more outspoken, but it wasn't enough) before I decided not to be there anymore.
About the influencers: They are there too, it's just different how it works. But one way or another I always stumbled upon their posts, although I really disliked them because they basically foster that bubble. They are just there to be the first in a less saturated market, like the first influencers of YouTube or so. And while you believe they are not there to influence you, watching the same crap every day passively influences you, even if you don't feel it.
This made me go "back" to X, whose main issue is for me the huge amount of bots or repetitive content, which you cannot just fight with manual tooling.
And X made me go back to no social media, except for time to time to see fun stuff or (very likely) unrealistic videos. Which is ok sometimes to decompress a bit.
So in a way I have to thank Mastodon for making me see that I am just not cut out for social media.
Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
I see bots that import from/link to other sources, bots that are clearly someone's attempts at automation. Then "classic" ad spam bots and countless porn/drawn lewd content profiles and even instances that contain nothing else.
Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
> Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash
This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon
Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
I tried two different instances and two different accounts, following people and really extensive post filtering and it still happen.
Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload.
It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
Curious: Are you looking at the local/federated timeline, or just the people you follow?
I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.
I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.
I also just read the timeline of followed accounts, and even a list of 'must-reads' for the high-value people, but I'm also aware that this isn't the way other people liked to use Twitter/Mastodon.
Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash"
Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/
I think the fediverse is great but: the specific desire for "more people that you already know coming to the Fediverse" is good; the general desire "more people" is not such a useful goal.
Yeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people.
People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.
For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
On boarding is too complicated for your average social user
https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.
If you cannot reach UX that normal people will use, you're building for the very few
tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy
Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.
Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
> And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.
User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"
ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes
Ah, to be clear, I was thinking of ActivityPub.
How’s ATProto work for the 99.9% of people who don’t own domains?
You just get a *.bsky.social handle.
The thing I really don't love about ATProto is its decision, or that of its dominant implementation to enforce a schema ("lexicon") on content, limiting interoperation between disparate software. This violates the Old Internet idea of software being liberal about what it accepts.
For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.
That's an incorrect assessment
Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept
https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined
ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of over-complexity
how do you measure "too complicted"?
Didn't measure what complicated means, these are the words people who churned use
Generally the first point is server selection. That's too complicated for most users
Somehow I doubt it is.
People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?
Don't buy it
> Don't buy it
Not listening to users is when learning stops
You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up
> You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up
I don't. I make these analogies, because they show that almost everyone is able to deal with the complexity of selecting a service provider.
I acknowledge that it is not their expected sign up flow, though, because they you can only expect what you already know.
That’s actually why I never tried it. Server selection. Choice paralysis. Gave up.
how did you get internet access?
It's another centralised service
I wish it were better. I really want to move to it, but they’ve somehow managed to even make something as simple as liking a toot unintuitive. Boost and favorite don’t fit the bill.
Honest question: Why is it important to like a toot? What benefit does liking one provide?
It indicates to the poster that someone (you) liked their post. Perhaps that encourages them to make other similar posts.
In which case either favorite or bookmark will do the trick, correct? Why worry whether you're clicking the "wrong" one?
Boost will also do it, but it has more side effects.
In real life, your friend tells you a moderately funny story that happened to him. You tell the friend, "nice story" (that's a like).
Another friend tells you a super funny story. You then go and tell other friends this same funny story. (that's a boost).
Different real life things, that are captured by digital tools.
What I have a problem with are quote tweets, which are like talking about someone in front of them, without including them in the conversation.
Because I don’t want to boost or add the toot to a perma-list, I just want to give the person that posted something I like some acknowledgement.
That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy, and all of the dark patterns of social media that the fediverse is designed to avoid.
People shouldn't be posting to get the endorphine rush from clicks or to satisfy metrics. They should post whatever they want, whenever they want. If you like what someone posts, you can follow their account, or better yet the hashtags they use. That should be sufficient.
Not having a like button seems like a good design choice TBH.
> That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy,
No, this is the digital analogue of a non-verbal expression. Basic table stakes - unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
>unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
In the context of social media most human behavior is addiction-reinforcing, because that is the behavior that those platforms are designed to reinforce. The medium is the message.
The issue with social media isn’t with encouraging or content creators, it is with how consumers are conditioned.
The incentives are related and create a feedback loop. Give someone a number and they'll do whatever it takes to make that number go up.
It isn’t important, it’s just something I would like to do.
how is clicking a heart or a star - depending on the UI - unintuitive?
Mastodon is alright; it could be much better. And I find that disappointing. Mastodon is where some of my techie friends live (the less sociable types generally, which is ironic IMHO). Bluesky seems to have a much broader appeal. They both aspire to federation. So why not federate them together? I'm sure there are technical challenges but those aren't the reason this is not happening.
The Mastodon community actively pushes back against federating with other networks, discoverability features (having content indexed for search), or sane security mechanisms (like signing your content). This is IMHO what is holding back Mastodon. It could be better but people push back against improving it and therefore it stays a bit niche and meh.
It's basically open source twitter but minus all the loud mouths using that to self promote, spam, troll, attack each other, etc. Twitter was really nice too before the masses showed up.
Bluesky basically adds content signing, discoverability, and a few other things a to the mix. It's similarly free from all the nasty things on Twitter.
It's less federated than it could be (it was designed as a federated protocol but effectively is centralized) because big company reflexes seem to be taking over there. That's an interesting dynamic. But there's enough open source stuff there that a mastodon bridge would be feasible. And IMHO stronger crypto would be good for Mastodon. I don't see the logic of defaulting to publishing content unsigned. How is that a thing in 2025?
> It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
You mean like HN?
If i logged into my account, its probably just some german hackers, some weird people, and a bot that posts the current big ben chimes in an amusing way. I love it. Empty is good.
At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
I view it as a good thing.
Yes, it's disappointing frankly to see how many smart people still are on X.
Then again it's disappointing to see how many people with fuck you money don't say "fuck you".
>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
To me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity.
"Just be kind of like email" is better.
Decentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
My mastodon account on mastodon.social (the official instance of Mastodon gGmbH) was deleted without a reason after I criticized the former GDR. Not going to donate another €100 this year.
There’s not really an “official” instance. That one is one of thousands of equal peers.
I say this not to explain to you, but to clarify a common misperception that it’s somehow the “real” Mastodon. It’s not, in exactly the same way that Gmail is not the “real” email.
mastodon.social is operated by the Mastodon gGmbH, the core body behind the project.
Correct, but there’s nothing special or privileged about it. The others aren’t knock-offs or imitations. They’re all peers.
It seemed like the point was to say they aren’t going to donate money to a project that doesn’t respect their right to free speech.
Sure, an account could be made on a other instance, but that doesn’t change the mindset behind how the instance run by the maintainers is handled, which we can only assume will influence the project as a whole.
Sure, I could see that. I just wanted to clarify that mastodon.social is an instance, not the instance. It’s not a special blessed server. If you turn on your own new server tomorrow, other servers will treat it identically to that one.
Also, moderation policies vary wildly. The instance I run moderates much differently than mastodon.social, which tends to get a lot of criticism for being seen as chronically under-moderated, if anything.
Just to clarify, my account was banned without a reasons mentioned. The „reason“/cause field is empty. I didn’t insult anyone, I didn’t break any laws, I didn’t call to unalive people. I didn’t violate TOS. I just dared to criticize the praise of the former East German regime, called it an „Unrechtsstaat“ which is not a controversial opinion and even part of the school curriculum. They shot their own people ar the border.
I think at least one of their moderators was insulted by that personally.
I believe you. I absolutely would not have suspended your account for that. But in so many other cases, they’re too slow to respond to reports of spammers, scammers, etc.
I reported several spammers impersonating with posts like „click here to verify your account“ phishing links and they disappeared in less than 2 minutes. There is little arguing about malicious content, it‘s about political and „tone“ related moderation. You can‘t be successful by just doing X but with an authorian left point of view. It‘s just the other side of the populistic, hateful spectrum. Some people want it, I get it. I‘m still running several accounts on other instances publishing open data and aggregating news (cycling and chess related) but the content I want to read is not created by people on the Fediverse.
They're not saying it is.
And? That's the beauty of it, i'm sure there's more to it to your story, but if truly you were banned for something silly, you can join another server (or even create your own!), there's a lot of alternatives.
You can't move a banned account, you lose all followers.
What a revolution in social media
Would you say that people who donate one hundred euro or more every year should receive some form of special treatment when it comes to their account status? Not sure why that detail is relevant. That is a very American point of view tbh, not sure why a fellow European would be parroting such currency-focused viewpoints. It's not a good look
It’s rude to pretend OP said something they didn’t say. And a little side insult to Americans, nice.
at least a single word would have been nice. I've not insulted anyone.
Godspeed, John Mastodon
Haha, you might have slexdyia.
I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"…
(I read it the same way, too.)
(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)
It’s a Mastodon community joke.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...
TIL! (Though I'd also wager that originated from someone having to squint at more bad kerning.)
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon
HN is simple enough that it scales well with browser zoom, and so (imo) is excusable for not following that 12pt standard.
Agreed. I need a larger font on a lot of sites nowadays, but HN is probably the one that behaves best with simple browser zoom. I have it set to 125 or 150% depending how tired my eyes are..
> keming
Kerning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning
Also, if that was the mistake, it's kinda funny given the likelihood it was caused by a kerning issue.
An intentional "pun".
E.g., reddit.com/r/keming
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400017
He’s also receiving €1 million as a one-time compensation. Not quite enough to retire on that.
Here's more information on that: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
> For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M.
Was already linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971902
Still enough to have a good lil nest egg that generates okay-ish passive income if invested correctly.
@ 4% that's €40k/year
more than what most regular people have
Does he not have to pay taxes on that 1m euros in the eu?
Absolutely. That is either "Teileinkünfteverfahren" (60% of 1 Million EUR are taxed, 40% are tax-exempt) or "Abgeltungssteuer" (Government takes a 25% cut). Fun fact: there is no tax on winning the lottery in Germany!
Loto is well-known (in France) as the poors' taxes
Only if you lose (not win) :) (irrelevant side node: poker is treated as skill based game in Germany, hence you have to pay taxes on wins)
Sure he does. He lives in Germany. They are gonna rip that 1 million apart.
Some countries have 0 rate if sold after x years. Although many had it in the past, they’ve started eliminating it.
And some countries have the opposite - they tax your invested gains as if you turned them to cash
I guess top rate in Germany is 45%
If you live in the west, 47.5% even. But that's income tax, whether that applies here depends on how it's structured.
You pretty much pay taxes on everything in the EU. In Germany there are ways you can reduce the total tax you have to pay and as far as I know you wont have to pay social security contributions on that. It'll still be 6 digit tax amount.
You're assuming zero savings to begin with, which is a weird assumption.
His salary from Mastadon annual reports 2021-2023 were 28,800, then 36,000, then 60,000 euros annually (reports for 2024 and 2025 are not released yet), so unless he had side gigs or deals, I wouldn't expect he has a ton of savings at the moment. Glad he is getting a decent payout with his exit, though unfortunately a windfall like this in one year offers less take-home than if he was paid this over several years.
I really hope he's able to find success and better work-life balance in his future endeavours
It doesn't say he's retiring (afaik) - he might still have compensation
Hence why I said it’s not enough to retire on it.
It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and control your costs.
Do you have a reference for this?
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Damn, where is Mastodon getting €1M from?
Also where do you get from that you can't retire with €1M. It seems very feasible as long as you keep a frugal lifestyle.
> We deeply appreciate the generosity of Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark.
> We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025).
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure.
Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".
A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation.
I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
Healthcare is taken care of by his taxes.
A quick google suggests more than a third of Germany pays for supplementary private health insurance (Zusatzversicherung) in addition to what their taxes take care of.
Generally charitable foundations figure that you can withdraw 3% per year from your savings and never run out. Remember you have to account for not only good years, but also really bad years, so even though you can average 10% over the long term in the stock market there will be decades that you are negative. There are also bond investments that are safer, but have worse return. And inflation is always eating into your savings so if they don't grow by that much every year (on average) eventually you will run out of money.
3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
> You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Or he could scrimp and put four hard years towards making manager at McDonald's. If he gets it, then he can demand they match 44k a year (his passive income at that point) or he walks.
He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.
Compound interest is one helluva drug!
The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.
(I'm going to assume that we actually withdraw slightly more than 3% to cover taxes, so that we are getting $30k/year after taxes).
I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.
The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.
A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.
That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.
I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.
You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.
We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.
We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.
Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
well and septic is cheaper than city services. However the city services are a small monthly cost while the well/septic is a big one every 20-30 years: budgeting is easier
>You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Hey, good for you. But 30k per year is a very good salary in European countries such as Spain, where the median salary is just a bit over half that.
30k gross, not net, so it's about equal to the median salary.
I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.
Shit Americans say...
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
Why is retiring mentioned? Most jobs pay zero when you leave so 1M is cool.
He was the founder and head of the company, so probably wouldn’t have had to step down if he didn’t want to.
Because that is the common thing someone will do when they get what looks like a large sum of money. It isn't the only option, but it is a common one.
€1M would not even cover the property tax to retire in the cheapest bay area home.
Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.
Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
thankfully nobody's forced to live in the Bay Area. With a million in the bank you could live off the interest in Portugal or an even cheaper city in Asia without touching the principal. Frankly on 40k you can even live here in Germany comfortably where Eugen hails from too.
This guy doesnt drama. Seems very selfish aware and down to earth. Good on him. Good to hear in a world of Wordpress and Ruby dramas.
Found it interesting they've lost status as a non-profit for tax exemption in Germany, and now establish a non-profit in the US for attracting investors while dev and ops remain in a German gGmbH.
They're part-way through setting up a Belgian non-profit entity (AISBL) which will be the main organisation.
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
>A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. > >As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
My understanding is that the non-profit in the US exists exclusively to handle fundraising from US donors who might not be able to give to non-US organizations for tax reasons.
Or for a tax receipt. I give modestly to Wikipedia, but their lack of a Canadian entity means I direct the bulk of my giving toward entities that I get the CRA kickback for.
Though if you are in the US odds are you don't need this tax deduction anyway. Few people understand how US taxes work and so give their accountant all their deductions because they know tax deductions exist. They don't realize that the standard deduction applies and they don't/can't deduct anything.
(if you do apply deductions then this matters)
Before the SALT cap of $10K, it could easily matter. Prior to the cap, I itemized deductions every year - easy if you have a mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and both spouses work. In those days the standard deduction was $12K, and just our state taxes exceeded that amount - forget about mortgage + charity.
Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better.
And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.
Related:
The Future Is Ours to Build – Together
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Mastodon: Building for the Long Term
https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404
This is the problem with a stressful role, with little compensation. Most people wouldn't want to be in this position.
It sounds like anyone that runs a moderately sized open source project.
More money would solve most of these issues.
I used to volunteer moderate a very busy forum.
Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.
The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down.
I do wonder though if you have people doing it for the money, would that help or hinder?
One fairly busy forum I cofounded and "moderated" on, we intentionally call the moderators "Janitors" in an attempt to dissuade the sort of people who wanted "a powerful role" from even wanting to ask. It sorta mostly worked, largely because there were 7 very like minded cofounders of that forum who stared it as an escape route when a previous version was sold to a forum-monetising company (Vertical Scope, from memory).
“Moderator” used to sound like a boring role as well once upon a time.
You can probavly get better, more accountable moderators, if it meant losing your job for violating the rules.
Money could also be invested in developers to maintain Mastadon and issue security fixes.
Title is: My next chapter with Mastodon
Ah, CEO can't help but use corporate-speech.
How to break up your girlfriend: "I've been thinking about the future... you're not in it.".
I think it's good for the future of Mastodon as a decentralized platform to not depend essentially on any one person. After all, the web itself no longer depends on Tim Berners-Lee. That doesn't diminish their accomplishments, which were never about king-making.
Truthfully, the web never did depend entirely on Tim.
He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all.
The W3C was its own thing.
Also kind of like John Gruber and Markdown.pl
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.
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.
So worse... a committee.
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
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.
He sounds like a remarkable human.
10 years leading. I would have fatigued.
Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though. I kind of know what it is, but I am not really using it. We could need, say, some replacement of Twitter-owned-by-billionaires.
>Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though.
No it absolutely does not.
The only people Mastodon needs are people who respect the culture, everyone else can fuck off to Bluesky.
> I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realise that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process.
Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.
Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.
The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).
I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.
Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.
0: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...
1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545
2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165
3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349
4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...
5: https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t
Even networks like HN and Reddit are filled with outrage and groupthink these days. I think the kind of person that spends all their time on social media gets stuck in a weird epistemic bubble which consists of ragebait posts and opinions that fish for community approval (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc.) Sitting in that soup for too long probably warps your sense of what's actually happening in the world around you. The folks that don't want to deal with this just opt out of the open web.
I think open forums on the Internet are a bit of a lost cause unless you specifically tune your algorithm to derank ragebait, pile ons, and karma fishing. YouTube did this and the comment section improved dramatically. Though it's obviously important to remember that the draw of YouTube is the videos and not the comments, unlike microblogging sites.
YouTube is an incredible story. It used to be memed as the worst comment community of all time. But then whatever they did to it made it the mildest thing on Earth, and it has really improved that site. As you point out, that works only because no one really goes there for the comments. Except perhaps for the famous slag one:
> Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah...
> The sea-gulls around dusk, would often ride the intense thermals created by the super-heated air, drawing cooler air up from below the slag pits, combining with the hot air whoosh it would go, rushing up the precipitous cliffs, man-made mini-mountains of slag, there they would fly along the thermals updraft about 100 feet up and nearly parallel to the rail car dump line. Their white underbelly's "glowing" brilliantly orange, phoenix like they hovered there almost motionless reflecting the bright yellow-orange and red hues of the cooling slag. It was like they were on fire it was so bright in the fading light of the day. It was the only beautiful sight to see in an otherwise desolate and foreboding wasteland of glassy rock-like congealed blast furnace slag.
- mrc109 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw
beautiful
This Video Will Make You Angry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox.
> the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
This used to form spontaneously around shared events and hashtags. But ultimately the culture war poison comes for everyone. Elon is just the highest profile example of someone who got rage-poisoned and then took it out on everyone else, and is now using the platform to automate rage-spreading. Like a crap version of 28 days later, infectious viral rage.
> Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour.
Somewhere, HN moderators talk about this concept: Bad behavior is a cancer and spreads through the community.
Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
Why? I think a lot of people are going to be pretty happy about this.
Yeah, the people who hate him. That's what I mean.
A very relatable post and a good explanation for stepping down.
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
You can say that again.
"The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape."
This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad
dunno what world you live in, but that was the line that resonated the most for me...
I think it's a great quote. Even bsky is part of the problem until regular people can host nodes in it.
Fedi is never going to be consistent, but it's also always going to be accessible to everyone. And therefore truly by the people for the people.
Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.
It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.
Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
It's better than the vast majority of social media, but it's still a walled garden. I wouldn't use it for anything important to me.
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro credits to access those characters on my keyboard
those new Discord ads sure are great!
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.
unfortunately he can only pay you back in 1925 dollars so youll have to take the dime as down payment and get the farmer enrolled in a BNPL
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.
Yeah, he'd spit it out because it tastes like corn-fed, feed-lot crap.
"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job." -- Bill Murray
I've heard a similar maxim that being rich is fantastic, rich and famous is good, poor is bad, poor and famous is a nightmare.
The quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.
I was poor and recognizable in a tiny niche related to open source tools and 100% this was true. The recognition creates envy and ambitious people invest extra effort to sabotage you... Often, people who are rich see you as a threat and go all out war on you... And you don't have any buffer or support so you have to be 10x better just to stay afloat. Convincing people to work with you is much harder since you can't offer them any money and must offer pure equity... And your reputation, which fades over time, is the only thing that makes such equity potentially valuable.
OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.
In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.
And if you can't buy popularity you can always buy a really high wall.
> With money you can always buy popularity easily
I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?
What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has
Well he was doing a good job at buying popularity until he fired his PR team so..
Elon Musk has never had a PR team... Which is maybe the better point. (Or if he did, he hasn't had one in the 15+ years I've been watching him.)
After the taking Tesla private tweet that got him in trouble with the SEC he hired some people, but that didn't last long. Tesla had a PR team until a few years ago but he probably did not listen to them very much.
His companies have certainly had PR teams a various points in time. Tesla even does advertising now. But the topic is specifically about the man himself which is independent of his companies. Most very rich but (un)popular people have personal PR teams.
Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with.
Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans.
Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home solar/battery people, and spaceflight fans.)
> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic.
It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.
> and spaceflight fans.
As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today, even if I have more issues with him today than I did back then. I can confidently say that many spaceflight fans feel the same as I on this. People overstate his controversial opinions (and being a nazi is not one of them) and understate his past achievements (and continued achievements).
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.
> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today
Elon is a rare human being.
He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).
And he is also what his worshipers think (a generationally incredible technical and business visionary).
Most people, whether ordinary or extraordinary themselves, have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.
A small segment sees both sides clearly. I find it a painful experience. Overlapping extremes of inspiration and damage. But reality isn't all bubblegum and glitter go pops.
is your idea of "pro-America" being a white supremacist state by chance? that hitler salute not subtle enough?
Yes this is what people like you do, go around calling everyone nazis and making up hitler salutes.
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists"
You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”
He’s an example. He has to burn massive amounts of money to counteract the fact that he wants to be the town asshole in public constantly.
If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right
Yeah, giving Nazi salutes is a great way to buy popularity.
It's effective for buying popularity with a crowd that likes nazi salutes.
It’s certainly a good way to get people like you to talk about him.
> I have so much passion for Mastodon and the fediverse. The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape. And from my perspective, Mastodon is our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses. This is why I’m sticking around, albeit in a more advisory, and less public, role.
Wait ’til the masses hear about this one.
You can claim the opposite of the fediverse. The fediverse became an ultra left-wing (in terms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, not human rights). If you write one positive thing about AI/LLM based coding and you will be tarred and spring-loaded. People use Fediverse for venting, less for creating and sharing original content. Some creators on TikTok provide much more insightful content than most of the Fediverse users (searchable users/tags/posts).
IMHO social networks, centralized or decentralized, are doomed to be exploited (financially, politically) or die in boredom and self-policing. If you can find and maintain a productive niche inside the cr*p , it may work.
human rights and sustainability also
That would be great but wasn’t the case. I‘m a „green“ guy and cycling advocate but we failed to get traction on the Fediverse.
I instantly had to think about a cyclist activist on Mastodon who was all over the news after he got killed by a car:
https://digitalcourage.social/@natenom
I was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon?
In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups?
Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.
People want to get entertained and informed. Very few original content is available and sharing of content from other platforms will lead to harsh reactions from self-claimed activists. I got insulted from completely random people who don’t follow because I didn’t remove an UTM key from an URL I shared.
In general the tone went super harsh and cult like. While neo nazis dominate X, the authoritarian left dominates on Mastodon. People call to dispossess „the rich“, „fight capitalism, support my gofundme“, antisemitism and open support of Hamas and other BS.
If you dare to reply and ask for rationality, you will get attacked personally. It‘s a toxic service like Twitter but just the other way around, and way too few insightful or funny content to lure new users. „Run your own server“ is also BS because discoverabilty is very poor.
Wait now I love the fediverse.
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.
Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...
> It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.
Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
You would really have to ask a person to know that.
The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
Just remember Marx created Capitalism as a strawman to argue against. Marx of course couldn't tell people the classical liberal ideas (not to be confused with what we call liberal today) of freedom were bad things - they would not like being told freedom is bad. So he found something he could push to 11 and argue against that.
He defined what "capitalism" meant, did he not? Just using the word isn't some fringe rhetoric, it's mainstream economics. Neither is categorizing ideologies after they happened - of course new ideologies would frame themselves in the noblest ways possible, so we need unrelated people as a second opinion to put their ideas into concrete terms. Insisting that we must call it "freedom" or even "classical liberal freedom" is like me creating an ideology that professes "universal happiness and free prosperity of wonder" and then insisting that everyone must call it that, regardless of what the ideology entails and whether it results in universal happiness or not.
sure he defined it. However what he defined is not what anything is based on or is so it isn't nearly as useful a term as supporters like to think.
clasical liberalism is a lot more complex than what he defined, and that is the system most of us live in. Calling it capitalism is wrong, as is thinking ecconomics based on that term matters much in the real world
Mastodon seems pretty unhealthy to me.
I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing.
I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.
It's the people you follow and perhaps your Mastodon instance. I suggest setting one up on your own.
No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.
If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.
Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
It highly depends on an instance you join and a people you follow.
I never see that on the php instance.
this was on the math instance
Does Jeff Bezos even dress well?
Fantastic!
Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just include the link preview in the toot. Add a disclaimer on the UI saying "link preview comes from toot" if it makes you happy. Then Mastodon can be a good web citizen and not a force for evil.
It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things.
[0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecommen...
I don't see his linked comment as blocking progress. Both of those questions are very valid and something I'd expect from a good core maintainer.
Disclaimer: I don't have any additional context.
There are other examples. He single-handedly prevented quote tweets from being implemented in Mastodon because "they lead to toxicity", disregarding the benefits of quote tweets and the barrage of feedback supporting it.
Meanwhile, Bluesky implemented QTs in a perfect way: you can detach your post from quotes or prevent quoting entirely if you want, but the feature is there.
This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time. I don't know if we can blame him on that. The opinion started changing once the community grew bigger after the twitter migration and after Bluesky implemented it in a more sensitive way.
For anyone reading, quote tweets are now available on Mastodon.
> This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time
Eugen didn't refer to the community when he declined implenting it. So, no, community wasn't a parameter at the time regardless what their opinion was.
The context for those who wonder what "single-handedly" means: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726
He was right!
This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post.
There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it.
But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen personally is "blocking progress" like there's some grand conspiracy (Instead of the much more boring reality of limited dev time and having to prioritize things).
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt 7 years ago. But it has been 7 years and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more useless traffic every time someone links to a site.
7 years of "limited dev time"? How much money have the world's webmasters had to pay out of their own pockets, so that nobody developing Mastodon has to spend their precious dev time on being a good netizen and not wasting other peoples' resources?
This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string just to fuck with webmasters - ostensibly they wanted the user agent to look a little bit nicer, but what they did was evade everyone's existing blocking rules, and cause 100,000s of webmasters to have to update their blocking rules for what should've been a solved problem.
It sounds like you have a personal kind of beef with Mastodon?
It's not personal, but Mastodon has DDoSed my website and many others, e.g.:
https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/
https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me/
https://chris.partridge.tech/2022/request-amplification-in-m...
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/mastodon_delays_fix_d...
Mastodon servers' collective behaviour DDoSes the sites its users link to. They just do. They don't have to, they've never had to, but they do. And they've been in no hurry to fix it.
I've never used Mastodon and I'm not part of its community. But it irks me that its community has completely failed to remediate its collective bad behaviour, for years.
Having read the relevant discussions in Mastodon's issue tracker, my view is that it's Eugen Rochko's ideological belief that you can't just include the link preview details along with the post (which you totally could do, and it would solve the problem)... and that has led to years more DDoS than there ever needed to be.
[Admittedly, we now also have the problem of completely amoral "AI" scraping companies, who have zero qualms about pumping millions of requests into webservers, knocking them offline, completely eschewing all common indexing behaviour... but that doesn't make Mastodon's behaviour acceptable because it's no longer the worst source of callous DDoSing]
> automatically assume the worst intentions
I don't know there's an assumption involved. I think for many people, it gives them the opportunity to act out on anger, shame, and other emotions they've internalized. They smell 'blood in the water' and know they can get away with it.
It seems like strixhalo is a pipe-cleaner part of sorts and the real deal may have to be Medusa Halo. That one could be a monster. The bad news is that it sounds like it's a long way off (2027 sometime) so who knows what Apple M5 or M6 Max could look like by then for competition.
Did you perhaps intend to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968611
i think this is on the wrong thread
Why does Mastodon need an CEO? A lefty-dominated "fEdErAtIoN" network, which isn't really federated if you go against their itch?