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.
He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.
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.
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:<p>> 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]<p>The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.<p>[1] <a href="https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html" rel="nofollow">https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html</a>
I met Stallman once when he was pamphleting outside a beloved book store because they were using meetup to organize a book signing. The guy is consistent.
I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.
Eugen*
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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>
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.
Let's salute dang for his service.
It wasn’t that great 10 or twenty years ago either. I ran a sizable community in my county in the late to mid 2000s and got death threats, human feces mailed to my home, calls and visits to my place of employment and constant threats of various kinds of lawsuits.<p>Eventually my blood pressure was driven too high and I fucked it off. A high percentage of people are like barely functioning apes flinging shit and I just got over it.
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.<p>I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.<p>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.<p>Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.
I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).
I don't find this analogy enlightening. Only a few people are ever trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, so of course it doesn't tell us much about humanity.<p>Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.
I don’t believe it’s necessarily human nature. But it’s definitely human culture.
> I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.<p>Why are you here there?<p>Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.
I share the same sentiment about the HN community, but there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here that are fun to read
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.
> Why are you here<p>I agree with, uh, assbuttbuttass: "there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here".<p>As for commenting, it's just a matter of too much time on my hands, temptation, and bad habit.<p>> Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.<p>You can respond, anyway. ;-)
> You can respond, anyway. ;-)<p>Well, since you asked ;-)<p>I'd agree with you, more or less. I don't find it horrendous necessarily. But I find the focus to be far more on the articles than the conversation. Most of my comments are just me screaming into the void.<p>Its a different business model though, HN isn't trying to increase your session time as much as possible. I find the UI to actually discourage conversation and interaction.
Its a decent feed for articles.<p>The culture is fucking terrible
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.
This feels very analogous to my experience with the place. As a Black person (who absolutely loves the idea and model), it's weird.<p>Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ever experienced via strangers on social media. E.g. some mild doxxing, you aren't really Black etc.<p>(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)
> with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything<p>That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times.<p>As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.
3% variance on beliefs is way bigger than you think, and also he said “just about” everything, not everything.<p>And you can have whatever opinion you want, but also be prepared for me to tell you that your opinion is stupid, and when you assert that a falsehood is in fact opinion instead of a lie, I will point out that facts are not opinions and opinions are not facts.<p>Too many of y’all get this confused.
I think his point is that we all have more in common as humans than differences, and yet the differences prevail, which is a shame (and unhealthy).<p>So we make our own choices about where we spend our time, and some of us simply disconnect.
>(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)<p>What do you mean?
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."<p>Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes.<p>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 Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
> Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy?<p>Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).<p>It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.<p>If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.
A good principle in theory, but did you miss that I mentioned that I am black as well?<p>And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc.<p>But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel <i>compelled</i> to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're a point of contact for "Blackness" for a lot of people who are not black. And frankly, I find them <i>embarrassing</i> in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.<p>As in, I never found "oh, they're just playing the race card" to EVER be valid.<p>Until I went to Mastodon.
> A good principle in theory<p>And especially in practice.<p>> I am black as well<p>I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say something critical - and especially something racist (you didn't say anything racist, afaik) - as if that somehow justifies it. It's a well-worn troll tactic to turn the tables on racism, etc.<p>> And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.<p>Doesn't that take on the too common perspective toward black people (and lots of other groups), that each black person is like a spokesperson of a universal Black Persons Association and speaks for / represents every other black person?<p>Freedom is the freedom to be outrageous, wrong, disagreeable, etc. (Not that disagreeing with you or me is 'wrong'.) Look at what white people do.
Yeah, basically I agree with mmooss. As a Black person, I don’t really care how weird, wrong, creepy, or exhausting other Black people are, I still feel more kinship and alignment with them than a random white person I don’t know. I can’t really stand white people writ large, but there are a ton of individual white people I love and adore. Because I know the difference between whiteness* and a white person.<p>And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.<p>And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.
I tend to agree -- but what kept me around <i>that</i> particular flavor of Black mastodon bullshit was of course, not the people -- but my personal belief that <i>Mastodon</i> is the smartest model for social media, and as such I choose to try to see what I can do in there. I think the world would be better off if everyone saw/believed that the thing we do with twitter would work VERY WELL if done on Mastodon.<p>Would not tolerate otherwise.
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It's not an "argument?" And if anything it's just more of a <i>confirmation</i> of your exact idea of being against a universal Black Person's Association.<p>Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads <i>some-kind-of</i> uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure <i>opinion</i> (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uBPA.
I can imagine your point about it countering the uBPA perspective, but the comments feel more like what I said above. Are people that dumb about uBPA beliefs that they really need to know about one exception? I hope not.<p>I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.
Are people that dumb?<p>In my experience? YES YES YES YES YES.<p>And hey, in my experience, if you want that perspective, head on over to Mastodon; it's ALL there.<p>edit: ha, I'm being uncharitable. I think it is naive to not understand that there is some sliver of "truthful experience" for most people to the uBPA, regardless of who you are.
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.<p>>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 Mastodon because it's boring as hell."<p>It's sad to say but I think black people aren't big in the tech space or similar spaces in general and not just in the US. Fosdem is one of the most pasty conventions out there in a rather international city.<p>As an outsider looking in I think just like with the lack of women in tech it's not primarily a barrier problem.
And this is a different subject but I in factthink some of the weird campaigning towards women to join has had the opposite effect (Think 'barbie and her pink laptop entering the male dominated field' type stuff just reinforcing pointlessly gendered preconceptions.)
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.<p>like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.
> interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything<p>Maybe because you say things like that? In what world is people's skin color related to their views?
Of the group of black people, he found a group where he shared 97% of views.<p>I think in the US there is 'black culture' and having a black skin, and I understand your point that skin color should not be assumed to be related to a view. But I don't think that's implied here.
I don't think that's what they were trying to imply there.
Lmao if you have to ask this it tells me a lot
Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl <i>racial</i> slurs if there wasn't the threat of being banned or flagged.
They're normal people - some of them good and some of them bad - some bright and some dim.<p>I'm not trying to be mean when I say this: don't kid yourself into thinking you're in a club with the cream of the crop, anywhere - you're just setting yourself up for disappointment in the best case and horror in the worst case.
Plenty of people trying to hurl racial slurs here, but they're mostly all shadow banned and not really truly participating in the discussions.
I think very few people on this forum would qualify as intellectuals, most are just ordinary people. Now, some users certainly present themselves as Renaissance polymaths, but typically they just suffer from Engineer's Disease :)<p>Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
> Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.<p>Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.
Why do you have to wonder? Are people on HN just abstract text to you? Just talk to people.
I promise you, you can be both.
A couple of decades has taught me that there's no hard boundary between those two sets. The concept of "public intellectual" itself is a bit suspect, since it becomes just another form of celebrity and/or cult leader.
HN comments rarely resolve <i>only</i> into personal insults. It's sometimes accompanied with the actual arguments but never just insults
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.
Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody<p>And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that <i>other people say</i> (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): <a href="https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html" rel="nofollow">https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html</a><p>Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where <i>nobody</i> runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Just use your server only for you, and ingest the federated feed.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.<p>IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it <i>completely</i> hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see <i>anything</i> the server is ingesting, without first logging in.<p>Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy <i>for yourself</i>, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.<p>Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.<p>The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if <i>someone else could see them</i>, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.<p>I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue <i>you</i> for making it available on <i>your</i> server, even temporarily.<p>From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.<p>In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
> Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?<p>Yes. I follow several remote users who default to "unlisted" posts. (To be honest, I don't know if they're unlisted or follower-only posts -- I can't tell.)
But that's en entirely different discussion then the "mastodon is not fully decentralized".
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.<p>There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (<a href="https://gotosocial.org/" rel="nofollow">https://gotosocial.org/</a>) with its light and low-tech UI.<p>Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Do you know about gotosocial? That’s pretty much exactly what you’re describing.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).<p>Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.<p>One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
> For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios.<p>That sounds like Nostr. My understanding is your node is the nostr relay. Your nostr client can publish messages to your relay. Any "subscribed" clients or relays can then access and forward the message from your relay.
On the GoToSocial website it's clear what it is, how it works and how to get started. The Nostr website seems more like they want me to sign up and start using their server/relay. And I had to spend some time searching for how to set up a private relay. This fact is off-putting. Feels like they care more about their product than about free communication.
Nostr doesn't have "a website". nostr.com is its own thing, nostr.org is another thing and nostr.how is yet another. None of these (AFAIK) is related to the Nostr project, whose only web presence is on GitHub.
And to make matters worse, Mastodon relies heavily on domains (and indirectly TLS root certs) as protocol primitives.<p>Even if you run your own server, you just change who your "overlord" is.
Why do you think that decentralization isn’t real if it’s not at the furthest extreme?
Even Eugen himself set to position of labelling opposite opinions (1) and censorship. Fediverse, in Mastodon way, actually feeds social bubbles.<p>(1) <a href="https://ibb.co/qY082NjX" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/qY082NjX</a>
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
> 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...
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.
Jay Graber
Mike Masnick (techdirt)
Jeromie Miller (XMPP)
Investor seat
"Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour" -- Rochko<p>rhymes with<p>"You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, you get like a million messages, right, of stuff that come in. It's usually not good," -- Zuckerberg<p>Kudos to Rochko for starting Mastodon and having the grit to guide it through 10 years of explosive growth!
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>
It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!<p>There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.
Personally I've always built my follow list via manual snowball sampling, so Mastodon discoverability is almost exactly the same as on twitter, except without the useless suggestions that I have to ignore at the start.<p>There's really only one trick to it, search for a hashtag and use the people there to get the list started, then it's the usually check at who's posting interesting stuff and who they in turn are reposting to find potential follows.
I have this impression too, I open Mastodon and the timeline usually doesn’t have many interesting things.
This used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
This is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
To me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity.<p>"Just be kind of like email" is better.
Decentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
Yes, this is a structural vs. social thing. My gut is that though, it would be entirely possible to build "nice and easy to find" ON TOP OF, as opposed to fully integrated with, a decentralized service.
What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.
@dang if possible please stick this reply to the top, @gargron is the author himself (the CEO stepping down)
Which controversial topic did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse?
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.
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>
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.
> ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).<p>$300M? Or $1.5T? Because $300B isn't tiny compared to $1.5B.
Do you mean $300M for ByteDance? Because $300B dwarfs $1.5B and $3.4B.
Do you understand that Bluesky is just the example implementation of a protocol that’s currently in the process of becoming an IETF standard?
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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
Mastodon is a bubble worse than when you enable all the activity/history/etc on Google and get always "things related to what you search".<p>The community is so "conforming" on certain topics that you will rarely find different opinions and those get flagged etc. I was in one of the main instances, and I noticed a change at the end (like when a tiny 1% becomes 1.1% and then 1.2%, or let's say more outspoken, but it wasn't enough) before I decided not to be there anymore.<p>About the influencers: They are there too, it's just different how it works. But one way or another I always stumbled upon their posts, although I really disliked them because they basically foster that bubble. They are just there to be the first in a less saturated market, like the first influencers of YouTube or so. And while you believe they are not there to influence you, watching the same crap every day passively influences you, even if you don't feel it.<p>This made me go "back" to X, whose main issue is for me the huge amount of bots or repetitive content, which you cannot just fight with manual tooling.<p>And X made me go back to no social media, except for time to time to see fun stuff or (very likely) unrealistic videos. Which is ok sometimes to decompress a bit.<p>So in a way I have to thank Mastodon for making me see that I am just not cut out for social media.
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>
Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
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).
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 one is the result of the other. It is a nice place because there are few people there.<p>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.<p>The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That its not an interesting target for phishers, spammers, scammers or attackers: the ROI is too low. And that the low number of people keeps influencers and other commercial entities, like brands or news-agencies away: not much to make money off.
>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.<p>The thing is Mastodon isn't <i>a</i> platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will always be smaller instances doing their own thing.
But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system.<p>So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate.
Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely.<p>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc.<p>The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.
You can do your own thing as much as you want, and choose with whom you federate, and others can do the same. That's just freedom of speech and freedom of association. Large instances aren't "dictating" anything to other instances. The point is you can't do that with Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit to the same degree. The fediverse will never have an Elon Musk trying to purge it of the "woke mind virus."<p>>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)<p>Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.<p>It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.<p>But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.
> It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.<p>You mean like HN?
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.
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.
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
At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
Mastodon is alright; it could be much better. And I find that disappointing. Mastodon is where some of my techie friends live (the less sociable types generally, which is ironic IMHO). Bluesky seems to have a much broader appeal. They both aspire to federation. So why not federate them together? I'm sure there are technical challenges but those aren't the reason this is not happening.<p>The Mastodon community actively pushes back against federating with other networks, discoverability features (having content indexed for search), or sane security mechanisms (like signing your content). This is IMHO what is holding back Mastodon. It could be better but people push back against improving it and therefore it stays a bit niche and meh.<p>It's basically open source twitter but minus all the loud mouths using that to self promote, spam, troll, attack each other, etc. Twitter was really nice too before the masses showed up.<p>Bluesky basically adds content signing, discoverability, and a few other things a to the mix. It's similarly free from all the nasty things on Twitter.<p>It's less federated than it could be (it was designed as a federated protocol but effectively is centralized) because big company reflexes seem to be taking over there. That's an interesting dynamic. But there's enough open source stuff there that a mastodon bridge would be feasible. And IMHO stronger crypto would be good for Mastodon. I don't see the logic of defaulting to publishing content unsigned. How is that a thing in 2025?
I view it as a good thing.
Yes, it's disappointing frankly to see how many smart people still are on X.<p>Then again it's disappointing to see how many people with fuck you money don't say "fuck you".
>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
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.
This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.<p>We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.<p>A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?<p>Just my 2cents
> We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?<p>I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.<p>It's called Communities (<a href="https://communities.social" rel="nofollow">https://communities.social</a>) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.
How do you ensure "one user, one vote?"<p>This seems impossible without intrusive government ID verification, and not immune to government meddling in any case.
To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.<p>Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.<p>It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.<p>The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.<p>So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.<p>Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.<p>The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.
Do you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?
I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.<p>Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.<p>Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.<p>Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.<p>Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.<p>It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.<p>One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.<p>But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.<p>This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!
Godspeed, John Mastodon
This guy doesnt drama. Seems very selfish aware and down to earth. Good on him. Good to hear in a world of Wordpress and Ruby dramas.
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.
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
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and control your costs.
Do you have a reference for this?
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.
They're part-way through setting up a Belgian non-profit entity (AISBL) which will be the main organisation.<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><p>>A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation.
>
>As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
My understanding is that the non-profit in the US exists exclusively to handle fundraising from US donors who might not be able to give to non-US organizations for tax reasons.
Or for a tax receipt. I give modestly to Wikipedia, but their lack of a Canadian entity means I direct the bulk of my giving toward entities that I get the CRA kickback for.
Though if you are in the US odds are you don't need this tax deduction anyway. Few people understand how US taxes work and so give their accountant all their deductions because they know tax deductions exist. They don't realize that the standard deduction applies and they don't/can't deduct anything.<p>(if you do apply deductions then this matters)
Before the SALT cap of $10K, it could easily matter. Prior to the cap, I itemized deductions every year - easy if you have a mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and both spouses work. In those days the standard deduction was $12K, and just our state taxes exceeded that amount - forget about mortgage + charity.<p>Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better.<p>And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.
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’m guessing he’s on mastodon himself and posted this to his feed. Can anyone share a link to his mastodon post for this announcement.
Title is: My next chapter with Mastodon
He sounds like a remarkable human.
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.
> <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>
What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox.<p>> the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.<p>This used to form spontaneously around shared events and hashtags. But ultimately the culture war poison comes for everyone. Elon is just the highest profile example of someone who got rage-poisoned and then took it out on everyone else, and is now using the platform to automate rage-spreading. Like a crap version of <i>28 days later</i>, infectious viral rage.
Amusingly the same thing happened to us, though we ended up on Slack/Signal/iMessage group chats. And I was the only left who stayed on Twitter and consequently the only one[0] with the confrontational style. To my good fortune, it was Twitter that I left, rather than the group chats.<p>And yeah, Elon is certainly a victim of this virus. I think Bill Ackman getting snookered into paying a tip twice in a classic cabbie scam was the first time I could clearly see how people could end up suddenly stupid through this disease<p><a href="https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Outrage_is_the_Universal_Parasite" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Outrage_is_the_Universal_Par...</a><p>0: I actually got called out on this once <a href="https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Bridge_Nodes" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Bridge_Nodes</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.
My low-information answer is that I'd suggest trying both and make heavy use of the keyword muting feature.
Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
> 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.
IME Lemmy is more predominantly far left although a very small userbase.<p>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.
human rights and sustainability also
Wait now I love the fediverse.
A very relatable post and a good explanation for stepping down.<p>> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.<p>You can say that again.
"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...
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 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 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.
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
i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro credits to access those characters on my keyboard
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.
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...
And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.
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.
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.
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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.
"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.<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.
The quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.
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?
What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has
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.
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists"<p>You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”
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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
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> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.<p>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”.
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?
You would really have to ask a person to know that.
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.
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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This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter what nationality you're talking about. Drive-by snark is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>We detached this comment from <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972558">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972558</a> and marked it off topic.
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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.
It highly depends on an instance you join and a people you follow.
I never see that on the php instance.
It's the people you follow and perhaps your Mastodon instance. I suggest setting one up on your own.
No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.<p>If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.<p>Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
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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