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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

#451

Post by Nextgrid »

berkes wrote: post #447
Nextgrid wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What’s impractical about that? My understanding is that ActivityPub relies on the server having a stable domain name and be reachable from the internet so that other instances can talk to it. So your client must continuously run its server in the background (impossible on mobile) and be reachable from the internet at a static IP or dynamic DNS with low TTLs (very impractical on mobile unless you perpetually leave y…

Your understanding is right. Though some downtime is usually handled by servers with "backoff retries" eventually you're server will be marked as offline and servers might never bother contacting it anymore. Similar to email which - at least technically - has the idea built into its protocol that servers are going to be down. But mastodon was built with more modern web in mind, so having a server that's offline more…

> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies

That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.

(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.

I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#452

Post by bigyabai »

billy99k wrote: post #130
duxup wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to volunteer moderate a very busy forum. Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so. The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down. I do wonder though if you have people doing it for…

You can probavly get better, more accountable moderators, if it meant losing your job for violating the rules. Money could also be invested in developers to maintain Mastadon and issue security fixes.

You don't seem to know how Mastodon works. If moderators aren't self-consistent in their judgement, users can literally take their profile to an entirely different website with no service disruption at all.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#453

Post by james_marks »

bigiain wrote: post #236
james_marks wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you dislike about Biz Stone being on the board? He’s a mensch with a highly relevant credential by all accounts I’ve heard.

Nothing "real", just a knee-jerk reaction to him being a Twitter cofounder (and patent holder).

You might be surprised to learn more about him.

Hard to remember the idealism Twitter was founded with now, but I suspect Biz saw where Twitter was headed long, long ago and didn’t want to be party to it.

He’s used his status to support awesome projects since then.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#454

Post by jrm4 »

modo_mario wrote: post #439
jrm4 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to be around Mastodon to know what that means, but basically there was an effort by some Black folks there to not just create their own server but to also flag and identify racist/toxic servers etc, and anyone who fit that as they saw was put on their thing called "The Bad Space." Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes. I find that most everyone on Mast…

I don't consider those types of efforts well meaning anymore. Rather than changing minds they without fail seem to attract narcissists and people utilizing victimhood like a status item or the like and that and purity spirals like a cudgel. >I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mas…

Black people are emphatically absolutely big in tech in the US, just not in a lot of well known "classic" arena; way more in the business tech space. Like linkedin, not slashdot.

like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#455

Post by wpietri »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #406
roenxi wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a…

A few years ago there were some "personalities" that very much agitated against Stallman. Without generalizing too much it is these people you probably should keep a very, very large distance to. Toxic is likely an understatement.

Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.

You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.

If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#456

Post by wpietri »

jordanb wrote: post #294
mothballed wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't beleive Epstein debacle ruined even rms. That guy's tentacles were everywhere.

RMS was trying to defend Marvin Minsky, but because RMS is on the spectrum he did it in a way that didn't do anything for his long-term friend but made things horrible for himself. Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky were both involved with Epstein.

Plenty of people are on the spectrum and able to talk about this stuff well. Please don't smear the rest of us with RMS's nonsense.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#457

Post by gradientsrneat »

rmoriz wrote: post #143
keybored wrote: post #124

> I have so much passion for Mastodon and the fediverse. The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape. And from my perspective, Mastodon is our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses. This is why I’m sticking around, albeit in a more advisory, and less public, role. Wait ’til the masses hear about this one.

You can claim the opposite of the fediverse. The fediverse became an ultra left-wing (in terms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, not human rights). If you write one positive thing about AI/LLM based coding and you will be tarred and spring-loaded. People use Fediverse for venting, less for creating and sharing original content. Some creators on TikTok provide much more insightful content than most of the Fediv…

IME Lemmy is more predominantly far left although a very small userbase.

Mastodon has islands of different culture on both the left and the right that don't interact much save a few of the largest instances. Some of the medium-sized ones vouched by joinmastodon have a lot of far left people. There's also a lot of mastodon forks which have been rebranded and closed off (at least one is far right), which complicates things. If you look at Mastodon blocklists you can get a feel for the boundaries.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#458

Post by mikem170 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #410
bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.

It was one of his assistants that signed him up. Pedantic but he himself has never actually used it

Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:

> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]

The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#459

Post by wpietri »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #434
lapcat wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture. That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things. Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

> I think that HN culture for example is horrendous. Why are you here there? Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.
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