His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
While this is a good move, I don’t think John Mastodon was making anywhere near the kind of money to turn into the next Musk or Zuck to begin with.
He’s no Tim Apple.
Or Jennifer Facebook.
Or Lenard TikTok III.
Zhang Wei can change his name to whatever the fuck he wants he’ll still ve Zhang Wei TikTok
You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.
€60k
I read that url as blog.johnmastodon.org and for a second I was seriously wondering if that name was real lol
Not now, but in the future that was a possibility.
I mean in the future it’s a possibility I’ll be fucking Zendaya but that doesn’t mean it’s reality now does it?
Are you in a space/career where you could conceivably interact with Zendaya?
Yeah, I don’t get it. Mastodon is already huge with millions of users and hundreds of instances. Rochko is already on speaking terms with Zendaya, if you will.
mass market media can only understand the world through the lens of mass market media
I have recently been using it more to connect with others on a new subject, but now for the first time ever on the internet since early 00’s, we are all owners of it ourselves. All the great new stuff was always owned by others and frankly I’m sick of it.
I never even liked twitter. Then I followed #nature and #bloomscrolling on mastodon for a while and my home feed was a feast of beautiful pics. So now there’s one use for me for microblogging. Neat! Mastodon does what it says it does and even offers ‘default’ instances. I’d love for some GO’s to help reach that donation goal quicker, so we can all get with the program and ditch corpo social media. -Why doesn’t my library host it’s own peertube?? #MakeLibrariesGreatAgain
we are all owners of it ourselves.
Not unless you run your own instance you aren’t.
I couldn’t find any legalese on mastodon.social that my toots are somehow not my property. While it’s true that I no longer have total control over its distribution, that doesn’t mean I have somehow relinquished ownership.
You seem quite confident that that is incorrect , with your one line reply. Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Could you link or explain where you got this information?
Common sense. The instance admin deletes the instance (or your posts) 'cos the coffee was bad this morning… there goes “your property”.
Obviously orders of magnitude better than commercial social media but it’s no silver bullet either.
There, 3 lines.
What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
- That’s giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
- The article does not even hint at the existence of source code, and the announcement itself doesn’t talk about changes in that aspect either, so I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
Someone is still in charge of the git account. No matter how many commits there are being made, unless the owner of the repo approves to merge them, it’s not happening.
And sure, someone could create a fork that includes their changes if they aren’t being merged, but then this separate fork might at some point lose compatibility with the original software. And on a purely semantic note, this fork wouldn’t be the original mastodon either.
152k to 1.5 milhouse is definitely an astronomical increase. Where does that number come from? For that matter…has he been funding all of this on his own up until this point?
I agree that 1.5 milhouse is quite a lot.
everything’s coming up thrillho
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on… That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.
bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.
It has more features, and most people don’t know why Mastadon might be better. The average person doesn’t even know what a server is.
Mastodon has far more features. What it doesn’t have is centralization.
What features?
Lots of little things that add up. Some of the better include temporary muting, hashtags, and hashtag subscriptions. Plus it is resilient with no single point of failure.
I’m pretty sure Bluesky has hashtags. Subscribing to a hashtag and muting someone temporarily is nice. I think the main feature Mastadon is missing is discovery algorithms. Most people use that heavily on social media, whether they admit they value it or not.
What is this, then? It’s on the front page of a Mastodon server before you log in and afterwards the discovery section with posts, hashtags, people etc. is on the search page after login. Bluesky was far harder to get a decent feed going on till people started building lists (and those are pretty flawed in that you only follow the individuals - not the list - so it doesn’t update for subscribers).
Oh cool, I didn’t realize they added that. I tried Mastadon a while ago and couldn’t find anything interesting. I don’t use any micro blogging apps.
I keep hammering this point every time this is brought up, PR and NAMES matter! BlueSky is a nice non threatening name, Mastadon is an awful name for an app. It sounds way too close to mastrubate.
At least this provides more time for mastodon to become better for even wider use. Hopefully bluesky wont go to shit too soon.
Considering the people pushing bluesky are the same ones usually praising government surveillance, I don’t trust it for one second. Smells like a psyop honeypot.
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
What makes you assume Mastodon is superior as a solution for the people who are flocking to Bluesky in droves?
Mastodon’s interface creates a self-selection bias of more technically inclined people, and is too dissimilar to twitter for the average user to want to invest time in learning it.
The Internet needs fewer Stalins and Hitlers and more George Washingtons.
More slave owners it is then!
It is an imperfect system, but my comment was more about leaders not clinging to power to the detriment of society.
I was just kidding. I understand what you meant. Monkey paw wish. Lol
Fuck yeah RTJ
Yeah, it’s refreshing to see someone not be an Absolute Dick™ on the internet for profit.
Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.
Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system
I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.
Absolutely nothing. I fully expect it to follow a similar trajectory.
If lemmy ever catches on ^doubt it’ll be a reddit fractal.
^doubt
You need to do double caret ^doubt^ for the proper formatting. Yeah, the markdown is a bit weird. lol
Oh? It works for me? Maybe it’s a sync hiccup.
Bluesky is still running on VC cash. We haven’t seen how they plan on monetizing it yet, but if anything that is where their major fuckup will happen.
All of these applications (yes, also Lemmy and Mastodon) are feed for the AI machine. That’s where the money is.
And ads probably.
I mean it kinda already is a Twitter, just 5 years in the past.
Nothing, which is okay. People make the mistake of thinking users have any even passing interested in a good platform with social media, not just the social connections on it.
That is why Bluesky can be so successful: It’s an absolutely smooth and effortless drop-in replacement for Twitter, and has no gathered enough momentum for it to be easy to find existing people you want to follow on it, further drawing more people who you might want to follow in. So the motivation to use it is there, and the switch itself is essentially unnoticable.
It has a public protocol.
You still have to go through the central hub. You can’t spin up your own, wholly independent Bluesky. You can only make your own node.
This is not true.
The App view, relay, PDS, and mobile app, code is all open source. Anyone can spin up their own version if they want.
If you want a complete copy of bluesky (reflecting the bluesky post firehose) it’s prohibitively expensive, but you can spin up your own version if you want.
The only thing that’s missing is bluesky federating anything other than PDSes by default, but you can 100% go in the other direction.
A good overview is here: What bluesky is and what bluesky is not
I wonder if we’ll see p2p versions of the firehose so people can seed posts from accounts they trust/like as a way to make firehoses affordable for the public to run
Especially considering the lead dev was the creator of beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
Yes, it’s not a full web3 app, but I like that these apps are heading in the right direction.
However it’s better than Twitter/Instagram. I can control my feed!
Twitter also looked great until it didn’t, it even comes from the same guy.
While at this moment BlueSky looks good, we will end up the same way sooner or later. Muskov et. al. figured out how to monetize social media. Now Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are tools to manufacture opinion. And certain opinions are worth a lot to certain people.
Until they build “The Algorithm” to “help you” find what
youthey want you to see or not.
It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.
As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)
The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.
AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.
That’s a red herring, they still have full control of the network.
We should not expect greatness from the men who create these corporations, they are not great men, they are not even good or especially intelligent men. They fell into their position by luck, the one in a million triers for whom circumstance clicked into position. The only thing that sets them apart and perhaps accounts for their success is how they are so consistently open to sycophancy and manipulation by the pack of cold and savage business graduates that flock to any form of success. When a person is against type, as seemingly is the case here, they stand out and just once in a while are capable of real greatness.
Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):
I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don’t feel remotely bad about being confused, it’s honestly pretty messy.
I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We’re not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that’s very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.
We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:
But you know, it’s really okay. It doesn’t have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That’s good enough.
I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn’t the worst thing.
One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can’t search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There’s also some sort of “invisible wall” for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don’t show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don’t know whether that’s a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.
Now I am wondering if there is a way to blast a message out to various micro blog platforms at once. Kind of like Ryan’s Woof idea from the office
The blog discussed progress on a “privacy-respecting search tool” that could be used to explore the entire Fediverse, a collection of independent social media networks that Mastodon connects to. That could make it possible to discover more content without depending on a “For You” algorithm mining user data.
Inshallah. Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.
I follow hashtags, it’s how i discover interesting content for me. I only use the search function to follow specific accounts.
Just like what happened with Ecosia. We need more humble people in the world!
Wasn’t this same ceo criticizing Zuckerberg last week for shutting down fact checking?
Getting really mixed signals here. What’s with the back and forth on this guy’s approach to centralized authority?
An interesting real time experiment to see how long it takes for stratification caused echo chambers and/or extremists zealots from both ends of the political spectrum to seize control of the platform. Turning the platform into a hellscape of zealots fighting each other for dominance and the eradication of all the others.
Sadly, humans as a rule need adult guidance for polite interactions to prevent violence. The sad part is it has become impossible to pick said adult capable of doing the job. And anyone in their right mind should run from such a job anyway.
His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
So uh… Mastodon will not have a moderation team?
I mean this makes sense, but how exactly is after-stopping-moderation Meta different then?
Interesting way to say you don’t understand federalisation. While using a federalised platform.
