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I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
171–180 of 497 posts
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#172[deleted]
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#173> 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”.
Just 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.
He defined what "capitalism" meant, did he not? Just using the word isn't some fringe rhetoric, it's mainstream economics. Neither is categorizing ideologies after they happened - of course new ideologies would frame themselves in the noblest ways possible, so we need unrelated people as a second opinion to put their ideas into concrete terms. Insisting that we must call it "freedom" or even "classical liberal freedom" is like me creating an ideology that professes "universal happiness and free prosperity of wonder" and then insisting that everyone must call it that, regardless of what the ideology entails and whether it results in universal happiness or not.
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 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.
> 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.
The context for those who wonder what "single-handedly" means: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.
If you cannot reach UX that normal people will use, you're building for the very few tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy
Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.
Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#177Mastodon 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…
sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an open source project. What exactly are you expecting? Keep in mind that every for-profit publicly-owned corporation has many shareholders, as well as a board of directors, which is, gasp, a committee!
yes, but they typically hire a singular CEO to drive a cohesive vision and strategy with the check that they can fire the CEO at anytime.
Yes, and Mastodon has an executive director (as I already mentioned), which is basically the nonprofit equivalent of a CEO.
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see bots that import from/link to other sources, bots that are clearly someone's attempts at automation. Then "classic" ad spam bots and countless porn/drawn lewd content profiles and even instances that contain nothing else. Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
> Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
I tried two different instances and two different accounts, following people and really extensive post filtering and it still happen.
Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload.
It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure. Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably". A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation. I'm sure one could live of…
Healthcare is taken care of by his taxes.
A quick google suggests more than a third of Germany pays for supplementary private health insurance (Zusatzversicherung) in addition to what their taxes take care of.