His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
While this is a good move, I don’t think John Mastodon was making anywhere near the kind of money to turn into the next Musk or Zuck to begin with.
He’s no Tim Apple.
Or Jennifer Facebook.
Or Lenard TikTok III.
Zhang Wei can change his name to whatever the fuck he wants he’ll still ve Zhang Wei TikTok
Please, “Mr. TikTok” was my father, call me Zhang.
You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.
€60k
I read that url as blog.johnmastodon.org and for a second I was seriously wondering if that name was real lol
Not now, but in the future that was a possibility.
I mean in the future it’s a possibility I’ll be fucking Zendaya but that doesn’t mean it’s reality now does it?
Are you in a space/career where you could conceivably interact with Zendaya?
Yeah, I don’t get it. Mastodon is already huge with millions of users and hundreds of instances. Rochko is already on speaking terms with Zendaya, if you will.
mass market media can only understand the world through the lens of mass market media
The point isnt money. The point is the “benevolent dictator” model, see Matt Mullenweg and the current WordPress controversy. The whole future of that software depends on this guy because he controls the most important assets (like the trademarks) personally.
Eugen and the whole Mastodon development team want to avoid a situation like that.
I have recently been using it more to connect with others on a new subject, but now for the first time ever on the internet since early 00’s, we are all owners of it ourselves. All the great new stuff was always owned by others and frankly I’m sick of it.
I never even liked twitter. Then I followed #nature and #bloomscrolling on mastodon for a while and my home feed was a feast of beautiful pics. So now there’s one use for me for microblogging. Neat! Mastodon does what it says it does and even offers ‘default’ instances. I’d love for some GO’s to help reach that donation goal quicker, so we can all get with the program and ditch corpo social media. -Why doesn’t my library host it’s own peertube?? #MakeLibrariesGreatAgain
we are all owners of it ourselves.
Not unless you run your own instance you aren’t.
I couldn’t find any legalese on mastodon.social that my toots are somehow not my property. While it’s true that I no longer have total control over its distribution, that doesn’t mean I have somehow relinquished ownership.
You seem quite confident that that is incorrect , with your one line reply. Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Common sense. The instance admin deletes the instance (or your posts) 'cos the coffee was bad this morning… there goes “your property”.
Obviously orders of magnitude better than commercial social media but it’s no silver bullet either.
There, 3 lines.Yep, it’s still someone else’s platform, even if it’s open source.
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on… That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.
Because BlueSky has designers and Mastodon is a nightmare for new users. Same reason a lot of “superior” open source apps never take off. Devs are rarely also good designers. Until we start caring about normal people it will stay that way.
Is this actually true? The UIs don’t seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon’s design that’s bad?
Just the UX rather than the UI. It’s also missing some features like quote tweets. But it can be confusing to onboard either your own instance and know that your discoverable or to join an instance and know how discoverable you are.
Like I am a career man in IT, servers, and networking. I have no idea if I were to run my own instance, who exactly on the network would be able to see my public posts
I think the lack of quote tweets is a feature and not a bug. They facilitate a lot of antisocial behavior on other microblogging sites as I recall.
I think Mastodon changed their mind about it due to user feedback, and “Quote Posts” is on the current Mastodon roadmap. Not sure when it will be added - maybe sometime in 2025?
Oh dang. I’m sure users wanted it, but it’s too effective as a mobbing tool. I don’t think it’ll help the protocol.
I think they decided on an opt in feature.
If you block somebody that quote posts you on Bluesky, their quote post no longer has your post in it or anything pointing to you. You also can straight up delete people’s replies to your posts there. Hopefully Masto’s iteration on QRTs works similarly, though people always have the option to “screenshot dunk” instead.
Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out…
But also I don’t really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is “nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to”.
That part I understand, but how can I get those first followers? And if I am just going to join the flagship instance, why wouldn’t I just join bluesky since it has more users.
Just trying to give a reason why people might shun mastodon for blue sky, this isn’t supposed to be a real argument against Mastodon. I’m on it and love it
Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.
I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won’t see that for another couple of years… Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.
Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers.
That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?
And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn’t going to pan out.
At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don’t necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon’s user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.
An app I use for Mastodon (Called Mona) allows quote toots.
Thats a good example of the UX issues, when only 1 specific app supports a feature.
Apparently it’s either become or will become a Mastodon feature.
That is called freedom of choice, apparently people are used to totalitarian system where everything should look the same and perfect for masses.
I agree but that isn’t gonna help normies get onboard at all. If we ever realize the semantic web then those different features will be amazing. Right now it’s confusing because the other apps can’t understand the data.
Yes, but it also makes the experience worse for people that aren’t invested in the ecosystem because of privacy or similar reasons.
If I’m using an app that allows quotes, but my friend isn’t and wants to quote a post, they’re going to be annoyed.
Bluesky literally allows people to finetune controls on things like allowing quote posts and replies. Thats way more freedom that the average social media platform gives to a user.
As someone who had never used corporate social media like FB and Twitter (for my own reasons), when I found out about Mastodon back in 2017-18, I decided to join it because of its philosophy and it not being a corporate-owned walled garden. It has its flaws of course. But since I didn’t have any preconceptions, I mostly liked Mastodon as it was and didn’t find it confusing at all. That’s probably because I read up on Mastodon first to decide whether I’d want to try it, so I knew what to expect.
So I can understand how people who had been using Twitter and had their expectations shaped by it would assume that Mastodon was just a Twitter clone, not having learned anything about it beforehand. That’s why they were confused and disappointed to find that it was its own thing with its own philosophy, and had existing communities aligned with that philosophy.
Some (not all) of those who saw the differences as flaws, complained that Mastodon was crap for not having certain Twitter features, and some (not all) existing communities didn’t take kindly to demands that Mastodon abandon its philosophy and transform itself into a Twitter clone, so there were conflicts as well, and those new people didn’t stick around.
OTOH, many other new people found that they liked the different philosophy and those people did stick around, so Mastodon has grown. But IMO since most people like the Twitter-style algorithms and “broadcast/consume” culture (as opposed to Mastodon’s more personal interaction culture), Mastodon will always be a much smaller thing. But its existence is an important and good thing, like the quiet room away from the riotous street party, where you can hear each other speak.
I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.
I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.
More UX than UI. The entire on-boarding process is hard on Mastodon. Who is on there? How do we find them, etc. it’s all rather nebulous. BlueSky has been innovative with some of their ideas. Things like starter packs are simple but greatly help new users get going. It’s shocking other social networks have not thought of them.
imho: UX-wise.
a: marketing, the name Mastodon is not in common usage, at all… it’s named after a (very cool) metal band… i love it, but your avg chap will hear “mastodon” and wrinkle their nose and move on in the sea of infinite new apps that are shinier… i think this hurt Diaspora a lot as well… at the end of the day, it’s a social network and people have to actually talk about it…
like, regular schmoe’s who don’t love new words have to drunkenly say at a bar “hey add me on ____” and bluesky is so so much better for that.
… remember, regular sports bar types need to say it to each other… grandma’s in nursing homes need to be comfortable with it.
“federated” is a big word and concept, but still the best word for it… after decentralized….
….
b: probably bigger but Jack Dorsey is kinda touted as this super moral tech luminary, even though he quit bluesky for centralizing, he still added a lot of weight to that critical mass a social network needs to achieve to be useful at all.
….
c. actual UI: trying to tag a username and instance is pretty cumbersome… on twitter or insta or most things, you can type @username and tag anyone, on lemmy it’s not as big of a deal because it’s little forums organized around posts, instead of posts organized around users… on a microblogging or friend-network thing like diaspora, it’s just not easy enough.
like, granny in the nursing home isn’t going to type !sonnyboy@dopemastonny.federaloo.org… or get all that….
if you don’t abstract all that away, regular users will be afraid and you’ll get mostly techies and people ideologically motivated to join….
and of course, most of the ideologically motivated ones will take bluesky as close enough… especially because it’s gotten big enough….
Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon’s UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.
In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that’s constantly bubbling content to the top, but that’s a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.
“Why can’t the algo find me better content?”
Motherfucker, it’s social media. You have to get social with people. Make a fucking friend, right?
Like, I fixed that shit by following George Takei and Mark Hamill and some reporters. The algo shouldn’t be finding things for you. You should be finding people.
Yeah, scratching my head just the same. My only problem with Mastodon is the same I had with StumbleUpon. It’s way too good about putting neat people and conversations in front of me and I feel bad not rising to the occasion more when I just want to deadbrain.
Following hashtags is also a great way to find content you’re interested in.
deleted by creator
Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I’ve heard that they’re working on this feature.
Genie’s out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren’t. Bluesky’s were. Casuals don’t care about what-ifs or principles, it’s a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It’ll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.
I hear what you’re saying and think you have a good point. It’s very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.
There’s also just the naming problem. Social media works best when its name sounds like a place and its verbs sound like normal actions. Mastodon is a three syllable elephant (or a metal band), versus a sky or a book (note: this isn’t a hard and fast rule, since Twitter and Instagram pulled it off). And they call their posts toots. Officially, too, unlike the user-made meme of “Skeets”. Toots are farts. No politician or business professional is going to say “retoot” with a straight face.
deleted by creator
Bluesky has the USP of people being able to choose from multiple algorithms or even use multiple ones at the same time; and that certainly has resonated with a lot of people.
That sounds pretty neat. Are all the algos developed by Bluesky (i.e., corporate/billionaire/VC-driven) though?
no, but the various algorithms that control and construct these “user customized feeds” is precisely the part of bluesky that is architecturely a bottleneck, and it isn’t a bug, the ceo of bluesky has gone on record that bluesky hasn’t ruled out using this intentional centralization point to force ads on the system
Good to know, thanks!
No, anyone is able to create a “feed”
Cool, thanks.
That’s actually a fair point. I’ve seen it in the UI but I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it seems like there’s communities to moderate and curate and you can simply enable them to moderate your feed, if I’m understanding it right. If so, it sounds like a really good way to compartmentalize that stuff to allow users to sort it themselves.
Mastodon has an early days of Twitter feel to it.
I think it is because Bluesky is simpler and easier to understand, as well as more familiar to use than mastodon. My favorite streamer said he is reluctant to move to the fediverse because of how different it is and the learning curve it has to it. I’m also, like, EXTREMELY new here and understand but once you start to get used to it, its easy to see how the fediverse and this “New Social” wave is far superior; the only hard part is getting “normies” to try it long enough to build enough familiarity to see that.
Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
That and finding relevant things or anything at all sometimes; also I hear that people want to see everything like a friendica environment but don’t like the differences from the social medias they know already. I’m not sure if it is all valid or relevant because I am extremely new to the fediverse in general myself.
Mastodon could definitely do with some more discovery methods. Hopefully something like bluesky’s starter packs get implemented eventually (but I understand why they aren’t rushing it, there are abuse risks).
Best approach for now on mastodon is to follow all the hash tags you’re interested in, and then follow everyone in your feed who posts anything interesting. Takes a few weeks to ramp up, I guess. My feed got good once I was following around 1k users. You can always unfollow if someone’s annoying.
Thanks for the tip – new to fediverse altogether and my most annoying challenge is the social aspect of finding people to connect with and making an interesting feed! Lemmy has been the easiest; right above friendica!
Yeah, Lemmy is good because of the topic and threading focus. Mastodon seems better for exploring lots of issues. I’m finding them fairly complementary, they cover different bases.
Still need something I can pull my IRL friends in with though. Pixelfed might work for people who are used to Instagram, but I think it’s probably still a bit sparse content wise.
I’m starting to realize that too. I might be more active on one than the other but it’s nice to have them all because it seems like a fuller experience; I am starting to see how they are complimentary.
I think either mastodon or pixelfed. I’m sure we are due to get a specific crowd — just from the political climate at the moment.
I guess I don’t understand. Why would someone want to “find” microblogs of people they don’t already know about from elsewhere? It’s like wanting to find someone’s email to me.
Not sure; I guess as a new person, I’d like to find micro blogs about topics and things that I might agree with? I was never really into twitter or micro-blogging; I don’t really understand the appeal but I figure since it is a social media, you might want to find similar people with like-minded blogs or whatever? Like I found a new up-coming political streamer that I like from another. Maybe that isn’t what micro-blogging is for and I’m off base.
I see microblogging as a way of following the thoughts of someone you’re already interested in. Maybe a friend, maybe a famous person. But it’s not a way to get deeper understanding. Nothing profound has ever been conveyed in a tweet. So I don’t know why I would look for the tweets of strangers. It’s more of a event tracking or relationship-maintaining kind of communication tool.
Fair enough, I just figured that as a social network, part of the goal is to connect new people together. You can look at Facebook in the same way you described it. That’s what its original purpose was. To just connect with people you already know, but I feel like social networking in general has since evolved from this. We can look at things like Facebook groups for example where it is more on the lines of what I’m thinking, people join groups that interest them and interact with like minded people that they have likely never met before.
I find the idea of using hashtags as the same.
I can’t speak for others, but when I joined I was definitely confused by instances, federated internet, moderation variances, and how to operate the various ~ 4 beta apps I downloaded at the same time.
I’m definitely not a tech normie, but it was still unfamiliar and I would never have migrated if I hadn’t been fed up with Reddit.
Most people don’t want to have to look up guides to figure out how a system works, they just want to download an app that their friends all use and move on with their day. Blocking instances you don’t like? Doing research to find a “home” instance? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how did you choose an email provider, or a phone service? How do you block spam? Those are basically identical questions, and yeah, they can be annoying, but I don’t think anyone finds them that hard to comprehend.
Maybe, but those questions are part of the normal daily zeitgeist. Everyone is exposed to those concepts and services through natural osmosis, but when I wanted to join Lemmy I got an app and I didn’t realize until I started trying to use it that it was a distributed system. Then I’m like, wait what? And I had to go read some stuff about it. Wasn’t anything too crazy but I was confused at first.
It’s absolutely insane to hear that a streamer, of all types of people, said there’s a learning curve to it. Twitch is/was bewildering to me, just as a user, much less a streamer who would need to learn to configure and use OBS, etc. SMH.
Very valid! This guy is like 38 though so I think he has gotten to the age where he has streamed for so long that it’s second nature but using a new social media that isn’t familiar enough seems like a hassle I guess? I feel those closer to my age, people in their 20’s, are either a bit intimidated by it or feel that there is a lack of people and content because it’s hard to find relevant “tweets” (or whatever the equivalent is called). That was my biggest thing when I first tried it a few years ago. I had this “so… what now…?” Feeling. It felt like the social was missing from it. I’m a little bit better at finding things to engage with; such as now, but I can somewhat remember the feeling I had that originally deterred me till now.
Thanks for providing more details. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mastodon was quite a bit quieter before the Twitter exodus. I moved over during the exodus and found it to be pretty active. I understand that they have kept developing features trying to address the feeling of “what now?” when you first sign up.
bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.
Because Bluesky has a marketing budget.
“We need to get away from these billionaire-ran social media sites! Ooh, a new billionaire-ran social media site!”
Same with the people who fled reddit and set their communities up on Discord…
It has more features, and most people don’t know why Mastadon might be better. The average person doesn’t even know what a server is.
Mastodon has far more features. What it doesn’t have is centralization.
What features?
Lots of little things that add up. Some of the better include temporary muting, hashtags, and hashtag subscriptions. Plus it is resilient with no single point of failure.
I’m pretty sure Bluesky has hashtags. Subscribing to a hashtag and muting someone temporarily is nice. I think the main feature Mastadon is missing is discovery algorithms. Most people use that heavily on social media, whether they admit they value it or not.
What is this, then? It’s on the front page of a Mastodon server before you log in and afterwards the discovery section with posts, hashtags, people etc. is on the search page after login. Bluesky was far harder to get a decent feed going on till people started building lists (and those are pretty flawed in that you only follow the individuals - not the list - so it doesn’t update for subscribers).
Oh cool, I didn’t realize they added that. I tried Mastadon a while ago and couldn’t find anything interesting. I don’t use any micro blogging apps.
Bluesky has had a very fast development cycle and now already has features it didnt have 6 months ago. Mastodon’s main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version. There are features on their github ready to be merged in for 2 years and when asked, no one on the development team was able to find out why it had not been merged.
Mastodon’s main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version.
Bluesky’s main problem IMO is how it is fundamentally a profit driven venture that cannot tolerate slow and steady growth and how fundamentally, no matter what anyone including the CEO says, Bluesky must and always will unflinchingly support the interests of its investors over the interest of its users, period. To really spell things out here, the continued employment of anyone at Bluesky is fundamentally predicated on their ability and desire to do this very thing.
Bluesky is a business, after all
Someone (probably bluesky) almost definitely spent a large sum of money on marketing/astroturfing for Bluesky
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
What makes you assume Mastodon is superior as a solution for the people who are flocking to Bluesky in droves?
Considering the people pushing bluesky are the same ones usually praising government surveillance, I don’t trust it for one second. Smells like a psyop honeypot.
Can you show me an example of that? Of the people pushing Bluesky also praising government surveillance?
The Washington Post published a guide encouraging and teaching users how to migrate to the platform.
But don’t take my word for it. Jump on and look around. It’s as crowded with neoliberals as Truth Social is with Red MAGAs.
Kinda depends on what you’re filling your feed with. Mine is filled with naked gay men, and I’m pretty pleased with that.
But do the naked gay men have an exhibition fetish, especially by government agents?
Do a bunch of men who post nudes on the internet in a very public forum for free have an exhibition fetish? The world may never know…
I’m just trying to extrapolate to being supportive of government surveillance, and proving that other commenter right.
Bluesky has jack dorsey, Twitter founder, in its DNA. Dorsey cheered musk on and they call each other friends. Bluesky is not the win people want it to be, it’s just a bandaid for your conscience with the same infected wound under the surface.
You can’t pry people away from their AI algorithms
You just got the answer in the headline and you answered yourself.
It just feels more like Classic Twitter, and I can imagine some users like that vibe, despite Mastodon perhaps having the better technicals to keep social media federated. I use both and they have their audience. There are services that allow crossposting too, so I’ve got a BlueSky instance out there copying my Mastodon into that feed. Just to reach out.
The sad fact is that I will follow the writers and creatives where they migrate to. William Gibson moved to Bluesky so did I.
At least this provides more time for mastodon to become better for even wider use. Hopefully bluesky wont go to shit too soon.
Chris Titus on YouTube had a decent break down of some the technical points he liked more about it.
Your u/n pretty much sums up the delivery of your comment
Mastodon’s interface creates a self-selection bias of more technically inclined people, and is too dissimilar to twitter for the average user to want to invest time in learning it.
Russian talking points already filtering down to the average user.
I keep hammering this point every time this is brought up, PR and NAMES matter! BlueSky is a nice non threatening name, Mastadon is an awful name for an app. It sounds way too close to mastrubate.
Lol, I guess we all make different connections, but to me “mastodon” doesn’t sound like “masterbate” any more than “blue sky” sounds like “blue balls” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of… other social media founders.
Will anyone be better than Tom?
Became everyone’s friend, became a millionaire, retired, (so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff. Kind of just a quiet dude.
Goals, for sure. The guy just does whatever he wants at this point. I think he’s doing photography now?
I read this as pornography, and was like I can believe that, this is the type of thing super rich bastards do. But then I googled it and realized that I got it wrong.
The foil of Notch?
Notch was primed for that shit long before Minecraft took off. He posted early builds to 4chan, and was an active shitposter there.
The money just made him stop paying attention to anything else.
Lmaooo. I forgot about Tom. Which shows how good of a tech founder he was. Memorable, but not in the headlines every other day.
Weird man, had no idea that rupert murdock bought MySpace?
Ja der Typ.
(so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff
People’s views typically tend to move slowly but what’s the current progressive position tends to move much faster, so if he’s young enough he’ll probably eventually fall off the progressive treadmill.
Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):
I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don’t feel remotely bad about being confused, it’s honestly pretty messy.
I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We’re not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that’s very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.
We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:
But you know, it’s really okay. It doesn’t have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That’s good enough.
I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn’t the worst thing.
One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can’t search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There’s also some sort of “invisible wall” for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don’t show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don’t know whether that’s a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.
The Mastodon devs have received a grant to work on a search/visibility tool in 2025, so I definitely expect developments there
Now I am wondering if there is a way to blast a message out to various micro blog platforms at once. Kind of like Ryan’s Woof idea from the office
The app openvibe does that for Mastodon and Bluesky. You have to have an account on both, though. I think they’re adding in other services eventually.
From my limited knowledge, you’d need one account on each instance and have all of them boosting the original post, which would make them more visible in their local instances.
Wuphf!
You can write a script to hit the API of multiple sites.
What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
- That’s giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
- The article does not even hint at the existence of source code, and the announcement itself doesn’t talk about changes in that aspect either, so I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.
The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.
Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.
Someone is still in charge of the git account. No matter how many commits there are being made, unless the owner of the repo approves to merge them, it’s not happening.
And sure, someone could create a fork that includes their changes if they aren’t being merged, but then this separate fork might at some point lose compatibility with the original software. And on a purely semantic note, this fork wouldn’t be the original mastodon either.
its an org, it can have multiple owners.
Once it is an organization, yes, that’s the whole point. Right now it is still an individual, that’s the point I was trying to make.
no it’s not? https://github.com/orgs/mastodon/people
unless we’re talking about different things?
That’s a virtual structure in github, not a legal construct. Those organisations have owners (minimum 2), but if they collude and go rogue, they can do quite a lot of harm. (See also https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/roles-in-an-organization).
A formally incorporated nonprofit organization has statutes, organs, supervisory boards and all that by which they must adhere, so once set up properly, the software would be fully protected from malicious intent on a legal level.
…but you were talking about the git project in the parent comment? the rest of the thread is about company structure.
Noj profit does not have owners per se, but it is still controlled by somebody
I was thinking specifically about the github.
Ain’t he putting it under a non profit structure?
dunno. they were talking about git so i was assuming we were talking about git.
I take it that you missed the whole WordPress situation that developed over the last couple of months?
It’s about control over the intellectual property (trademarks, copyright) as well as control over the company which pays the developers. One does definitely not want a single person in control of these things, otherwise they can hold the whole project hostage (like Mullenweg is accused of, in the case of WordPress).
Additionally, the change also gives them a preferable tax status than the previous arrangement.
I’m not sure what the practicals of doing something like this will be, but it speaks a lot to who Eugen Rochko is.
He might also be an obtuse dick. I’ve gotten that vibe too. Still, good for him.
deleted by creator
152k to 1.5 milhouse is definitely an astronomical increase. Where does that number come from? For that matter…has he been funding all of this on his own up until this point?
I agree that 1.5 milhouse is quite a lot.
everything’s coming up thrillho
Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.
Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system
I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.
Absolutely nothing. I fully expect it to follow a similar trajectory.
If lemmy ever catches on ^doubt it’ll be a reddit fractal.
^doubt
You need to do double caret ^doubt^ for the proper formatting. Yeah, the markdown is a bit weird. lol
Oh? It works for me? Maybe it’s a sync hiccup.
Huh, on Jerboa I get Html tags where my escaped carets used to be. 😅
Bluesky is still running on VC cash. We haven’t seen how they plan on monetizing it yet, but if anything that is where their major fuckup will happen.
All of these applications (yes, also Lemmy and Mastodon) are feed for the AI machine. That’s where the money is.
And ads probably.
We haven’t seen how they plan on monetizing it yet
Enshittification once they have enough users, that’s usually how these things go. I swear we don’t learn.
I mean it kinda already is a Twitter, just 5 years in the past.
Nothing, which is okay. People make the mistake of thinking users have any even passing interested in a good platform with social media, not just the social connections on it.
That is why Bluesky can be so successful: It’s an absolutely smooth and effortless drop-in replacement for Twitter, and has no gathered enough momentum for it to be easy to find existing people you want to follow on it, further drawing more people who you might want to follow in. So the motivation to use it is there, and the switch itself is essentially unnoticable.
It’s open-source and has a public protocol.
You still have to go through the central hub. You can’t spin up your own, wholly independent Bluesky. You can only make your own node.
This is not true.
The App view, relay, PDS, and mobile app, code is all open source. Anyone can spin up their own version if they want.
If you want a complete copy of bluesky (reflecting the bluesky post firehose) it’s prohibitively expensive, but you can spin up your own version if you want.
The only thing that’s missing is bluesky federating anything other than PDSes by default, but you can 100% go in the other direction.
A good overview is here: What bluesky is and what bluesky is not
I wonder if we’ll see p2p versions of the firehose so people can seed posts from accounts they trust/like as a way to make firehoses affordable for the public to run
Especially considering the lead dev was the creator of beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
More than likely we’ll see in/outbox functionality similar to activitypub, so the PDSes could interop with ActivityPub and individually talk to one another
Yes, it’s not a full web3 app, but I like that these apps are heading in the right direction.
However it’s better than Twitter/Instagram. I can control my feed!
Twitter also looked great until it didn’t, it even comes from the same guy.
While at this moment BlueSky looks good, we will end up the same way sooner or later. Muskov et. al. figured out how to monetize social media. Now Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are tools to manufacture opinion. And certain opinions are worth a lot to certain people.
Reddit was open source at some point too.
it even comes from the same guy
The seed money came from Twitter, allocated by Jack Dorsey and he had a position on the board that he didn’t really make use of. He literally left because he is against centralised moderation and didn’t have enough influence to prevent bsky implementing it.
Until they build “The Algorithm” to “help you” find what
youthey want you to see or not.Feeds offer algorithm transparency and you can use alternative frontends. ATProto can’t suddenly be turned to private and disable third party access, it is intrinsically public.
It doesn’t have to be app-based, simply account based. Then the third party app doesn’t mean anything.
It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.
As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)
The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.
AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.
That’s a red herring, they still have full control of the network.
The Internet needs fewer Stalins and Hitlers and more George Washingtons.
More slave owners it is then!
It is an imperfect system, but my comment was more about leaders not clinging to power to the detriment of society.
I was just kidding. I understand what you meant. Monkey paw wish. Lol
Fuck yeah RTJ
Yeah, it’s refreshing to see someone not be an Absolute Dick™ on the internet for profit.
We should not expect greatness from the men who create these corporations, they are not great men, they are not even good or especially intelligent men. They fell into their position by luck, the one in a million triers for whom circumstance clicked into position. The only thing that sets them apart and perhaps accounts for their success is how they are so consistently open to sycophancy and manipulation by the pack of cold and savage business graduates that flock to any form of success. When a person is against type, as seemingly is the case here, they stand out and just once in a while are capable of real greatness.
Micro-blogging didn’t click for me, it’s just so much less exciting than the forum format of Reddit / Lemmy :)
I’m amazed, he actually stopped corruption before it started
I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn’t bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.
Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.
I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn’t going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it’s totally free!
I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).
I know you have to make money…but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others…why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants…but he has the money to keep the site going…without charging people 8 bucks to get “Premium” service.
The only thing Mastodon doesn’t have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.
Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?
I think it’s unlikely that Mastodon (or other federated short form blogging platforms e.g. Pelorama) will integrate live-streaming as it’s pretty far outside of the normal content they are built for. There is a project that does support live streaming and is federated though: Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/
I believe that since Tiktok is about to be banned - if no buyer is sought by Sunday, January 19; that a lot of people will flock to Red Note. Another Chinese-owned social media. Having said that, more and more people will start to try new alternative places. I like the idea of open source sites. I wished I have known this much sooner.
I like Odysee - an open source to Rumble - minus the ads. Unlike Rumble, you don’t have to pay to remove ads (among other features). Odysee never has ads on their platform. Which I like a lot.
I am also on Pixelfed. That site is pretty cool!
Another Chinese-owned social media.
Doesn’t that mean it’s just law enforcement noticing it exists and applying the law that bans TikTok away from also being banned?
yould like for it to pickup - it is a google killer app
WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.
The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.
And HTTP/2 can be used to provide video steaming, but that doesn’t mean that nginx will be the next YouTube. This isn’t a question of technical feasibility, but project focus. Though, I must admit, I don’t follow the development of fediverse software all that closely, so maybe it is on the roadmap.
I am not really tech savvy
I think you’ll find that a lot of things you think aren’t for you because of that phrase are more accessible than you realize. Look at you go!
Sure! I am always learning.
The blog discussed progress on a “privacy-respecting search tool” that could be used to explore the entire Fediverse, a collection of independent social media networks that Mastodon connects to. That could make it possible to discover more content without depending on a “For You” algorithm mining user data.
Inshallah. Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
I follow hashtags, it’s how i discover interesting content for me. I only use the search function to follow specific accounts.
So do I, but I can’t even search for my own posts. It’s frustrating.
Problem being that any instance only displays those posts under a hashtag that it knows about. Currently, if I follow #formula1 from my home instance, I’m seeing different posts than if I follow #formula1 from a certain other instance.
Will probably get better with developments in that aspect in the next few years.
that it knows about.
TIL
