[HN Gopher] Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change o...
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Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
Author : andypiper
Score : 195 points
Date : 2025-01-13 10:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.joinmastodon.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.joinmastodon.org)
| Kye wrote:
| I was hoping to see something like this in light of the WordPress
| situation and the lack of independence in the non-profit.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Mastodon is on the right track. They've been doing so much right,
| the UX has improved considerably.
|
| I think there's some mainstream appeal, but there are also
| ecosystem issues that aren't solved easily, as well as a lack of
| algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
| andypiper wrote:
| My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools
| (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of
| sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see.
| I think there's something to be said for the ability to have
| that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess
| I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I
| definitely don't love it when I don't have a level of control
| of it for myself.
| Kye wrote:
| What is functionally different from these tools other than
| the protocol providing a firehose of posts and APIs to filter
| it for people to make custom feeds?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of
| people deem very important.
|
| Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it
| still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more
| years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot
| of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to
| them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business,
| tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by
| major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell
| more ads).
| sunshowers wrote:
| I use both Mastodon and Bluesky.
|
| I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their
| own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use
| a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
| runako wrote:
| I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that
| the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
|
| I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of
| their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is
| posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that
| unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I
| will generally not see their posts on Mastodon.
|
| Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but
| in practice that means I want to surface every post of the
| infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another
| comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for
| exactly this.
|
| IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I
| already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified
| membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on
| frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other
| algorithms people come up with.
| allenu wrote:
| > I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix
| of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was
| "who is posting right now?"
|
| This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would
| constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes
| whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less
| of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are
| always online. Of course, you can just stop following those
| people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is
| when you first follow them.
|
| I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the
| feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS
| feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most
| recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a
| profile to see all their posts in chronological order
| instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought
| might be a better way to go.
| BeetleB wrote:
| You can make lists in Mastodon, and put the noisy people
| there and exclude them from your main feed.
|
| You can put all your Asian follows in a separate list as
| well if you want to quickly catch up with them.
|
| No algorithm has its down sides, but I doubt they'll put in
| an algorithm that I'll like more than "no algorithm".
|
| I'll add that I think algorithms should be the
| responsibility of the client, and not the server. The web
| client is merely one client. There's not much preventing
| any of the numerous other clients from implementing an
| algorithm.
| runako wrote:
| Bluesky also has a followers feed like Mastodon. I use
| that one sometimes, but it's easy to toggle over to one
| of the algorithmic feeds as well. Sort of best of both.
|
| Worth noting that some algorithms can be done client-
| side, but it may not be feasible or desirable to do so.
| For example in the open protocol of email, some huge
| majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering
| client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I
| suspect the same could become true of any open protocol
| like Mastodon or AT.
|
| Either way, I think the proliferation of sites is good
| for the digital ecosystem.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| When did Twitter hit it's viral growth curve? And what was
| the user count before and after? To be clear, it's not
| necessarily the case that a platform _needs_ to optimize for
| growth, but I wonder what can be expected without the sticky
| features that "addict" the most users to a given platform.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied
| in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major
| companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell
| more ads)
|
| You might have inadvertently fallen for the fallacy of
| composition. What to describe is only one type of algorithm;
| one meant to maximize engagement/revenue.
|
| Mastodon has the potential for a user-centric "Bring your own
| algorithm" which may work similar block lists. Users could
| subscribe to algorithms matching their preferences by
| boosting or penalizing posts based on topics I like or don't
| like. This would be very valuable to me, and will reduce the
| need for moderation - I won't even see the random ragebait or
| porn spam
| dingnuts wrote:
| Mastodon simply cannot be that user centric because the
| user can only control the subset of the Fediverse that your
| instance is able and allowed to see. Given that single user
| instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of
| blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls,
| which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks, your choice of
| homeserver matters more than anything. And of course,
| there's no good way to choose one as a new user. Most
| newcomers will simply give up when faced with the choice.
| Even with great interest I've gotten stuck at this stage
| multiple times, myself. No homeserver seems welcoming, and
| they're all a little culty.
|
| HN looks at the federated model and thinks about how much
| control the homeserver operator has and imagine themselves
| in that position as a "user" when the truth is that each
| homeserver is a small fiefdom run by a dictator and users
| have even less control over what they see there than they
| do in the corporate networks
| vidarh wrote:
| I used a single user instance, and it's perfectly viable.
| If anything it's _less_ hassle with respect to blocks.
|
| Relays can also easily mitigate the issue you describe,
| as can an algo provider that simply boost all entries it
| puts in your feed.
| meatmanek wrote:
| I also run a single-user instance, and it's fine. Maybe
| I'm not prolific enough or marginalized enough to attract
| much attention, but I've only had to block one person in
| 2 years.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >Given that single user instances are largely nonviable
| due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse
|
| Yeah, that's nonsense. I've been running my own single-
| user instance since 2018 and server blocks by other
| instance administrators have never caused any problems
| for my use of the Fediverse.
|
| I also follow a bunch of other people who run their own
| and never see any comments suggesting it's a problem for
| them either.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| > no good way to choose one as a new user.
|
| I agree, lots of things I have just never gotten around
| to because I had do chose something, choice can sometimes
| be a bad thing.
| braiamp wrote:
| > I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic
| curation is worth to them
|
| They don't. They are addicted to it. Imagine a world where
| you scroll in Instagram and you reach the end. What are you
| going to do?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Not too long ago IG removed the notice that would appear
| that "you're all caught up" when you had scrolled down to
| the end of the posts of those you follow; now it just
| continues to show you "algorithmically suggested posts" so
| you can't even tell
| AlexandrB wrote:
| "Addicted" is negative value. Back when Facebook was not a
| never-ending feed, people would reach the end and _go do
| something productive_ instead of spending all night on it.
| hbn wrote:
| I've said this for a while too. People got mad when their
| chronological feeds disappeared, and I think it should be
| kept around as a separate view you can pop into (and this
| does exist on twitter), but people follow so many accounts,
| and those accounts post so much, chances are when you go into
| the chronological feed, you won't see anything that really
| interests you. That's my experience any time I go into the
| Following tab on twitter.
|
| It seems much wiser to seed out a new post from someone to a
| few people's feeds, see if it gets their interest, and if so,
| boost it to more people that would be interested.
| darthrupert wrote:
| How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and
| it's exactly as I remember it.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Some of the changes are listed here:
| https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
| glenstein wrote:
| I had the same experience as you. But now, if you go to
| preferences, there's an option to disable "advanced web
| interface". If you uncheck that, you get the simpler view.
|
| Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface
| used to just be the default.
| kps wrote:
| > the UX has improved considerably.
|
| Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme`
| yet?
| gargron wrote:
| Yeah.
| kps wrote:
| Thanks; that does seem to be the case, and (as someone
| afflicted by astigmatic halation) I will no longer avoid
| following Mastodon links.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > lack of algorithmic curation,
|
| in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social
| networks. They were absolutely better without it.
| lxgr wrote:
| There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from
| their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all.
|
| The most important one is that both your identity and your data
| are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not
| easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact
| that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really
| isn't, in my view.
|
| Discoverability is another big one, and while I generally don't
| care much for algorithmically curated feeds myself, not being
| able to do a handle or keyword search is a dealbreaker for me.
|
| Compared to Bluesky, which makes efforts to modularize/federate
| all essential components of a social network, Mastodon's
| approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely
| rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep
| to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
| ekimekim wrote:
| > ownership moves to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere
| in Europe, with the exact location still to be finalized. The
| organization is currently headquartered in Germany, where it was
| a nonprofit until its charitable status was stripped last year.
|
| So it sounds like Mastodon _was_ run by a non-profit, but the
| non-profit ran afoul of some legal issues, and they 're now
| creating a fixed version? This seems to be administrative
| details, not news.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Well Rochko is stepping down as CEO as part of the
| restructuring, which is a fairly big development.
| lutoma wrote:
| The difference is that the previous non-profit was a not-for-
| profit corporation (gGmbh). This legal form is roughly
| analogous to most US non-profits (501(c)3 Inc.) and meant that
| as founder, Eugen Rochko still had more or less full control
| over the organization.
|
| As I understand it, the new organization is supposed to be a
| non-profit association (e.V.), which is a distinct type of
| organization under German law that enforces democratic
| decision-making and enables people to become voting members of
| the NGO.
|
| It's a bit difficult to explain as there is no analogue in most
| common law systems (sadly).
| Tomte wrote:
| > enables people to become voting members of the NGO.
|
| Only if the current management approves. You can keep control
| over the club, if you wish, you just need two or three people
| helping you.
| zrail wrote:
| The Open Home Foundation (Home Assistant, ESPHome, etc) is a
| similar contemporary example. It's organized as a Stiftung in
| Switzerland, which as I understand it is somewhat analogous
| to a US 501(c)(3) private foundation, in so far as it is an
| independent legal entity that can't solicit donations
| directly from the public and isn't necessarily run
| democratically like an e.V.
|
| There are non-profit associations in the US (notably
| 501(c)(6) business leagues) but I don't know enough about
| them or about e.V. to speak about the differences.
| wirrbel wrote:
| It seems they lost the first game in the gGmbH (gemeinnutzige
| GmbH, thus "charitable Ltd") leading to a normal GmbH
| (similar to a Ltd.).
|
| In Germany only certain purposes qualify as "gemeinnutzige"
| which makes the formation of non-profits at times difficult,
| especially in the computing space.
|
| Maybe I didn't read careful enough. But it's actually not
| spelled out which form the new European non-profit is
| incorporated in.
| jeromegv wrote:
| > This seems to be administrative details, not news.
|
| The CEO is stepping down. Also the copyright/ownership of the
| name won't be owned by the founder, but by a separate non-
| profit. Those 2 news are significant.
| seydor wrote:
| It's usually bad news when implementing control by commitee to a
| mass medium. Like what happens with publicly-owned TV
| wmf wrote:
| Control of the Mastodon software isn't control of the
| Fediverse.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| From the announcement:
|
| > Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we're going to
| invest deeply in trust & safety. We want everyone, especially
| marginalized communities, to feel safe on our platform. We're
| working on building a stronger trust & safety function--
| including hiring--which will contribute to new features,
| educate instance admins about best practices, assess
| community needs, and partner with organizations like IFTAS to
| share insights and expand the availability of resources in
| this critical area.
| wmf wrote:
| Mastodon has a good track record so I'm going to give them
| some benefit of the doubt.
| ADeerAppeared wrote:
| > Like what happens with publicly-owned TV
|
| Which is bad ... why exactly? Public TV largely works.
|
| Meanwhile, existing privately owned social media & news in the
| US falling into the hands of single billionaires is showing
| itself to have been a terrible idea. They're all kowtowing to
| the incoming president, and it's increasingly looking like
| we'll be seeing the death of the first amendment on the
| internet.
|
| Sure. Committees suck sometimes. ActivityPub as a standard has
| been design-by-committee'd to uselessness.
|
| But it's so much better than the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, or
| Bezos having unilateral control over the entire platforms and
| (soon) gleefully clamping down on free speech because Der
| Fuhrer decreed that LGBT content must be censored. (And yes, I
| am being facetious. But if you think that this attack on free
| speech won't be expanded and expanded, you're a fool.)
| dtagames wrote:
| Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already
| owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's
| real competition.
| dang wrote:
| (This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196, where the
| article is different.)
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| It's a story about a different company and being a public
| benefit corporation is different than being a non-profit.
|
| It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.
| rsstack wrote:
| Is B Corp a real thing? It's not equivalent to non-profit and
| they can always stop being B Corps. Wikipedia lists Nestle
| Nespresso as a B Corp example, not very inspiring.
| jampekka wrote:
| B Corp is a certification stamp that companies can buy from
| the B Corp non-profit. It has no legal ramifications. It's
| like UTZ, FSC and Fairtrade.
|
| Benefit corporation is a form of legal corporation in the USA
| that allows for other duties than maximizing shareholder
| value.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
| Aloisius wrote:
| Bluesky isn't a B Corp as far as I can tell (certified by B
| Lab).
|
| Rather they're incorporated as a Delaware public benefit
| corporation.
| shafyy wrote:
| This is correct. But a public benefit corporation is still
| for profit. And the "benefit" is very vaguely defined. It
| might be defined in their charter, but the only people who
| can hold them responsible to it are the investors. And as we
| know, most of the investors are VCs... So...
| andreamonaco wrote:
| I'm not very optimistic about the technical direction of
| Mastodon.
|
| Mastodon had a minimal HTML-only interface before, you could read
| posts and replies of each profile.
|
| They removed it some time ago, now you just see a blank page if
| you don't have JS, and I think it's a huge mistake; it was a
| clear albeit small advantage over mainstream social networks.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| The hilarious dichotomy of HN - this post says UX is going
| wrong because of JS requirements and HTML only was better,
| while the one below (currently this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682927) says UX is
| getting better.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I know right, almost like an internet forum or something
| glenstein wrote:
| It's a legitimate point - the criticism carries more weight
| if its part of a unified collective consensus (e.g. the
| Unity fees debacle) than if it's a bunch of all-over-the-
| map criticisms that all contradict each other (Gamergate).
| Seems straightforward enough to me.
|
| The latter can be especially important to observe because
| sometimes people are just full of it and it's all just a
| bunch of vibes, where people agree something is wrong, but
| they can't settle on a coherent idea. In those cases _that_
| phenomenon is often the most important thing to understand.
| I would go so far as to say vibes based psuedo-consensus is
| one of the most common things manufactured by internet
| mobs.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| I mean, yeah. I read opinions I sharply disagree with all the
| time on this forum. If I didn't I probably wouldn't post
| here. ( Because contradicting opinions enrich my own, not
| because "someone's wrong on the internet again").
| jeromegv wrote:
| You can still get every user access through RSS
|
| And you can add the /embed suffix to any mastodon post url, to
| get a javascript-free version.
|
| But I understand its not the same as maintaining a JS-free
| version of their web UI. To be fair, with the little budget and
| little workforce they have, this was likely not high on the
| priority list.
| andreamonaco wrote:
| I understand!
|
| It's just that I was used to read some people's feed with JS
| disabled, a kind of plain-HTML blog, and that stopped working
| suddenly, so I was a bit shocked. But it's not a tragedy.
| masfuerte wrote:
| The /embed thing stopped working recently.
| mikae1 wrote:
| I actually love the official web client. So much that I never
| open Tusky (or Elk).
|
| Have you tried https://brutaldon.org?
|
| Or perhaps you're the type of person that'd be willing to self
| host https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 or
| https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk?
| progval wrote:
| And even with JS enabled, it now needs more network round-
| trips, which is noticeably slower, even with a very low-latency
| connection to the server. For example, loading
| https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/ takes 1.2s to display the
| posts (or 3.3s when logged in), with a warm cache and 5ms ping
| to mastodon.social.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I also loved the HTML interface, I hate having to temporarily
| enable JS on a bunch of weird domains just to read threads. But
| I also hosted a node for many years and realize how heavy it is
| to render stuff server side. So the decision is clearly to make
| it less resource hungry for selfhosters.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| A truly overwhelming majority of users browse with JS enabled.
| Designing or even considering those who don't is (in the most
| literal way possible) a waste of time.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?
| andypiper wrote:
| As I posted elsewhere when this was asked yesterday: "there's a
| big difference between running a service on volunteers, and
| having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the
| regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the
| features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an
| infrastructure spend. There's also an amount of legal work
| involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements
| we're looking at."
|
| Now, I cannot give you a line-by-line account of the budget
| estimate that went into that number (you can look at the 2023
| report https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/12/annual-
| report-2023/ with the 2024 report coming sometime in Q1 of this
| year I think, more timely anyway; and you'll see that's a big
| upswing / optimistic forward-looking goal); but, it is lower
| than some other non-profits, foundations, and other efforts
| elsewhere.
|
| So by all means ask whether that number is valid, but also look
| around at other OSS efforts. I'd also point out that these are
| critical times for the future of the open social web, and we
| (all of us) need to sustain it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Thanks for the 2023 breakdown. That's really what I was
| asking for (an unpopular question, apparently). Clearly, the
| amount being asked is a lot more than the 2023 expenses (by
| about 10x), but comparing with 2024 would give a better idea.
|
| I guess a separate question I would have is what the
| Foundation actually does - I need to read up more on that. To
| me, because of the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon is mostly a
| client/server piece of SW. Using Mastodon, I can interact
| with folks on Lemmy, Pleroma, etc and vice versa. It's not a
| self contained system. Anyone who disagrees with the
| Foundation can simply fork and pretend the Foundation doesn't
| exist - while interoperating with Mastodon servers.
| mempko wrote:
| Yes. Software gets good because of investment, both money and
| time. I want to see Mastodon improve and succeed.
| shafyy wrote:
| I'm impressed by Eugen. Giving up full ownership is absolutely
| the right thing to do. But most people in this situation would
| become too greedy and start rationalizing why they should be in
| control (benevolent dictator). Hats off! Mastodon is heading in
| the right direction.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > lack of algorithmic curation
|
| They can get that elsewhere. Mastodon will never win that battle.
| It's not wrong to want algorithms feeding you content, it's just
| that Mastodon will always be like the tenth best option for those
| users, and they always will be. Mastodon's advantage is with
| users that don't want posts written for algorithms. (I used
| Twitter that way for many years, but when they killed off
| Tweetdeck I visited less and less, to the point that I just don't
| often go there any longer.)
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Bluesky has the best of both worlds: reverse chronological
| primarily, and then rich alternatives for all sorts of content.
| Some are analogous to lists on Mastodon (though seem much more
| heavily used on Bluesky to me) and others more advanced.
|
| Reverse chronological can suffice if you're spending all day
| looking at the timeline but algorithms can be helpful! Not all
| algos are engagement muck.
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