This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
Even Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.
I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.<p>Eugen's presence is felt and appreciated in the community, but I can also understand why he stepped down. It's hard to represent so many people who don't always agree with you. I think back to Jack Dorsey's final days at Twitter with the NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers - he truly did not understand that his leadership had passed it's prime. The honorable thing for him to do was pass on control to someone <i>responsible</i>, but instead he spent his final days polarizing Twitter and guaranteeing it's own critical insolvency.<p>Eugen took the honorable route - I hope he remains vocal and influential in the community. It sounds like he knows himself extremely well and I applaud his honesty about the temptation for ego to ruin big projects. Most of us can't imagine the pressure in his shoes.
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I would love to love Mastodon, but discoverability was so incredibly difficult that I just gave up. I can find people and topics so much more easily on Bluesky. The starter packs are nice too.<p>Does Mastodon have starter packs (lists of people to follow posting on a particular subject area, which ideally you could just click once and follow everyone)?
There is an open proposal to implement it without some of Bluesky's downsides.<p><a href="https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections</a>
I have this impression too, I open Mastodon and the timeline usually doesn’t have many interesting things.
Looks like the inmates won again:<p><i>Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.</i>
Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can see what Rochko means.
Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is <i>good</i> (and they are all flagged to death which is good), but neither do they make this comment section some kind of cesspool that would show why one is correct to distance oneself from Mastodon.
Meh, the worst I see in this thread with show dead on is some tedious criticism, politics slop and one guy posting a racial slur. I can't imagine making decisions about the direction of my life over such mild nothings.<p>Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated sensitivity goes with the territory.
I would never, ever want to have anything to do with running any kind of online community these days, or even anything adjacent to one.
He sounds like a remarkable human.
> and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit<p>This is refreshing and exemplary; especially in the light of recent wordpress, rubygems, or similar power struggle dramas.
Here's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space.<p>I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Graber and two names with zero googleable internet presence in the last decade...
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.
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.<p>It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.<p>Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).<p>Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.<p>It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.
> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have<p>Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense).<p>Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality.<p>Influencers don't go on mastodon because they can't "go viral". They can't spew dramaslop or whatever other psychological trickery to gain a greater reach.<p>Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them.<p>---<p>It's also not growth-hacking to a reach critical mass usage before rug-pulling its users into a pit of every expanding service enshitification.<p>That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks.<p>It's the social media network from a parallel universe where the non-profit Wikipedia/Wikimedia purchased Twitter and Discord, merged them together then got rid of the mic rooms.
There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.<p>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.<p>The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.
Here is the thing. None of that matters to <i>me</i>. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.
I don't really care for inactive users, I do post, and people reply to me, and i follow a bunch of people that post. I follow a bunch of hashtags so discover posts outside of my immediate circle. No ads, almost no trolls, no bots, haven't seen spam in a while, it's a great experience as a daily user.
The beauty of OG Twitter was that talking to void is all that was needed. People pumped in tons of interesting contents and it worked(I'd argue it still does work, for lots of IT relevant topics).<p>The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.
The way you paint it feels akin to the people going back rural or even to the middle of the forest, but in the digital scape which has the possibility of being seen just following a (sometimes quite esoteric) URI.
I walked away a long time ago when I realized how fragmented and prone to drama it was.
sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago
> 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.<p>This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.
What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
I'm not entirely sure, I wonder if that is related to the "fight" between fans of ActivityPub and fans of Bluesky AtProto where he was personally involved.<p>Because both protocols can actually interface together, we had people on both side of the 2 networks talking to each other in the same thread (which is truly impressive when you think about it)<p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115074431325055303" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115074431325055303</a>
A thread with a user that devolved into name calling.<p>Or the Twitter fight where he encouraged people to DOS the rival.<p>Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.
I know we must have some terminally online fediverse users here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.
Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
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.<p>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<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Curious: Are you looking at the local/federated timeline, or just the people you follow?<p>I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.<p>I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.
I also just read the timeline of followed accounts, and even a list of 'must-reads' for the high-value people, but I'm also aware that this isn't the way other people liked to use Twitter/Mastodon.<p>Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash"<p>Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/
I think the fediverse is great but: the specific desire for "more people that you already know coming to the Fediverse" is good; the general desire "more people" is not such a useful goal.
Yeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people.<p>People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.<p>For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
On boarding is too complicated for your average social user<p><a href="https://atproto.com" rel="nofollow">https://atproto.com</a> has more of the developer mindshare now
It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.
The thing I really don't love about ATProto is its decision, or that of its dominant implementation to enforce a schema ("lexicon") on content, limiting interoperation between disparate software. This violates the Old Internet idea of software being liberal about what it accepts.<p>For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.
That's an incorrect assessment<p>Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept<p><a href="https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance" rel="nofollow">https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance</a><p>> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined<p>ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of over-complexity
how do you measure "too complicted"?
It's another centralised service
I wish it were better. I really want to move to it, but they’ve somehow managed to even make something as simple as liking a toot unintuitive. Boost and favorite don’t fit the bill.
> It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.<p>You mean like HN?
At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
If i logged into my account, its probably just some german hackers, some weird people, and a bot that posts the current big ben chimes in an amusing way. I love it. Empty is good.
I view it as a good thing.
>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
Godspeed, John Mastodon
He’s also receiving €1 million as a one-time compensation. Not quite enough to retire on that.
Here's more information on that: <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...</a><p>> For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M.
Still enough to have a good lil nest egg that generates okay-ish passive income if invested correctly.<p>@ 4% that's €40k/year<p>more than what most regular people have
You're assuming zero savings to begin with, which is a weird assumption.
His salary from Mastadon annual reports 2021-2023 were 28,800, then 36,000, then 60,000 euros annually (reports for 2024 and 2025 are not released yet), so unless he had side gigs or deals, I wouldn't expect he has a ton of savings at the moment. Glad he is getting a decent payout with his exit, though unfortunately a windfall like this in one year offers less take-home than if he was paid this over several years.<p>I really hope he's able to find success and better work-life balance in his future endeavours
It doesn't say he's retiring (afaik) - he might still have compensation
It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and control your costs.
Do you have a reference for this?
Damn, where is Mastodon getting €1M from?<p>Also where do you get from that you can't retire with €1M. It seems very feasible as long as you keep a frugal lifestyle.
> We deeply appreciate the generosity of Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark.<p>> We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025).<p>From <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...</a>
Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure.<p>Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".<p>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.<p>I'm sure one <i>could</i> live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
Generally charitable foundations figure that you can withdraw 3% per year from your savings and never run out. Remember you have to account for not only good years, but also really bad years, so even though you can average 10% over the long term in the stock market there will be decades that you are negative. There are also bond investments that are safer, but have worse return. And inflation is always eating into your savings so if they don't grow by that much every year (on average) eventually you will run out of money.<p>3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.<p>Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
> You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.<p>Or he could scrimp and put four hard years towards making manager at McDonald's. If he gets it, then he can demand they match 44k a year (his passive income at that point) or he walks.<p>He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.<p>Compound interest is one helluva drug!
The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.<p>(I'm going to assume that we actually withdraw slightly more than 3% to cover taxes, so that we are getting $30k/year after taxes).<p>I'm in the Puget Sound area of Washington with a paid off house and until a few months ago a paid off car. My new car is financed for a few months while I wait for some CDs to mature which I will use to pay it off. In the following I'm going to treat it as paid off.<p>The expenses that arise every month (e.g. food/groceries, some insurance premiums, utilities, prescriptions and OTC health stuff) plus the expenses that are yearly or half-yearly (e.g. some insurance premiums, property taxes) converted to monthly comes to a little under $2000/month.<p>A new Mac every 5 years, an iPad every 5 years, an iPhone every 4, an Apple Watch every 4, and a new car every 10 works out to be equivalent to around $350/month.<p>That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.<p>I do have fairly low property taxes thanks to a pretty good senior discount that Washington provides, but Washington is also a high property tax state. If we pick a low property tax state there are a few were someone without a discount would be paying about $800/month more than I'm paying for a comparable house. In one of those states that would leave us $1000/year for the occasional appliance repair or replacement.<p>You may need to make sure your house is suitable for this. Mine has a well and septic system which can be expensive to fix if they break. That could require drawing down the principle. We'd probably want to pick a house on municipal water and sewage. Also pick one in a milder climate so that we aren't relying on some expensive high capacity heating and/or cooling system. That should keep heating/cooling repairs down.<p>We also should take another look at that 3% a year withdrawal. We don't need to never run out. We just need to not run out before we die.<p>We can bump our monthly withdraw up to $3000 and keep that up for around 60 years. With that we've got $7k/year for our maintenance/repairs/replacements.<p>Another thing we should probably look at is whether we've already done enough work or whatever else is required to qualify for our country's old age benefits someday. If we will be able to start collecting those when we are 65 for example, and we are getting our $1 million at 30, we can withdraw more now than if we have to have the $1 million get us all the way to death.
>You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.<p>Hey, good for you. But 30k per year is a very good salary in European countries such as Spain, where the median salary is just a bit over half that.
30k gross, not net, so it's about equal to the median salary.<p>I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.
Shit Americans say...
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
Why is retiring mentioned? Most jobs pay zero when you leave so 1M is cool.
He was the founder and head of the company, so probably wouldn’t have had to step down if he didn’t want to.
Because that is the common thing someone will do when they get what looks like a large sum of money. It isn't the only option, but it is a common one.
€1M would not even cover the property tax to retire in the cheapest bay area home.
Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.
Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.<p>Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
thankfully nobody's forced to live in the Bay Area. With a million in the bank you could live off the interest in Portugal or an even cheaper city in Asia without touching the principal. Frankly on 40k you can even live here in Germany comfortably where Eugen hails from too.
My mastodon account on mastodon.social (the official instance of Mastodon gGmbH) was deleted without a reason after I criticized the former GDR. Not going to donate another €100 this year.
There’s not really an “official” instance. That one is one of thousands of equal peers.<p>I say this not to explain to you, but to clarify a common misperception that it’s somehow the “real” Mastodon. It’s not, in exactly the same way that Gmail is not the “real” email.
Would you say that people who donate one hundred euro or more every year should receive some form of special treatment when it comes to their account status? Not sure why that detail is relevant. That is a very American point of view tbh, not sure why a fellow European would be parroting such currency-focused viewpoints. It's not a good look
It’s rude to pretend OP said something they didn’t say. And a little side insult to Americans, nice.
at least a single word would have been nice. I've not insulted anyone.
Found it interesting they've lost status as a non-profit for tax exemption in Germany, and now establish a non-profit in the US for attracting investors while dev and ops remain in a German gGmbH.
Does Jeff Bezos even dress well?
Related:<p><i>The Future Is Ours to Build – Together</i><p><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-build-together/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...</a><p><i>Mastodon: Building for the Long Term</i><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404</a>
This is the problem with a stressful role, with little compensation. Most people wouldn't want to be in this position.<p>It sounds like anyone that runs a moderately sized open source project.<p>More money would solve most of these issues.
I used to volunteer moderate a very busy forum.<p>Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.<p>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.<p>I do wonder though if you have people doing it for the money, would that help or hinder?
One fairly busy forum I cofounded and "moderated" on, we intentionally call the moderators "Janitors" in an attempt to dissuade the sort of people who wanted "a powerful role" from even wanting to ask. It sorta mostly worked, largely because there were 7 very like minded cofounders of that forum who stared it as an escape route when a previous version was sold to a forum-monetising company (Vertical Scope, from memory).
You can probavly get better, more accountable moderators, if it meant losing your job for violating the rules.<p>Money could also be invested in developers to maintain Mastadon and issue security fixes.
I think it's good for the future of Mastodon as a decentralized platform to not depend essentially on any one person. After all, the web itself no longer depends on Tim Berners-Lee. That doesn't diminish their accomplishments, which were never about king-making.
Truthfully, the web never did depend entirely on Tim.<p>He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all.<p>The W3C was its own thing.
It depends what the alternative is. A vacuum is worse for example.
10 years leading. I would have fatigued.<p>Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though. I kind of know what it is, but I am not really using it. We could need, say, some replacement of Twitter-owned-by-billionaires.
Fantastic!<p>Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just <i>include the link preview in the toot</i>. Add a disclaimer on the UI saying "link preview comes from toot" if it makes you happy. Then Mastodon can be a good web citizen and not a force for evil.<p>It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecomment-396732769" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecommen...</a>
I don't see his linked comment as blocking progress. Both of those questions are very valid and something I'd expect from a good core maintainer.<p>Disclaimer: I don't have any additional context.
There are other examples. He single-handedly prevented quote tweets from being implemented in Mastodon because "they lead to toxicity", disregarding the benefits of quote tweets and the barrage of feedback supporting it.<p>Meanwhile, Bluesky implemented QTs in a perfect way: you can detach your post from quotes or prevent quoting entirely if you want, but the feature is there.
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.<p>For anyone reading, quote tweets are now available on Mastodon.
> This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time<p>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.
This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post.<p>There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it.<p>But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen personally is "blocking progress" like there's some grand conspiracy (Instead of the much more boring reality of limited dev time and having to prioritize things).
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt 7 years ago. But <i>it has been 7 years</i> and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more <i>useless</i> traffic every time someone links to a site.<p>7 years of "limited dev time"? How much money have the world's webmasters had to pay out of their own pockets, so that nobody developing Mastodon has to spend their precious dev time on being a good netizen and not wasting other peoples' resources?<p>This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string <i>just to fuck with webmasters</i> - ostensibly they wanted the user agent to look a little bit nicer, but what they did was evade everyone's existing blocking rules, and cause 100,000s of webmasters to have to update their blocking rules for what should've been a solved problem.
> automatically assume the worst intentions<p>I don't know there's an assumption involved. I think for many people, it gives them the opportunity to act out on anger, shame, and other emotions they've internalized. They smell 'blood in the water' and know they can get away with it.
Mastodon seems pretty unhealthy to me.<p>I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing.<p>I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.
Title is: My next chapter with Mastodon
Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
> <i>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.</i><p>Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.<p>Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.<p>Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.<p>The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).<p>I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.<p>Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.<p>0: <a href="https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023/twitter-recommendation-algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...</a><p>1: <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545" rel="nofollow">https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545</a><p>2: <a href="https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165" rel="nofollow">https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165</a><p>3: <a href="https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349" rel="nofollow">https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349</a><p>4: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fafpk2n" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...</a><p>5: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t</a>
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.<p>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.
YouTube is an incredible story. It used to be memed as the worst comment community of all time. But then whatever they did to it made it the mildest thing on Earth, and it has really improved that site. As you point out, that works only because no one really goes there for the comments. Except perhaps for the famous slag one:<p>> <i>Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah...</i><p>> <i>The sea-gulls around dusk, would often ride the intense thermals created by the super-heated air, drawing cooler air up from below the slag pits, combining with the hot air whoosh it would go, rushing up the precipitous cliffs, man-made mini-mountains of slag, there they would fly along the thermals updraft about 100 feet up and nearly parallel to the rail car dump line. Their white underbelly's "glowing" brilliantly orange, phoenix like they hovered there almost motionless reflecting the bright yellow-orange and red hues of the cooling slag. It was like they were on fire it was so bright in the fading light of the day. It was the only beautiful sight to see in an otherwise desolate and foreboding wasteland of glassy rock-like congealed blast furnace slag.</i><p>- mrc109 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw</a>
This Video Will Make You Angry:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc</a>
> Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour.<p>Somewhere, HN moderators talk about this concept: Bad behavior is a cancer and spreads through the community.
"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.
The quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.
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.<p>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.
In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.
And if you can't buy popularity you can always buy a really high wall.
<i>> With money you can always buy popularity easily</i><p>I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?
Well he was doing a good job at buying popularity until he fired his PR team so..
Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with.<p>Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans.<p>Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic. (And has fallen way way out of popularity with huge parts of demographics that he used to be popular in, like electric car people, home solar/battery people, and spaceflight fans.)
> Musk is super popular in the outspoken nazi demographic.<p>It's sad seeing such poor misinformed takes like this on hacker news. I guess Marc Andreessen and the President/Co-Founder of Stripe, among many others, are nazis now. It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.<p>> and spaceflight fans.<p>As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today, even if I have more issues with him today than I did back then. I can confidently say that many spaceflight fans feel the same as I on this. People overstate his controversial opinions (and being a nazi is not one of them) and understate his past achievements (and continued achievements).
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists" that he's highly appreciated and many want to figure out how to replicate him.<p>> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today<p>Elon is a rare human being.<p>He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).<p>And he is also what his worshipers think (a generationally incredible technical and business visionary).<p>Most people, whether ordinary or extraordinary themselves, have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.<p>A small segment sees both sides clearly. I find it a painful experience. Overlapping extremes of inspiration and damage. But reality isn't all bubblegum and glitter go pops.
What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has
He’s an example. He has to burn massive amounts of money to counteract the fact that he wants to be the town asshole in public constantly.<p>If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right
Yeah, giving Nazi salutes is a great way to buy popularity.
"The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape."<p>This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad
dunno what world you live in, but that was the line that resonated the most for me...
I think it's a great quote. Even bsky is part of the problem until regular people can host nodes in it.<p>Fedi is never going to be consistent, but it's also always going to be accessible to everyone. And therefore truly by the people for the people.
It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
It's better than the vast majority of social media, but it's still a walled garden. I wouldn't use it for anything important to me.
i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro credits to access those characters on my keyboard
those new Discord ads sure are great!
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...
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.<p>Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.
unfortunately he can only pay you back in 1925 dollars so youll have to take the dime as down payment and get the farmer enrolled in a BNPL
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742</a>) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.
Yeah, he'd spit it out because it tastes like corn-fed, feed-lot crap.
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.
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The catastrophizing perspecting is objetively correct from the perspective of the present and future that we are creating.<p>The open web as we knew it 20 years ago does not exist. Governments continue to tighten down on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and financial restrictions through the digitizing of currency and arbitrary sanction mechanisms.<p>Income inequality continues to increase. Standards of living in the West have marginal increases in material access at the cost of unaffordability in housing and health. Retirement benefits continue to be chipped away. Organized labor is made more and more irrelevant each day.<p>None of this will make a difference in your daily life. Until it does; then it's too late.
Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.<p>It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.<p>Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
> 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.<p>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 Fediverse users (searchable users/tags/posts).<p>IMHO social networks, centralized or decentralized, are doomed to be exploited (financially, politically) or die in boredom and self-policing. If you can find and maintain a productive niche inside the cr*p , it may work.
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Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.<p>Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_perihelion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...</a>
> 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”.<p>He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.<p>Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
You would really have to ask a person to know that.
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.
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.<p>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
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It seems like strixhalo is a pipe-cleaner part of sorts and the real deal may have to be Medusa Halo. That one could be a monster. The bad news is that it sounds like it's a long way off (2027 sometime) so who knows what Apple M5 or M6 Max could look like by then for competition.
Did you perhaps intend to post this on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968611">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968611</a>
i think this is on the wrong thread