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I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

blog.joinmastodon.org

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Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#131

Post by michaelt »

weinzierl wrote: post #77
jonathaneunice wrote: post #28

"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

In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.

> With money you can always buy popularity easily

I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#134

Post by thunderfork »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #114

Mastodon seems pretty unhealthy to me. I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing. I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.

[dead]

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#135

Post by nabla9 »

bhhaskin wrote: post #56

Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.

There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.

I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#136

Post by mdasen »

bhhaskin wrote: post #56

Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.

Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.

It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.

Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).

Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.

It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#137

Post by forgetfulness »

michaelt wrote: post #131
weinzierl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.

> With money you can always buy popularity easily I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?

What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#138

Post by amiga386 »

lutoma wrote: post #86
amiga386 wrote: post #60

Fantastic! Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just include the link preview in the toot . Add a disclaimer on the UI saying "link preview comes from toot" if it makes you happy. Then Mastodon can be a good web citizen and not a force for evil. It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things. [0] https://github.com/mastodon/m…

This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post. There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it. But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen perso…

I'd give him the benefit of the doubt 7 years ago. But it has been 7 years and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more useless traffic every time someone links to a site.

7 years of "limited dev time"? How much money have the world's webmasters had to pay out of their own pockets, so that nobody developing Mastodon has to spend their precious dev time on being a good netizen and not wasting other peoples' resources?

This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string just to fuck with webmasters - ostensibly they wanted the user agent to look a little bit nicer, but what they did was evade everyone's existing blocking rules, and cause 100,000s of webmasters to have to update their blocking rules for what should've been a solved problem.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#139

Post by wat10000 »

xupybd wrote: post #12

"The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape." This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad

Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.

It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.

Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#140

Post by Zak »

verdverm wrote: post #59
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #29

Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.

On boarding is too complicated for your average social user https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now

The thing I really don't love about ATProto is its decision, or that of its dominant implementation to enforce a schema ("lexicon") on content, limiting interoperation between disparate software. This violates the Old Internet idea of software being liberal about what it accepts.

For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.

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