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Mastodon Has Already Won
- longitudinal93 3y agoFirst real success of open source? Where have you been, friend??
- Kye 3y agoI'm more interested in the "Mastodon is a creation of a single Russian dude" bit. He was born there, but everything I've seen suggests he doesn't feel much connection to it having moved at 11. Even his Wikipedia page calls him German and puts his page in various German categories.
- waboremo 3y ago> He was born there That's enough to qualify someone as such. He is also a German citizen, he is free to claim both/either as he chooses but it's also not wrong for someone to call someone born in a country as being from that country. The wikipedia also cites the only reason they use "German" in his bio is because he responded on Reddit saying he was a naturalized German citizen. Nothing about a demand to exclusively wanting to be referenced as German. Which by the way, his answer about being a German citizen was because people were attacking him for being born in Russia and claiming Mastodon was Russian spy tools and nonsense like that. It would only be interesting if the blog writer was asked by Eugen Rochko to replace it with the nationality he prefers to claim, and refuses to do that.
- Kye 3y agoIt's still interesting the blog author chose to go that way when it's the less obvious of two possible ways. Your response gives the impression you think I said it's bad or wrong. I did not.
- waboremo 3y agoMy point is that it's not the less obvious way! It's been the norm for ages now to refer to people by their place of birth - NOT their chosen nationality. It's only been a very recent move in social history to question this and instead ask why aren't we placing more importance on their environmental upbringing.
- Kye 3y agoOkay. But essentially every news article ever calls him German except this one case here that seems innocent and the much larger portion of people trying to scaremonger. We're not speaking in the abstract here or talking about historical practice. There's a reality where one way is, in practice, the obvious way most people go for this person we're talking about, and the other is not so obvious. So, yes, it is interesting that the blog author went this way and isn't doing it with the usual purpose. I don't know why this bothers you so much, but this thread has gotten tiresome.
- waboremo 3y agoYes, and on Wikipedia it says he's born in Russia. So, someone who normally might label someone by their birth, would then claim he is Russian. See how that's an easier path than looking up "every news article"? I am not bothered, and this thread is not tiresome. I am discussing why you feel the need to find this interesting, you brought it up. Blaming me for your stubbornness exhausting you will always render fruitless.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cubefox 3y agoIs it the obvious way to say that Elon Musk is a South African?
- waboremo 3y ago
- vadman 3y agoPlot twist: Rochko is a Ukrainian last name.
- cratermoon 3y agoIt's funny how much importance we attach to someone's country of birth but not their state or canton or other administrative unit. If you were born in Texas but live in California, are you a Texan? Born in Boston but live in Los Angeles, are you a Bostonian or a Los Angeleno? Does it matter how old you were when you moved? As an example, Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa. How many people think of him as South African? He has American, Canadian and South African citizenships. Is he Canadian?
- waboremo 3y agoYes, it's one a lot of societies are questioning recently, identity and how much we attribute to parts that might not make any sense but stem from tradition or false beliefs. A lot of it isn't purely geographical either, things like views on race can have a huge impact on how we label/self-label. Another part of the identity equation people are questioning are things like pride, where we claim people as [group] because it makes us feel better (even if the individual does not claim that identity, whether it be the school they attended or where they were born, etc). It's a lot of good discussion, but I feel due to political circumstances recently a lot of people have become very antagonistic towards Russian labels even if the individual themselves distances from the Russian administration, in the same way you can still be American if you hate the Biden administration.
- alpaca128 3y agoImho what's more relevant is the current status. Nobody can choose where they are born. It's considered malicious to call a trans person by their birth name, but if someone decides to leave their place of birth and publicly claim a different nationality that doesn't mean anything?
- cubefox 3y ago> Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit from Germany that develops the Mastodon software. https://joinmastodon.org/de/about https://joinmastodon.org/de/about
- aranke 3y ago10 million total users is impressive compared to 450 million monthly active users, how?
- AdamN 3y agoThe quality is probably very high for those 10MM compared to the 450MM. Still, Twitter is ahead by an order of magnitude for sure. fwiw I left Twitter a few weeks ago with Elon's 'defund NPR' tweet which I only saw the image of since I had blocked him months ago. I kind of mildly miss Twitter but not enough to go back - used to be multiple times a day on there.
- cubefox 3y agoIf NPR really objects to being labelled government funded, it seems they can't object to being government defunded.
- AdamN 3y ago'publicly funded' would be more appropriate but then I'd also like to see 'commercially funded' for all the private media outlets. The majority of NPR funding is not from the government so 'public' is more correct in that sense. Voice of America you could call 'government funded'.
- cubefox 3y agoLet's settle on "state funded" saying "publicly funded" for media of foreign states would sound as if they were domestically funded.
- waboremo 3y ago3rd paragraph from the bottom.
- erwinh 3y agoInteresting contrast to have both “Mastodon is doomed?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713894 And “mastodon has already won” On the front page
- jredwards 3y agoI already grabbed a screenshot of that for the hilarity.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThen again, people usually post submissions on the same topic in response to a highly ranked submission. It’s not random.
- cornhole34 3y agodata?
- blowski 3y agoI've been on HN for more than a decade, and it's definitely a thing. I've even done it myself.
- cornhole34 3y agoI've been on HN for more than a decade, and it's definitely a not thing. I've never even done it myself.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIt's a personal observation.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoOPs admit to it all the time in the comments.
- sharemywin 3y agoWhat a testament to decentralized messaging.
- SteveMoody73 3y agoCan't say that outside of HN i've come across a link to anything about Mastodon so not sure it's won much.
- thewebcount 3y agoReally? It was all over the mainstream media 6 months ago after Twitter got bought: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-rcna56288 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-r... https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/tech/mastodon-twitter-explainer-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/tech/mastodon-twitter-explain... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/24/1139079748/leave-twitter-social-networks-mastodon-hive-post https://www.npr.org/2022/11/24/1139079748/leave-twitter-soci... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/08/mastodon-what-is-it-how-do-i-join-use-find-best-server-list-change-elon-musk-twitter-leaving-social-network-alternative https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/08/mastodon-...
- snapetom 3y agoAnyone talking about it now in the mainstream media? Oh, sweet summer child, thinking some tech nugget reported 6 months ago is still relevant.
- mperham 3y ago> Mastodon is a creation of a single Russian dude. Gargron lives in Germany, I assume he is German?
- Lex-2008 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia[1], he was born in Russia and moved to Germany at the age of 11. I'll let others decide if it makes him German or Russian :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rochko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rochko
- realworldperson 3y ago[dead]
- ChildOfChaos 3y agoThis article is complete nonsense. It's the typical thing of someone being excited about something and being in the bubble of it, thinking it is a much bigger deal than it is. The majority of people don't care about Mastodon and never will, Mastodon hasn't won, it's not even relevant.
- sixQuarks 3y agoThe anti-Musk folks are the only ones that are excited about Mastodon. There are a lot of them though, so it's something I guess.
- shanebellone 3y agoI think Musk is a dumb man-child. Mastodon sucks too though. We should let social die. Our aggregate attention is too valuable to waste on such trivial things.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> We should let social die. You know HN is a social site, right?
- shanebellone 3y ago"You know HN is a social site, right?" You know we're talking about social networks, right?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoSure, but like... if you want people to not use social networks, why are you here? Why are you posting here?
- cornhole34 3y agohackernews is more of a news feed with a comment section than a social network
- tracerbulletx 3y agoIn that 99% of projects get less than 100 users and like 3 stars on GitHub sure I guess that's a win. But if winning is becoming the new preferred destination for microblogging or social broadcasting it seems like it took a shot and sputtered out before the finish line.
- Hamuko 3y agoMastodon isn't a microblog though? As far as I know, the maximum message length is basically limitless.
- Groxx 3y agoThe default is 500 chars iirc, but yeah. Entirely configurable (and many modify it in practice), and most servers will pull in much larger ones than they allow to be published, so you can get a novel in your feed if you follow people who do that.
- aprilnya 3y agoMastodon is meant to be for microblogging (a la Twitter), but there is other software that accesses the same federated network (called the “Fediverse”) that focuses on other things, like long blogs (a la Medium), pictures (a la Instagram), etc… (There are forks of Mastodon that increase the message length but on vanilla Mastodon it’s hardcoded to 500. But the fediverse itself doesn’t have a limitation like that, it’s a Mastodon thing)
- waboremo 3y agoI think your expectations might just be skewed. To be the largest decentralized communications platform is quite substantial. You're expecting it to dethrone centralized platforms but that's a gigantic additional hurdle, one nobody has been able to reach.
- trollied 3y ago> And, by a lucky dice roll, it became the first real success of the open-source world Guess I need to wait for the Linux kernel to become popular & succeed. (Amongst thousands of other great pieces of open source software). Possible one of the worst takes I’ve seen on the internet for a while. Oh, the internet, guess that hasn’t succeeded either?
- RobotToaster 3y agoGuess someone should tell the ruby devs they aren't a success.
- CountSessine 3y agoYeah the python and rust devs will be pretty crestfallen too. All that wasted effort for all of these failed projects!
- mogoh 3y agoJust look at this pathatic open-source failures: VLC, Chrome, Firefox, and Wikipedia.
- kgwxd 3y agoYikes, I'm sure they mean the open-source world of social media applications.
- simlevesque 3y agoWhere's "the internet"'s source code ? Is it on GitHub ? I agree that Mastodon being the first success is a bad take but the internet is not an open-source project. There are RFC's, protocols, but that's not what open-source is.
- cykros 3y agoMicrosoft was pretty happy though that an open source TCP/IP stack existed on FreeBSD so they didn't have to go and actually write their own for Windows.
- 3y ago
- duxup 3y agoThis article has a lot of curious / BS one off lines and seems pretty empty overall.
- devin 3y agoNo mention of Bluesky? From what I've heard, people are heading there precisely because it's not the "linux of social networks".
- graemebenzie 3y agoNeeds a better name tho..
- that_guy_iain 3y agoExcept it seems very likely that the VC backed BlueSky social will probably become the replacement for Twitter with many finding Mastaodon intimidating. I'm legit seeing a lot more people open up bluesky accounts than Mastadon when Musk took over Twitter.
- ghostDancer 3y agoThe thing is that Mastodon/Fediverse is not competing, it does not have to won. It exists and shows there are options different from the walled gardens. It just works different. Some people prefer local markets and little shops other prefer malls. That's it. Winning is a metric that IMHO is not applicable in this case, much more when it's usually tied to profits or numbers for investors.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> If you want to message a friend, the friend is most likely on Messenger/WhatsApp. So your friend might be on either, or both. But everyone has an email address.
- snapetom 3y agoThis sounds a lot like the annual "[insert the upcoming year] is the year of Linux on the desktop!" that circulated in the early 2000's. Nobody cared outside of Linux crowd, and it never happened.
- nbittich 3y agoEvery day I see a twitter quitter tweeting back again. Looking at their mastodon, no likes and no interaction with their account.