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Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

blog.joinmastodon.org

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

#31

Post by andypiper »

BeetleB wrote: post #20

Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?

As I posted elsewhere when this was asked yesterday: "there’s a big difference between running a service on volunteers, and having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an infrastructure spend. There’s also an amount of legal work involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements we’re looking at."

Now, I cannot give you a line-by-line account of the budget estimate that went into that number (you can look at the 2023 report https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/12/annual-report-2023/ with the 2024 report coming sometime in Q1 of this year I think, more timely anyway; and you'll see that's a big upswing / optimistic forward-looking goal); but, it is lower than some other non-profits, foundations, and other efforts elsewhere.

So by all means ask whether that number is valid, but also look around at other OSS efforts. I'd also point out that these are critical times for the future of the open social web, and we (all of us) need to sustain it.

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

#32

Post by andreamonaco »

jeromegv wrote: post #24
andreamonaco wrote: post #19

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.

You can still get every user access through RSS And you can add the /embed suffix to any mastodon post url, to get a javascript-free version. But I understand its not the same as maintaining a JS-free version of their web UI. To be fair, with the little budget and little workforce they have, this was likely not high on the priority list.

I understand!

It's just that I was used to read some people's feed with JS disabled, a kind of plain-HTML blog, and that stopped working suddenly, so I was a bit shocked. But it's not a tragedy.

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

#33

Post by jampekka »

rsstack wrote: post #14
dtagames wrote: post #11

Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.

Is B Corp a real thing? It's not equivalent to non-profit and they can always stop being B Corps. Wikipedia lists Nestle Nespresso as a B Corp example, not very inspiring.

B Corp is a certification stamp that companies can buy from the B Corp non-profit. It has no legal ramifications. It's like UTZ, FSC and Fairtrade.

Benefit corporation is a form of legal corporation in the USA that allows for other duties than maximizing shareholder value.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

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

#34

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

dgrin91 wrote: post #23
andreamonaco wrote: post #19

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.

The hilarious dichotomy of HN - this post says UX is going wrong because of JS requirements and HTML only was better, while the one below (currently this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682927 ) says UX is getting better.

I know right, almost like an internet forum or something

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

#35

Post by Aloisius »

dtagames wrote: post #11

Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.

Bluesky isn't a B Corp as far as I can tell (certified by B Lab).

Rather they're incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation.

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

#36

Post by runako »

WorldMaker wrote: post #8
solarkraft wrote: post #3

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.

> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots w…

I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.

I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon.

Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this.

IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.

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

#37

Post by progval »

andreamonaco wrote: post #19

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.

And even with JS enabled, it now needs more network round-trips, which is noticeably slower, even with a very low-latency connection to the server. For example, loading https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/ takes 1.2s to display the posts (or 3.3s when logged in), with a warm cache and 5ms ping to mastodon.social.

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

#38

Post by masfuerte »

jeromegv wrote: post #24
andreamonaco wrote: post #19

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.

You can still get every user access through RSS And you can add the /embed suffix to any mastodon post url, to get a javascript-free version. But I understand its not the same as maintaining a JS-free version of their web UI. To be fair, with the little budget and little workforce they have, this was likely not high on the priority list.

The /embed thing stopped working recently.

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

#39

Post by Kye »

andypiper wrote: post #4
solarkraft wrote: post #3

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.

My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a le…

What is functionally different from these tools other than the protocol providing a firehose of posts and APIs to filter it for people to make custom feeds?

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

#40

Post by femiagbabiaka »

WorldMaker wrote: post #8
solarkraft wrote: post #3

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.

> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots w…

When did Twitter hit it's viral growth curve? And what was the user count before and after? To be clear, it's not necessarily the case that a platform needs to optimize for growth, but I wonder what can be expected without the sticky features that "addict" the most users to a given platform.
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