His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of… other social media founders.
I have recently been using it more to connect with others on a new subject, but now for the first time ever on the internet since early 00’s, we are all owners of it ourselves. All the great new stuff was always owned by others and frankly I’m sick of it.
I never even liked twitter. Then I followed #nature and #bloomscrolling on mastodon for a while and my home feed was a feast of beautiful pics. So now there’s one use for me for microblogging. Neat! Mastodon does what it says it does and even offers ‘default’ instances. I’d love for some GO’s to help reach that donation goal quicker, so we can all get with the program and ditch corpo social media. -Why doesn’t my library host it’s own peertube?? #MakeLibrariesGreatAgain
we are all owners of it ourselves.
Not unless you run your own instance you aren’t.
I couldn’t find any legalese on mastodon.social that my toots are somehow not my property. While it’s true that I no longer have total control over its distribution, that doesn’t mean I have somehow relinquished ownership.
You seem quite confident that that is incorrect , with your one line reply. Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Common sense. The instance admin deletes the instance (or your posts) 'cos the coffee was bad this morning… there goes “your property”.
Obviously orders of magnitude better than commercial social media but it’s no silver bullet either.
There, 3 lines.Yep, it’s still someone else’s platform, even if it’s open source.
While this is a good move, I don’t think John Mastodon was making anywhere near the kind of money to turn into the next Musk or Zuck to begin with.
The point isnt money. The point is the “benevolent dictator” model, see Matt Mullenweg and the current WordPress controversy. The whole future of that software depends on this guy because he controls the most important assets (like the trademarks) personally.
Eugen and the whole Mastodon development team want to avoid a situation like that.
You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.
€60k
I read that url as blog.johnmastodon.org and for a second I was seriously wondering if that name was real lol
He’s no Tim Apple.
Or Jennifer Facebook.
Or Lenard TikTok III.
Zhang Wei can change his name to whatever the fuck he wants he’ll still ve Zhang Wei TikTok
Please, “Mr. TikTok” was my father, call me Zhang.
mass market media can only understand the world through the lens of mass market media
Not now, but in the future that was a possibility.
I mean in the future it’s a possibility I’ll be fucking Zendaya but that doesn’t mean it’s reality now does it?
Are you in a space/career where you could conceivably interact with Zendaya?
Yeah, I don’t get it. Mastodon is already huge with millions of users and hundreds of instances. Rochko is already on speaking terms with Zendaya, if you will.
Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.
Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system
I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.
Nothing, which is okay. People make the mistake of thinking users have any even passing interested in a good platform with social media, not just the social connections on it.
That is why Bluesky can be so successful: It’s an absolutely smooth and effortless drop-in replacement for Twitter, and has no gathered enough momentum for it to be easy to find existing people you want to follow on it, further drawing more people who you might want to follow in. So the motivation to use it is there, and the switch itself is essentially unnoticable.
I mean it kinda already is a Twitter, just 5 years in the past.
Bluesky is still running on VC cash. We haven’t seen how they plan on monetizing it yet, but if anything that is where their major fuckup will happen.
We haven’t seen how they plan on monetizing it yet
Enshittification once they have enough users, that’s usually how these things go. I swear we don’t learn.
All of these applications (yes, also Lemmy and Mastodon) are feed for the AI machine. That’s where the money is.
And ads probably.
Absolutely nothing. I fully expect it to follow a similar trajectory.
If lemmy ever catches on ^doubt it’ll be a reddit fractal.
^doubt
You need to do double caret ^doubt^ for the proper formatting. Yeah, the markdown is a bit weird. lol
Oh? It works for me? Maybe it’s a sync hiccup.
Huh, on Jerboa I get Html tags where my escaped carets used to be. 😅
It’s open-source and has a public protocol.
That’s a red herring, they still have full control of the network.
You still have to go through the central hub. You can’t spin up your own, wholly independent Bluesky. You can only make your own node.
It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.
As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)
The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.
AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.
Yes, it’s not a full web3 app, but I like that these apps are heading in the right direction.
However it’s better than Twitter/Instagram. I can control my feed!
Until they build “The Algorithm” to “help you” find what
youthey want you to see or not.Feeds offer algorithm transparency and you can use alternative frontends. ATProto can’t suddenly be turned to private and disable third party access, it is intrinsically public.
Twitter also looked great until it didn’t, it even comes from the same guy.
While at this moment BlueSky looks good, we will end up the same way sooner or later. Muskov et. al. figured out how to monetize social media. Now Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are tools to manufacture opinion. And certain opinions are worth a lot to certain people.
Reddit was open source at some point too.
This is not true.
The App view, relay, PDS, and mobile app, code is all open source. Anyone can spin up their own version if they want.
If you want a complete copy of bluesky (reflecting the bluesky post firehose) it’s prohibitively expensive, but you can spin up your own version if you want.
The only thing that’s missing is bluesky federating anything other than PDSes by default, but you can 100% go in the other direction.
A good overview is here: What bluesky is and what bluesky is not
I wonder if we’ll see p2p versions of the firehose so people can seed posts from accounts they trust/like as a way to make firehoses affordable for the public to run
Especially considering the lead dev was the creator of beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
The Internet needs fewer Stalins and Hitlers and more George Washingtons.
Yeah, it’s refreshing to see someone not be an Absolute Dick™ on the internet for profit.
More slave owners it is then!
It is an imperfect system, but my comment was more about leaders not clinging to power to the detriment of society.
Fuck yeah RTJ
I was just kidding. I understand what you meant. Monkey paw wish. Lol
Same here. I still try to use it once every day in support but I don’t like having such a low limit (or any limit at all, really) on how many characters I’m allowed to use for my posts or response. I am more of a macro-blogger as I tend to be very verbose; especially posting online. I do, however, think it is important to create accounts, use and donate to the project that is mastodon; as they are leading by example in this “New Social” era or movement we are all apart of. It would be a shame that something like this isn’t able to continue, let alone expand, because not enough people supported the project – even though such project is giving the people exactly what they wanted and asked for. Let’s all try to show our support behind such a bold and selfless decision.
I don’t like having such a low limit (or any limit at all, really)
Instead we should see value in opinionated software, when the alternative is software that tries to do everything for everyone.
There are different Mastodon instances with different post character limits. You could also use an ActivityPub based macroblog (like write.as / WriteFreely(?)).
Nice to know! I think lemmy has been meeting my needs pretty well, as there are no limits that I’m aware of here. What would be compelling for something like write.as and writefreely?
The blog discussed progress on a “privacy-respecting search tool” that could be used to explore the entire Fediverse, a collection of independent social media networks that Mastodon connects to. That could make it possible to discover more content without depending on a “For You” algorithm mining user data.
Inshallah. Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
I follow hashtags, it’s how i discover interesting content for me. I only use the search function to follow specific accounts.
Problem being that any instance only displays those posts under a hashtag that it knows about. Currently, if I follow #formula1 from my home instance, I’m seeing different posts than if I follow #formula1 from a certain other instance.
Will probably get better with developments in that aspect in the next few years.
So do I, but I can’t even search for my own posts. It’s frustrating.
I’m not sure what the practicals of doing something like this will be, but it speaks a lot to who Eugen Rochko is.
He might also be an obtuse dick. I’ve gotten that vibe too. Still, good for him.
We should not expect greatness from the men who create these corporations, they are not great men, they are not even good or especially intelligent men. They fell into their position by luck, the one in a million triers for whom circumstance clicked into position. The only thing that sets them apart and perhaps accounts for their success is how they are so consistently open to sycophancy and manipulation by the pack of cold and savage business graduates that flock to any form of success. When a person is against type, as seemingly is the case here, they stand out and just once in a while are capable of real greatness.
What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
- That’s giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
- The article does not even hint at the existence of source code, and the announcement itself doesn’t talk about changes in that aspect either, so I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
Someone is still in charge of the git account. No matter how many commits there are being made, unless the owner of the repo approves to merge them, it’s not happening.
And sure, someone could create a fork that includes their changes if they aren’t being merged, but then this separate fork might at some point lose compatibility with the original software. And on a purely semantic note, this fork wouldn’t be the original mastodon either.
its an org, it can have multiple owners.
Noj profit does not have owners per se, but it is still controlled by somebody
I was thinking specifically about the github.
Ain’t he putting it under a non profit structure?
Once it is an organization, yes, that’s the whole point. Right now it is still an individual, that’s the point I was trying to make.
no it’s not? https://github.com/orgs/mastodon/people
unless we’re talking about different things?
That’s a virtual structure in github, not a legal construct. Those organisations have owners (minimum 2), but if they collude and go rogue, they can do quite a lot of harm. (See also https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/roles-in-an-organization).
A formally incorporated nonprofit organization has statutes, organs, supervisory boards and all that by which they must adhere, so once set up properly, the software would be fully protected from malicious intent on a legal level.
…but you were talking about the git project in the parent comment? the rest of the thread is about company structure.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.
The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.
Just like what happened with Ecosia. We need more humble people in the world!
Please enlighten me as to what happened with ecosia?
The founder stepped down in ownership and made sure he couldn’t sell it.
I’m amazed, he actually stopped corruption before it started
152k to 1.5 milhouse is definitely an astronomical increase. Where does that number come from? For that matter…has he been funding all of this on his own up until this point?
I agree that 1.5 milhouse is quite a lot.
everything’s coming up thrillho
I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn’t bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.
Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.
I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn’t going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it’s totally free!
I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).
I know you have to make money…but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others…why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants…but he has the money to keep the site going…without charging people 8 bucks to get “Premium” service.
The only thing Mastodon doesn’t have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.
Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?
I am not really tech savvy
I think you’ll find that a lot of things you think aren’t for you because of that phrase are more accessible than you realize. Look at you go!
I think it’s unlikely that Mastodon (or other federated short form blogging platforms e.g. Pelorama) will integrate live-streaming as it’s pretty far outside of the normal content they are built for. There is a project that does support live streaming and is federated though: Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/
I believe that since Tiktok is about to be banned - if no buyer is sought by Sunday, January 19; that a lot of people will flock to Red Note. Another Chinese-owned social media. Having said that, more and more people will start to try new alternative places. I like the idea of open source sites. I wished I have known this much sooner.
I like Odysee - an open source to Rumble - minus the ads. Unlike Rumble, you don’t have to pay to remove ads (among other features). Odysee never has ads on their platform. Which I like a lot.
I am also on Pixelfed. That site is pretty cool!
yould like for it to pickup - it is a google killer app
WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.
The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.
uh… ok? So now it’ll be controlled by someone who DOES want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg?
No it is the opposite, this is the first paragraph in the article:
Mastodon announced Monday that it’s shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—“affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
