[HN Gopher] I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
___________________________________________________________________
I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
Author : Tomte
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-11-18 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.joinmastodon.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.joinmastodon.org)
| JadoJodo wrote:
| What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
| Conscat wrote:
| I know we must have some terminally online fediverse users
| here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.
| shakna wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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
| m-hodges wrote:
| Godspeed, John Mastodon
| memorydial wrote:
| Haha, you might have slexdyia.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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_.)
| m-hodges wrote:
| It's a Mastodon community joke.
|
| https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-
| col...
| roywiggins wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon
| ajkjk wrote:
| HN is simple enough that it scales well with browser zoom,
| and so (imo) is excusable for not following that 12pt
| standard.
| mh- wrote:
| 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..
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Dyslexics of the world, untie!
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| He's also receiving EUR1 million as a one-time compensation. Not
| quite enough to retire on that.
| lapcat wrote:
| Do you have a reference for this?
| akuchling wrote:
| From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-
| ours-to-...
| edm0nd wrote:
| Still enough to have a good lil nest egg that generates okay-
| ish passive income if invested correctly.
|
| @ 4% that's EUR40k/year
|
| more than what most regular people have
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Does he not have to pay taxes on that 1m euros in the eu?
| cntlzw wrote:
| Absolutely. That is either "Teileinkunfteverfahren" (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!
| batisteo wrote:
| Loto is well-known (in France) as the poors' taxes
| rmoriz wrote:
| 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)
| mk89 wrote:
| Sure he does. He lives in Germany. They are gonna rip that
| 1 million apart.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I guess top rate in Germany is 45%
| fhd2 wrote:
| If you live in the west, 47.5% even. But that's income
| tax, whether that applies here depends on how it's
| structured.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Some countries have 0 rate if sold after x years. Although
| many had it in the past, they've started eliminating it.
| torginus wrote:
| And some countries have the opposite - they tax your
| invested gains as if you turned them to cash
| zwnow wrote:
| 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.
| naIak wrote:
| Damn, where is Mastodon getting EUR1M from?
|
| Also where do you get from that you can't retire with EUR1M. It
| seems very feasible as long as you keep a frugal lifestyle.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| > 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-...
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Why is retiring mentioned? Most jobs pay zero when you leave
| so 1M is cool.
| layer8 wrote:
| He was the founder and head of the company, so probably
| wouldn't have had to step down if he didn't want to.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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 EUR2-3M it would be less
| of a question.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| markdown wrote:
| Healthcare is taken care of by his taxes.
| lrvick wrote:
| EUR1M would not even cover the property tax to retire in the
| cheapest bay area home.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| naIak wrote:
| >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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and
| control your costs.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It doesn't say he's retiring (afaik) - he might still have
| compensation
| layer8 wrote:
| Hence why I said it's not enough to retire on it.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Was already linked here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971902
| stevage wrote:
| You're assuming zero savings to begin with, which is a weird
| assumption.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| 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
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Also kind of like John Gruber and Markdown.pl
| jshen wrote:
| It depends what the alternative is. A vacuum is worse for
| example.
| lapcat wrote:
| There's no power vacuum. There's now a Mastodon nonprofit
| organization with an executive director and leadership team.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| So worse... a committee.
| lapcat wrote:
| 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!
| jshen wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, and Mastodon has an executive director.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| jshen wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Title is: My next chapter with Mastodon
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.".
| getalifebruh wrote:
| You should seek a professional help.
| xupybd wrote:
| "The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian
| capitalist hellscape."
|
| This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad
| polynomial wrote:
| It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low
| key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| 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...
| quinnjh wrote:
| 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
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| chb wrote:
| Yeah, he'd spit it out because it tastes like corn-fed,
| feed-lot crap.
| rrix2 wrote:
| i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro
| credits to access those characters on my keyboard
| verdverm wrote:
| those new Discord ads sure are great!
| fizwidget wrote:
| 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".
| tavavex wrote:
| 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.
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| dunno what world you live in, but that was the line that
| resonated the most for me...
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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?
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| "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
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| And if you can't buy popularity you can always buy a really
| high wall.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> With money you can always buy popularity easily_
|
| I don't know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example.
| Maybe both?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| What he can't buy is being at peace and content with the
| popularity he already has
| Tool_of_Society wrote:
| Well he was doing a good job at buying popularity until he
| fired his PR team so..
| bigiain wrote:
| 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.)
| wmeredith wrote:
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of
| people is on the low side.
| INTPenis wrote:
| >The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian
| capitalist hellscape.
| bovermyer wrote:
| These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| On boarding is too complicated for your average social user
|
| https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
| lutoma wrote:
| It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the
| experience easier.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's another centralised service
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| LastTrain wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| At some point more users would probably make everything worse.
| Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
| pndy wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| > 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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._
| api wrote:
| 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.
| youniverse wrote:
| Let's salute dang for his service.
| Loughla wrote:
| For real though. The moderation on this site is on point.
| mmooss wrote:
| Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can
| see what Rochko means.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Meh, the worst I see in this thread with show dead on is some
| tedious criticism, politics slop and one guy posting a racial
| slur. I can't imagine making decisions about the direction of
| my life over such mild nothings.
|
| Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who
| can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated
| sensitivity goes with the territory.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| 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.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Here is the thing. None of that matters to _me_. The only
| thing that matters is the people I follow.
| BonitaPersona wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| hadlock wrote:
| sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago
| mdasen wrote:
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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...
| kvirani wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| > 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| The context for those who wonder what "single-handedly"
| means: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726
| lutoma wrote:
| 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).
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| lutoma wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| kragen wrote:
| Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
| arjie wrote:
| > _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
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I never see that on the php instance.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| this was on the math instance
| keybored wrote:
| > 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.
| rmoriz wrote:
| 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.
| keybored wrote:
| Wait now I love the fediverse.
| rmoriz wrote:
| 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 EUR100 this year.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| rmoriz wrote:
| mastodon.social is operated by the Mastodon gGmbH, the core
| body behind the project.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Correct, but there's nothing special or privileged about
| it. The others aren't knock-offs or imitations. They're all
| peers.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| rmoriz wrote:
| You can't move a banned account, you lose all followers.
| SkinTaco wrote:
| 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
| rmoriz wrote:
| at least a single word would have been nice. I've not
| insulted anyone.
| mikestew wrote:
| It's rude to pretend OP said something they didn't say. And a
| little side insult to Americans, nice.
| thih9 wrote:
| > 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| swaggerist wrote:
| Does Jeff Bezos even dress well?
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