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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

#181

Post by bluGill »

tavavex wrote: post #173
bluGill wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 freedo…

sure he defined it. However what he defined is not what anything is based on or is so it isn't nearly as useful a term as supporters like to think.

clasical liberalism is a lot more complex than what he defined, and that is the system most of us live in. Calling it capitalism is wrong, as is thinking ecconomics based on that term matters much in the real world

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#183

Post by lapcat »

nabla9 wrote: post #135
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…

> 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.

This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#185

Post by jongjong »

wmeredith wrote: post #96
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

I've heard a similar maxim that being rich is fantastic, rich and famous is good, poor is bad, poor and famous is a nightmare.

I 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.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#187

Post by phyzome »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #36
polynomial wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"

I 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...

And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#188

Post by Karrot_Kream »

arjie wrote: post #95

> 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 Inte…

Even networks like HN and Reddit are filled with outrage and groupthink these days. I think the kind of person that spends all their time on social media gets stuck in a weird epistemic bubble which consists of ragebait posts and opinions that fish for community approval (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc.) Sitting in that soup for too long probably warps your sense of what's actually happening in the world around you. The folks that don't want to deal with this just opt out of the open web.

I think open forums on the Internet are a bit of a lost cause unless you specifically tune your algorithm to derank ragebait, pile ons, and karma fishing. YouTube did this and the comment section improved dramatically. Though it's obviously important to remember that the draw of YouTube is the videos and not the comments, unlike microblogging sites.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#189

Post by tcfhgj »

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

how do you measure "too complicted"?

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#190

Post by BeetleB »

pndy wrote: post #179
jeromegv wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Curious: Are you looking at the local/federated timeline, or just the people you follow?

I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.

I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.

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