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I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
- JadoJodo 1y agoWhat happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
- Conscat 1y agoI know we must have some terminally online fediverse users here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.
- shakna 1y agoA 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 1y agoI'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 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115074431325055303
- gargron 1y agoIt did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.
- AmbroseBierce 1y ago@dang if possible please stick this reply to the top, @gargron is the author himself (the CEO stepping down)
- Maken 1y agoWhich controversial topic did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse?
- master-lincoln 1y agoWhy would it be their responsibility to succeed at topics in the fediverse more than it's your responsibility? So which topics did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse @Maken? I personally failed to push harder for DIDs so switching servers without losing followers is easier.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- m-hodges 1y agoGodspeed, John Mastodon
- memorydial 1y agoHaha, you might have slexdyia.
- deathanatos 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt’s a Mastodon community joke. https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-columnists-funny-error-about-a-fictitious-john-mastodon.html https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...
- deathanatos 1y agoTIL! (Though I'd also wager that originated from someone having to squint at more bad kerning.)
- roywiggins 1y agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon
- ajkjk 1y agoHN is simple enough that it scales well with browser zoom, and so (imo) is excusable for not following that 12pt standard.
- layer8 1y agoHe’s also receiving €1 million as a one-time compensation. Not quite enough to retire on that.
- lapcat 1y agoDo you have a reference for this?
- akuchling 1y agoFrom https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
- edm0nd 1y agoStill enough to have a good lil nest egg that generates okay-ish passive income if invested correctly. @ 4% that's €40k/year more than what most regular people have
- kjkjadksj 1y agoDoes he not have to pay taxes on that 1m euros in the eu?
- cntlzw 1y agoAbsolutely. That is either "Teileinkünfteverfahren" (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!
- lapcat 1y agoI 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 1y agoTruthfully, 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.
- jshen 1y agoIt depends what the alternative is. A vacuum is worse for example.
- lapcat 1y agoThere's no power vacuum. There's now a Mastodon nonprofit organization with an executive director and leadership team.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoSo worse... a committee.
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- 0dayman 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 1y agoYeah he did a lot of harm to the community by expending so much of his effort on segregating communities. I understand what he was going for but I think it was both the wrong tone and the wrong tools, and it crippled the growth of the fediverse
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y ago> expending so much of his effort on segregating communities Wanna tell us more about this? I'm out of the loop.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoTitle is: My next chapter with Mastodon
- netsharc 1y agoAh, 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.".
- xupybd 1y ago"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 1y agoIt also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoIt'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 1y agoI 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 1y agounfortunately 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 1y agoThe 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742 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 1y agoYeah, he'd spit it out because it tastes like corn-fed, feed-lot crap.
- billy99k 1y agoThis 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoYou 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.
- bigyabai 1y agoYou don't seem to know how Mastodon works. If moderators aren't self-consistent in their judgement, users can literally take their profile to an entirely different website with no service disruption at all.
- bigiain 1y agoOne fairly busy forum I cofounded and "moderated" on, we intentionally call the moderators "Janitors" in an attempt to dissuade the sort of people who wanted "a powerful role" from even wanting to ask. It sorta mostly worked, largely because there were 7 very like minded cofounders of that forum who stared it as an escape route when a previous version was sold to a forum-monetising company (Vertical Scope, from memory).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- periodjet 1y ago> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape. It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y ago> It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”. He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything. Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
- Daishiman 1y ago[flagged]
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoMany physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915. Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_perihelion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...
- kragen 1y agoThe open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
- bluGill 1y agoJust remember Marx created Capitalism as a strawman to argue against. Marx of course couldn't tell people the classical liberal ideas (not to be confused with what we call liberal today) of freedom were bad things - they would not like being told freedom is bad. So he found something he could push to 11 and argue against that.
- jonathaneunice 1y ago"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
- wmeredith 1y agoI've heard a similar maxim that being rich is fantastic, rich and famous is good, poor is bad, poor and famous is a nightmare.
- jongjong 1y agoI was poor and recognizable in a tiny niche related to open source tools and 100% this was true. The recognition creates envy and ambitious people invest extra effort to sabotage you... Often, people who are rich see you as a threat and go all out war on you... And you don't have any buffer or support so you have to be 10x better just to stay afloat. Convincing people to work with you is much harder since you can't offer them any money and must offer pure equity... And your reputation, which fades over time, is the only thing that makes such equity potentially valuable. OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.
- groundzeros2015 1y agoThe quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.
- weinzierl 1y agoIn 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.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoMastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
- INTPenis 1y ago>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
- bovermyer 1y agoThese two statements are not mutually exclusive.
- dsr_ 1y agoI 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.
- bigiain 1y agoYeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people. People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to. For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
- verdverm 1y agoOn boarding is too complicated for your average social user https://atproto.com https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
- patrickdavey 1y ago[flagged]
- czbond 1y ago> Now.. if only DHH would do the same for Rails... Random comment - what is DHH gatekeeping about Ruby or Rails that would be better if he was not? <genuine question.... I like Ruby but don't pay attention to the general happenings>
- hn-idiots 1y ago[flagged]
- passerine_mech 1y agoWhat does that mean?
- hn-idiots 1y ago[flagged]
- patrickdavey 1y agoI guess I love the idea of the rails community being owned by the community not an individual. I find some of his stances on topics problematic (e.g the latest posting about London). Regarding rails itself I have no major issues, but, as titular head of rails itself I think he should be more inclusive.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: The Future Is Ours to Build – Together https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/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 https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404
- burningChrome 1y agoLooks 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoLet's salute dang for his service.
- Loughla 1y agoFor real though. The moderation on this site is on point.
- LexiMax 1y agoIt's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces. I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread. It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.
- bhhaskin 1y agoMastodon 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoHere is the thing. None of that matters to me. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.
- nabla9 1y agoBut we are not talking about you. Mastodon is not culturally or technologically meaningful. It had 2.5 million users few years ago, now there are 700,000 users and numbers go down.
- SiempreViernes 1y agoThere are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.
- kragen 1y agoHow can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?
- amiga386 1y agoFantastic! 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#issuecomment-396732769 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecommen...
- kvirani 1y agoI 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoThis 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 1y ago> 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.
- tannhaeuser 1y agoFound 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 1y agoMy 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 1y agoOr 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 1y agoThough 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)
- BeetleB 1y agoBefore the SALT cap of $10K, it could easily matter. Prior to the cap, I itemized deductions every year - easy if you have a mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and both spouses work. In those days the standard deduction was $12K, and just our state taxes exceeded that amount - forget about mortgage + charity. Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better. And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.
- M2Ys4U 1y agoThey're part-way through setting up a Belgian non-profit entity (AISBL) which will be the main organisation. From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-... >A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. > >As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
- kragen 1y agoWell, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- arjie 1y ago> 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/twitter-recommendation-algorithm https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023... 1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545 https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545 2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165 https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165 3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349 https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349 4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fafpk2n https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa... 5: https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t
- dipsheetpatel 1y ago[flagged]
- ants_everywhere 1y agoMastodon 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 1y agoI never see that on the php instance.
- ants_everywhere 1y agothis was on the math instance
- thunderfork 1y ago[dead]
- ku1ik 1y agoIt highly depends on an instance you join and a people you follow.
- Tepix 1y agoIt's the people you follow and perhaps your Mastodon instance. I suggest setting one up on your own.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ants_everywhere 1y agoNo it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance. If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture. Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
- keybored 1y ago> 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 1y agoYou 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 1y agoWait now I love the fediverse.
- tcfhgj 1y agohuman rights and sustainability also
- rmoriz 1y agoThat would be great but wasn’t the case. I‘m a „green“ guy and cycling advocate but we failed to get traction on the Fediverse.
- mikem170 1y agoI was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon? In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups? Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.
- rmoriz 1y agoMy 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 €100 this year.
- kstrauser 1y agoThere’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 1y agomastodon.social is operated by the Mastodon gGmbH, the core body behind the project.
- kstrauser 1y agoCorrect, but there’s nothing special or privileged about it. The others aren’t knock-offs or imitations. They’re all peers.
- al_borland 1y agoIt seemed like the point was to say they aren’t going to donate money to a project that doesn’t respect their right to free speech. Sure, an account could be made on a other instance, but that doesn’t change the mindset behind how the instance run by the maintainers is handled, which we can only assume will influence the project as a whole.
- kstrauser 1y agoSure, I could see that. I just wanted to clarify that mastodon.social is an instance, not the instance. It’s not a special blessed server. If you turn on your own new server tomorrow, other servers will treat it identically to that one. Also, moderation policies vary wildly. The instance I run moderates much differently than mastodon.social, which tends to get a lot of criticism for being seen as chronically under-moderated, if anything.
- thih9 1y ago> 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.
- bigiain 1y agoHere's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space. I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Graber and two names with zero googleable internet presence in the last decade...
- james_marks 1y agoWhat do you dislike about Biz Stone being on the board? He’s a mensch with a highly relevant credential by all accounts I’ve heard.
- bigiain 1y agoNothing "real", just a knee-jerk reaction to him being a Twitter cofounder (and patent holder).
- james_marks 1y agoYou might be surprised to learn more about him. Hard to remember the idealism Twitter was founded with now, but I suspect Biz saw where Twitter was headed long, long ago and didn’t want to be party to it. He’s used his status to support awesome projects since then.
- pfraze 1y agoJay Graber Mike Masnick (techdirt) Jeromie Miller (XMPP) Investor seat
- getalifebruh 1y ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 1y ago10 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.
- krapp 1y ago>Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though. No it absolutely does not. The only people Mastodon needs are people who respect the culture, everyone else can fuck off to Bluesky.
- swaggerist 1y ago[flagged]
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- veeti 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoThis is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter what nationality you're talking about. Drive-by snark is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972558 and marked it off topic.
- tpurves 1y agoIt seems like strixhalo is a pipe-cleaner part of sorts and the real deal may have to be Medusa Halo. That one could be a monster. The bad news is that it sounds like it's a long way off (2027 sometime) so who knows what Apple M5 or M6 Max could look like by then for competition.
- glenstein 1y agoThis is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
- bfkwlfkjf 1y agoEven Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.
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- thekid314 1y agoI met Stallman once when he was pamphleting outside a beloved book store because they were using meetup to organize a book signing. The guy is consistent.
- grepfru_it 1y agoI used to make so much fun of RMS in the late 90s. Then I met him and my entire view on that man changed. He absolutely is doing the world a favor and it would benefit everyone to think long and hard what a world would be like without GNU today
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- metabagel 1y agoI would love to love Mastodon, but discoverability was so incredibly difficult that I just gave up. I can find people and topics so much more easily on Bluesky. The starter packs are nice too. Does Mastodon have starter packs (lists of people to follow posting on a particular subject area, which ideally you could just click once and follow everyone)?
- balder1991 1y agoI have this impression too, I open Mastodon and the timeline usually doesn’t have many interesting things.
- seba_dos1 1y agoThis used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
- baruchel 1y agoI don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
- master-lincoln 1y agoThis is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
- pkd 1y agoThere is an open proposal to implement it without some of Bluesky's downsides. https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections
- watersb 1y agoHe sounds like a remarkable human.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 1y agoThis guy doesnt drama. Seems very selfish aware and down to earth. Good on him. Good to hear in a world of Wordpress and Ruby dramas.
- runako 1y ago"Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour" -- Rochko rhymes with "You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, you get like a million messages, right, of stuff that come in. It's usually not good," -- Zuckerberg Kudos to Rochko for starting Mastodon and having the grit to guide it through 10 years of explosive growth!
- jrm4 1y agoTo me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity. "Just be kind of like email" is better.
- m-schuetz 1y agoDecentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
- jrm4 1y agoYes, this is a structural vs. social thing. My gut is that though, it would be entirely possible to build "nice and easy to find" ON TOP OF, as opposed to fully integrated with, a decentralized service.
- rckt 1y agoDecentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
- latexr 1y ago> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
- rckt 1y agoYes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
- ktpsns 1y agoModern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc). Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
- Yodel0914 1y agoDo you know about gotosocial? That’s pretty much exactly what you’re describing.
- zombot 1y agoA very relatable post and a good explanation for stepping down. > The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape. You can say that again.
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- talkingtab 1y agoThis is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error. We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system. A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate? Just my 2cents
- dbingham 1y ago> We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate? I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration. It's called Communities (https://communities.social https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.
- eucyclos 1y agoDo you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?
- dbingham 1y agoI'm exploring various systems of community moderation. Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop. Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed. Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds. Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege. It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
- evolve2k 1y agoI’m guessing he’s on mastodon himself and posted this to his feed. Can anyone share a link to his mastodon post for this announcement.
- sphars 1y agoHere's his post: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115569820207257167 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115569820207257167
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