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Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

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141–149 of 149 posts

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#141

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.

> lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug

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.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#142
post #65
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

It seems they lost the first game in the gGmbH (gemeinnützige GmbH, thus "charitable Ltd") leading to a normal GmbH (similar to a Ltd.). In Germany only certain purposes qualify as "gemeinnützige" which makes the formation of non-profits at times difficult, especially in the computing space. Maybe I didn't read careful enough. But it's actually not spelled out which form the new European non-profit is incorporated in…

> it's actually not spelled out which form the new European non-profit is incorporated in

Correct, this is underway, and we're looking in to the right option for the organisation. As of right now, we have options, but the new entity is not finalised so it is not possible to spell out the format yet.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#143

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

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.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#144

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

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.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#145
post #111

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.

Here is a client you can use to avoid turning on JS: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser.

oh, neat, I knew about tut and toot (two other TUI apps), but not this one - I'll have to add it to the community section of our next engineering blog post.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#146
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was mostly speaking to the general advantages of not enabling JS. > static pages As in it won't change after you load the page. > almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls Indeed, haven't seen these with mastodon instances, but you never know when that will start happening. > smaller attack surface The instance could have been hacked, or you could have angered the admin, or you could have angered some other use…

> Static page... As in it won't change after you load the page. That's not what static means in the context of web development. It means that the html is delivered from the server in a static form and doesn't need to be changed in any way to be displayed. > The JavaScript sent by Mastodon is obfuscated, so it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to audit it and mark it as safe This is what file hashes are for. But a…

Static means something different in the context of trust on the web. An entirely static page without JS means you can reason about the page, know it will still work if saved locally etc. A static HTML that loads JS could do anything, like reporting your access to Google, or blocking your viewing if the date is April 1st or whatever, or breaking if it gets saved to archive.org.

File hashes only indicate the file and or hash weren't modified in transit, you can't know which party created the hash, and whether to trust that party, since they aren't authenticated from developer to browser, only from the server to the browser. Even if there were end-to-end authentication and there were a web of trust that could be used for authenticating developer keys, you can't trust code without auditing it, and you can't audit JS on most sites, because it is almost always minified/obfuscated or huge.

I expect it is unlikely Mastodon would care about JS hashes, because they are delivered by the instances rather than a CDN, and each instance can run a different version of the code, and each instance can modify the code as they please.

As above, many/most sites work fine, or much better without JS. The ones that don't can be dealt with using external tools like yt-dlp gallery-dl zygolophodon etc.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#147
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a client you can use to avoid turning on JS: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser.

oh, neat, I knew about tut and toot (two other TUI apps), but not this one - I'll have to add it to the community section of our next engineering blog post.

Those look like they require an account to use. zygolophodon is different, it is a read-only client for use without an account. It uses the same APIs used by the JavaScript based client that instances serve to visitors.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

I don’t see how this argues for or against the point about JS in Mastodon, but yeah, I too would go so far as to say that vibes, pseudo-consensus and internet mobs manufacturing things might have something to do with it.

That's because we branched off into a different topic about what can or can't be derived from the wisdom of mobs. It doesn't argue for JS any more or less than your own comment did which I was replying to.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug

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.

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.

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