8 ms·

Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

356 points by andypiper 2y ago

Kye 2y ago
I was hoping to see something like this in light of the WordPress situation and the lack of independence in the non-profit.
solarkraft 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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?
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    > so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok. I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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.
- darthrupert 2y ago
  How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.
  - jeromegv 2y ago
    Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
  - glenstein 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  > the UX has improved considerably. Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
  - gargron 2y ago
    Yeah.
    - kps 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  > lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
  - solarkraft 2y ago
    This is the view of many deeply in the space, but not that of the broader public. This divide needs to be crossed and this is where Bluesky is ahead of Mastodon.
    - mystified5016 2y ago
      Framing it as competition between mastodon and bluesky is just flatly wrong. There is no competition. Bluesky isn't "winning" because there just is no game being played. Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago
  Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.
- lxgr 2y ago
  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.
  - spartanatreyu 2y ago
    > The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view. You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account. All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server. They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself. > 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. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes. As opposed to: A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.
- throwawayq3423 2y ago
  A decentralized social network is an oxymoron. Centralization is the point.
ekimekim 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  Well Rochko is stepping down as CEO as part of the restructuring, which is a fairly big development.
- lutoma 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
    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.
seydor 2y ago
It's usually bad news when implementing control by commitee to a mass medium. Like what happens with publicly-owned TV
- wmf 2y ago
  Control of the Mastodon software isn't control of the Fediverse.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Mastodon has a good track record so I'm going to give them some benefit of the doubt.
    - stephen_g 2y ago
      This would probably more affect the mastodon.social instance rather than the Fediverse as a whole. But since that instance is so huge, a lot of the spam and abuse comes from there.
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > 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 Führer 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 2y ago
Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Aloisius 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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...
- dang 2y ago
  (This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196, where the article is different.)
- atomicfiredoll 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
andreamonaco 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682927) says UX is getting better.
  - andreamonaco 2y ago
    Yeah I noticed that hahaha
  - scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
    I know right, almost like an internet forum or something
    - glenstein 2y ago
      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.
      - scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
BeetleB 2y ago
Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?
- andypiper 2y ago
  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/ 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  Yes. Software gets good because of investment, both money and time. I want to see Mastodon improve and succeed.
shafyy 2y ago
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.
- bigiain 2y ago
  I have for some time considered some of his decision making and community leadership skills a bit suspect. But like you, I am impressed by this move. I wonder if he's been watching Mullenweg and WordPress's recent drama?
  - NoboruWataya 2y ago
    Mullenweg, Zuckerberg, Musk, whoever runs Reddit now... there's no shortage of CEOs happy to enshittify their platforms.
    - whyenot 2y ago
      Have you seen Reddit's recent stock prices? Bemoan enshtification if you want, but management's decision to include many long term users in the IPO and decisions since then have made many loyal redditors a lot of money ($34 -> $164.82).
      - brianbest101 2y ago
        Stock prices do not help me find fixes for my 3d printer.
        Ruthalas 2y ago
        But they can [organically] suggest a great replacement to purchase!
      - maeil 2y ago
        I think that's the point, no?
bachmeier 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    You guys do know there is a simple trending page and 'for you' suggestions in Mastodon, right? It does offer some algorithmic content, however the algos used are transparent and simple to understand and also do not prey on outrage and don't specifically optimise for max engagement. Of course not maliciously pushing people's buttons comes with a price and they are probably not as popular, but IMO they are as far as we can ethically go, and are well suited to the needs of the fedi dweller, i.e. 'I'm kinda bored let's see what other people in the community are talking about'
  - Vaslo 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dehugger 2y ago
      sounds like the promised land, thanks for the strong recommendation!
duxup 2y ago
I fear many of these alternatives are “backend is the appeal” and really, most people don’t care.
- piyuv 2y ago
  How does “elections not being controlled by whims of billionaire/s” sound? Or is this too radical for this site too?
  - duxup 2y ago
    I don’t know. But I suspect most people don’t care. Even the people who will tell me an how bad twitter is, are almost all still on there. Talk and action just doesn’t go hand in hand, I can only assume they don’t care “that” much.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    This site is controlled by billionaires. I wish people would just cut the keyfabe.
fuckyah 2y ago
[dead]
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Interesting to see that Biz Stone is on the board of the new Mastodon non-profit.
- andypiper 2y ago
  for clarity Biz Stone is on the board of the 501(c)(3) fundraising entity that was incorporated in the U.S. in early 2024. The new EU non-profit entity doesn't yet exist, or have a named board.
openrisk 2y ago
With bluesky bursting on the open source (and not yet enshittified) microblogging scene, mastodon needed to regroup and reposition. This organizational change seems aligned and is a good sign that there is ambition and appetite to build further, starting with solid governance. The first chapter of the re-decentralization of the online experience is closing. Lets hope there are many more and curious what the shape of new things to come will be.
anon-3988 2y ago
I've been thinking of how to disrupt the Discord market. I really, really, don't want Discord of all things to succeed. I was thinking something like Mastodon could be it: as a combination of Twitter + Discord. They need to support create guilds and channels like Discord.
- arielcostas 2y ago
  Maybe Matrix.org isn't so voice-centered, but they do support the guild+channels system. I really don't want Discord to succeed either, I want something that is fully E2E encrypted (except for guilds explicitly marked as "public", which should be able to provide the chat history to new members, and moderation tools).And something that isn't bloated as heck promoting Nitro any chance they get, to a point that it gets ridiculous.
figassis 2y ago
I think this is a happy consequence of the WordPress drama.
- andypiper 2y ago
  I would say that it is a coincidental happening to that drama. As Eugen mentioned in a thread on Mastodon, this has been under consideration for quite a long time, certainly before the nuclear events that kicked off the WP drama.
darthrupert 2y ago
I didn't know Mastodon has a CEO. Why does it need one?

356 points by andypiper 2y ago

Kye 2y ago

I was hoping to see something like this in light of the WordPress situation and the lack of independence in the non-profit.

solarkraft 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  > so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok. I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.
WorldMaker 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.
darthrupert 2y ago
How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
- glenstein 2y ago
  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 2y ago
> the UX has improved considerably. Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
- gargron 2y ago
  Yeah.
  - kps 2y ago
    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 2y ago
> lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
- solarkraft 2y ago
  This is the view of many deeply in the space, but not that of the broader public. This divide needs to be crossed and this is where Bluesky is ahead of Mastodon.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    Framing it as competition between mastodon and bluesky is just flatly wrong. There is no competition. Bluesky isn't "winning" because there just is no game being played. Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.
ClassyJacket 2y ago
Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.
lxgr 2y ago
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.
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  > The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view. You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account. All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server. They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself. > 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. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes. As opposed to: A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.
throwawayq3423 2y ago
A decentralized social network is an oxymoron. Centralization is the point.

ekimekim 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
Well Rochko is stepping down as CEO as part of the restructuring, which is a fairly big development.
lutoma 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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.

seydor 2y ago

It's usually bad news when implementing control by commitee to a mass medium. Like what happens with publicly-owned TV

wmf 2y ago
Control of the Mastodon software isn't control of the Fediverse.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Mastodon has a good track record so I'm going to give them some benefit of the doubt.
  - stephen_g 2y ago
    This would probably more affect the mastodon.social instance rather than the Fediverse as a whole. But since that instance is so huge, a lot of the spam and abuse comes from there.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> 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 Führer 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 2y ago

Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Aloisius 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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...
dang 2y ago
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196, where the article is different.)
atomicfiredoll 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

andreamonaco 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682927) says UX is getting better.
- andreamonaco 2y ago
  Yeah I noticed that hahaha
- scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
  I know right, almost like an internet forum or something
  - glenstein 2y ago
    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.
    - scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago

BeetleB 2y ago

Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?

andypiper 2y ago
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/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Yes. Software gets good because of investment, both money and time. I want to see Mastodon improve and succeed.

shafyy 2y ago

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.

bigiain 2y ago
I have for some time considered some of his decision making and community leadership skills a bit suspect. But like you, I am impressed by this move. I wonder if he's been watching Mullenweg and WordPress's recent drama?
- NoboruWataya 2y ago
  Mullenweg, Zuckerberg, Musk, whoever runs Reddit now... there's no shortage of CEOs happy to enshittify their platforms.
  - whyenot 2y ago
    Have you seen Reddit's recent stock prices? Bemoan enshtification if you want, but management's decision to include many long term users in the IPO and decisions since then have made many loyal redditors a lot of money ($34 -> $164.82).
    - brianbest101 2y ago
      Stock prices do not help me find fixes for my 3d printer.
      - Ruthalas 2y ago
        But they can [organically] suggest a great replacement to purchase!
    - maeil 2y ago
      I think that's the point, no?

bachmeier 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  You guys do know there is a simple trending page and 'for you' suggestions in Mastodon, right? It does offer some algorithmic content, however the algos used are transparent and simple to understand and also do not prey on outrage and don't specifically optimise for max engagement. Of course not maliciously pushing people's buttons comes with a price and they are probably not as popular, but IMO they are as far as we can ethically go, and are well suited to the needs of the fedi dweller, i.e. 'I'm kinda bored let's see what other people in the community are talking about'
- Vaslo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dehugger 2y ago
    sounds like the promised land, thanks for the strong recommendation!

duxup 2y ago

I fear many of these alternatives are “backend is the appeal” and really, most people don’t care.

piyuv 2y ago
How does “elections not being controlled by whims of billionaire/s” sound? Or is this too radical for this site too?
- duxup 2y ago
  I don’t know. But I suspect most people don’t care. Even the people who will tell me an how bad twitter is, are almost all still on there. Talk and action just doesn’t go hand in hand, I can only assume they don’t care “that” much.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  This site is controlled by billionaires. I wish people would just cut the keyfabe.

fuckyah 2y ago

[dead]

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Interesting to see that Biz Stone is on the board of the new Mastodon non-profit.

andypiper 2y ago
for clarity Biz Stone is on the board of the 501(c)(3) fundraising entity that was incorporated in the U.S. in early 2024. The new EU non-profit entity doesn't yet exist, or have a named board.

openrisk 2y ago

With bluesky bursting on the open source (and not yet enshittified) microblogging scene, mastodon needed to regroup and reposition. This organizational change seems aligned and is a good sign that there is ambition and appetite to build further, starting with solid governance. The first chapter of the re-decentralization of the online experience is closing. Lets hope there are many more and curious what the shape of new things to come will be.

anon-3988 2y ago

I've been thinking of how to disrupt the Discord market. I really, really, don't want Discord of all things to succeed. I was thinking something like Mastodon could be it: as a combination of Twitter + Discord. They need to support create guilds and channels like Discord.

arielcostas 2y ago
Maybe Matrix.org isn't so voice-centered, but they do support the guild+channels system. I really don't want Discord to succeed either, I want something that is fully E2E encrypted (except for guilds explicitly marked as "public", which should be able to provide the chat history to new members, and moderation tools).And something that isn't bloated as heck promoting Nitro any chance they get, to a point that it gets ridiculous.

figassis 2y ago

I think this is a happy consequence of the WordPress drama.

andypiper 2y ago
I would say that it is a coincidental happening to that drama. As Eugen mentioned in a thread on Mastodon, this has been under consideration for quite a long time, certainly before the nuclear events that kicked off the WP drama.

darthrupert 2y ago

I didn't know Mastodon has a CEO. Why does it need one?