hckrnws

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.

Even Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.

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 used to make so much fun of RMS in the late 90s. Then I met him and my entire view on that man changed. He absolutely is doing the world a favor and it would benefit everyone to think long and hard what a world would be like without GNU today

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It's possible for a person to be an absolute stupid asshole about one topic (children's well being) but right about other things (software).

Should have just stayed in his lane. I admired this dude but those words are, kinda, punchable offense. TF with "voluntary" in there?!?

It means he thinks kids can "want it" and if a kid "wants it" it's ok. It's unfortunately a common view among some, most apparent with Sartre and that "philosopher" crew. It's disgusting of course.

Helpful context https://www.change.org/p/a-demand-that-sartre-de-beauvoir-s-...

Having terrible opinions in one area doesn’t discount what you do in another.

I’d say Stallman has overall had a positive impact on the technology landscape even though he clearly has messed up views when it comes to “sexual ethics”

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

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

Marvin Minsky and Noam Chomsky were both involved with Epstein.

It didn't ruin RMS at all. He was momentarily cancelled then welcomed back to the FSF. He was blogging passionately about his pro-pedophilia views for years. His supporters literally couldn't have cared less, and rather swore a blood oath of vengeance against the people who called him out.

I'm actually struggling to think of anyone who has suffered negative consequences over Epstein, besides Epstein himself. Even Ghislane is being treated like royalty in prison. Trump seems untouchable. Prince Andrew lost a purely decorative title and was banished to a slightly smaller mansion.

He's blogged for years, writing a number of short 1 or 2 sentence notes daily, on a very wide range of topics, taking positions on each of them from a lefty and analytical point of view, generally covering various political/environmental/economic/legal topics.

And, for what it's worth, he recanted the statement he made that was posted above.

>taking positions on each of them from a lefty and analytical point of view, generally covering various political/environmental/economic/legal topics.

He didn't take a lofty and analytical view on sex with children. Read his other posts, he was upset that there were societal norms and laws against it. He cared about this.

>And, for what it's worth, he recanted the statement he made that was posted above.

As far as I'm aware only once, almost as an afterthought, in a brief statement when the Minsky stuff was blowing up, likely under duress from someone at MIT desperate for him to put out the fire his at best awkward comments on Minsky set alight. He's probably put more effort into ordering a meal than he did recanting his views on pedophilia. Which again he held for years, in public view, without consequence.

So he didn't even need to go that far because none of it even touched him.

I suppose you are not arguing in favor of pedophilia but just pointing out that RMs was actually a pretty big advocate?

Of course I'm not arguing in favor of pedophilia JFC.

Yes I'm pointing out that RMS was, judging from his own words, an advocate. He advocated for adults to have sexual relationships with children. It's gross. It's gross that he's still the face of free software.

Well there's Virginia Giuffre and whether she was murdered or the story of suicide is true (I personally doubt it) - either way, she suffered.

As well as the hundreds of other unnamed underage victims who were coerced into sexual favors for Epstein personally.

The fact that every conversation about RMS derails into his boorish behavior/pedophile apologism/awful hygiene, as these comments have predictably done, should be proof enough that he's absolutely the wrong front man for the free software movement.

Maybe one day we'll get someone with actual charisma at the helm of the FSF. Someone who isn't repellant to normal people is going to have a lot more success with their political advocacy. And Free Software is a political movement first and foremost.

I don't think you even need to go as far as his interpersonal skills. IMHO The fact that the GPLv3 (not the AGPLv3) didn't close the network hole should've been proof enough.

If you care about user freedom, the fact that the GPL isn't viral across the network is such an obvious gaping hole at its center, one that was well known by the late 2000's. Yet through myopia or appeasement, he decided to leave it to the AGPL to solve, and the GPLv3 ended up as a license that still ticked off enough people for them to not upgrade, yet with a gigantic backdoor built-in that allows trivial circumvention of user freedoms.

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.

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 responsible, but instead he spent his final days polarizing Twitter and guaranteeing it's own critical insolvency.

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.

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.

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"Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour" -- Rochko

rhymes with

"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

Kudos to Rochko for starting Mastodon and having the grit to guide it through 10 years of explosive growth!

Looks like the inmates won again:

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.

Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can see what Rochko means.

HN comments rarely resolve only into personal insults. It's sometimes accompanied with the actual arguments but never just insults

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 good (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.

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.

(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

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.

As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.

> interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything

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.

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.

Unfortunately that's what they wrote? What other interpretation could there be?

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 racial 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.

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.

People who think HN is specially smart are funny. They mistake active moderation by the community with intelligence when the registration form doesn't have an acceptance exam, so literally no reason to believe that.

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.

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I thought it was more 'social media for people that don't like normal social media'. It's not being advertised too on a social media platform and seeing things/interactions that you actually care about and/or are interested in (generally speaking at least).

Social media optimizes for engagement. Maybe some folks are into that...or addicted to it...but I remember a time before engagement was hyper-incentivized, where hanging out someplace on the internet was because you liked the people or the community surrounding it.

Mastodon reminds me a lot more of those old-school internet hangout spaces, like IRC channels and web forums, than it does Twitter, despite wearing its artifice.

If preferring community spaces to habit-forming social media firehoses is somehow cast as "not being able to handle social media," then...guilty as charged, I guess, though it continues to escape me why anybody would consider that a bad thing.

I think trying to divide social media into "incentivized" and "non-incentivized" places either takes a lot more rigor than anyone here is doing or is just futile altogether. Even Mastodon is filled with ragebait. I also don't think trying to build an identity around the style of social media you use, the way you're trying to do in your posting, is conducive to good social habits. Do you think creating an us vs them even if it's your your own sense of self is helpful?

Building an identity? Us vs them? What are you even talking about? If that was an attempt at trying to reframe this conversation using identity politics - politics you are well aware that HN doesn't handle very well - it was an awfully clumsy one.

I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

> Building an identity? Us vs them? What are you even talking about?

I don't think acting indignant rather than trying to reach understanding is in good faith. If we want to raise the level of conversation, we should listen to each other.

> I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

This really condescending. They are addicts and victims. You are not.

> Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

My point was: I don't think making money from engagement means much, though maybe it exacerbates the existing tendencies of socializing online. Mastodon makes no money but it's often even more toxic than the more widespread networks. I don't think size is the predictor. Lobsters and Bluesky are smaller than HN and Twitter but they both have plenty of toxicity.

I think the point is that once you combine the property of creating an online space disconnected from real life signals and give people a way to stay constantly connected to it (smartphone, always on internet), then reality for these folks erode. I think engagement algorithms can change the incentives on these networks but even a purely chronological forum has the same issues. The reason forums of old were less toxic (and they often were just as toxic, I remember many old flamewars) was just that the participants had to turn off the internet and go outside and interact with the offline world. They could only separate for so long.

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.

For real though. The moderation on this site is on point.

I actually think HN achieves the illusion of greatness via excessive moderation. It’s very easy for users to flag a topic from the front page and (IIRC) there are even automated downranks for threads that attract a lot of back and forth arguing.

The result is a site with relatively measured debate but also a large chunk of missing debate. All that said I don’t have some genius idea about how to do it better so my criticisms can only go so far.

Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things.

In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.

It's on-par with extreme moderation to the point where they will flag/mute whoever disagrees with them

It's good that Hacker News has some form of human moderation, which is a lot more than what you can say about a lot of social media spaces.

I wouldn't necessarily call it good, however. HN is absolutely teeming with bad-faith throwaway accounts, and too much faith is put in the user moderation side of things to police them. The user moderation itself is also given far too much leeway - I have lost track of the amount of bad-faith flagging and downvoting I've seen on this site, and there's quite a bit of it even in this thread.

It's nice that the worst of the bad behavior has been flagged or dead-ed. But in communities that I actually use for socializing, behaving badly would get you put on a very short leash, followed by a gentile but firm removal from the community if it persisted. Behaving badly on an alt would get your main account outright banned, and obvious alt accounts would be proactively sought out and removed - sometimes before they even said anything. And in those communities, there are generally no user moderation tools at all, aside from a "report" button, because user moderation is far too easy to gamify and abuse.

I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here. Not sure what other communities you’re referring to, but my experience over decades of forums and social media is that HN consistently somehow avoids the toxic fate of so many other sites and services like it.

> I would absolutely call it good given the volume of comments that flow through here.

That's part of the problem. A place this large, this public, and with this little amount of trust isn't really a community. It's the comments section of a content aggregator with a few engagement hooks via voting and user moderation. You can't really "hang out" here, there's no place to actually connect with other human beings unless you go elsewhere.

These days, it seems like most "community" spaces have migrated to places like Discord, Matrix, or even VRChat - places that allow for both public spaces and private, invite-only spaces. I've also found that Tildes feels like a community, despite being shaped a lot like Reddit/HN. I suspect that's due to the community still being rather small, not having open invitations, and making nearly all forms of gamified engagement positive.

For what it's worth, the largest internet community I knew of prior to the modern era of social media was Something Awful. And, frankly, it was _much_ better run than this place, or any other social media site, as it was moderated by dozens of actual humans who operated transparently - all moderator actions were publicly listed, and you could see the post and reason for the action. The site also charged $10 for access, charged you again if you got banned for breaking the rules or just not being a quality member of the community, and would actively seek out and ban anonymous alt accounts.

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.

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.

> and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections

The main downside being the ability to opt out of starter packs (they can be a source of low quality interactions).

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.

What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)

I'm not entirely sure, I wonder if that is related to the "fight" between fans of ActivityPub and fans of Bluesky AtProto where he was personally involved.

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)

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115074431325055303

It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.

A thread with a user that devolved into name calling.

Or the Twitter fight where he encouraged people to DOS the rival.

Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.

Do you mean dox?

I know we must have some terminally online fediverse users here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

So in a way I have to thank Mastodon for making me see that I am just not cut out for social media.

Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.

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.

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).

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.

It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.

> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have

Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense).

Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality.

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.

Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them.

---

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.

That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks.

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.

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.

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 me. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.

But we are not talking about you. Mastodon is not culturally or technologically meaningful. It had 2.5 million users few years ago, now there are 700,000 users and numbers go down.

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).

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 walked away a long time ago when I realized how fragmented and prone to drama it was.

Well, it's just fragmented. It's hard to find people that I used to follow on Twitter. It's hard to find posts on topics I'm interested in, outside of my instance.

sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago

> I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.

Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.

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.

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"

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 :/

On boarding is too complicated for your average social user

https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now

It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.

If you cannot reach UX that normal people will use, you're building for the very few

tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy

Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.

Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.

> And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to.

User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"

ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes

Ah, to be clear, I was thinking of ActivityPub.

How’s ATProto work for the 99.9% of people who don’t own domains?

You just get a *.bsky.social handle.

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.

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

Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept

https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance

> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined

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"?

Didn't measure what complicated means, these are the words people who churned use

Generally the first point is server selection. That's too complicated for most users

Somehow I doubt it is.

People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?

Don't buy it

> Don't buy it

Not listening to users is when learning stops

You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up

That’s actually why I never tried it. Server selection. Choice paralysis. Gave up.

It's another centralised service

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.

People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.

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 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.

Honest question: Why is it important to like a toot? What benefit does liking one provide?

It indicates to the poster that someone (you) liked their post. Perhaps that encourages them to make other similar posts.

In which case either favorite or bookmark will do the trick, correct? Why worry whether you're clicking the "wrong" one?

Boost will also do it, but it has more side effects.

In real life, your friend tells you a moderately funny story that happened to him. You tell the friend, "nice story" (that's a like).

Another friend tells you a super funny story. You then go and tell other friends this same funny story. (that's a boost).

Different real life things, that are captured by digital tools.

What I have a problem with are quote tweets, which are like talking about someone in front of them, without including them in the conversation.

Because I don’t want to boost or add the toot to a perma-list, I just want to give the person that posted something I like some acknowledgement.

That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy, and all of the dark patterns of social media that the fediverse is designed to avoid.

People shouldn't be posting to get the endorphine rush from clicks or to satisfy metrics. They should post whatever they want, whenever they want. If you like what someone posts, you can follow their account, or better yet the hashtags they use. That should be sufficient.

Not having a like button seems like a good design choice TBH.

> That sounds like exactly the kind of addiction-reinforcing Skinner box nonsense that leads to influencers, parasocial relationships and a content economy,

No, this is the digital analogue of a non-verbal expression. Basic table stakes - unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".

The issue with social media isn’t with encouraging or content creators, it is with how consumers are conditioned.

The incentives are related and create a feedback loop. Give someone a number and they'll do whatever it takes to make that number go up.

It isn’t important, it’s just something I would like to do.

how is clicking a heart or a star - depending on the UI - unintuitive?

> It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.

You mean like HN?

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.

At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.

I view it as a good thing.

>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.

These two statements are not mutually exclusive.

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.

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.

mastodon.social is operated by the Mastodon gGmbH, the core body behind the project.

Correct, but there’s nothing special or privileged about it. The others aren’t knock-offs or imitations. They’re all peers.

It seemed like the point was to say they aren’t going to donate money to a project that doesn’t respect their right to free speech.

Sure, an account could be made on a other instance, but that doesn’t change the mindset behind how the instance run by the maintainers is handled, which we can only assume will influence the project as a whole.

Sure, I could see that. I just wanted to clarify that mastodon.social is an instance, not the instance. It’s not a special blessed server. If you turn on your own new server tomorrow, other servers will treat it identically to that one.

Also, moderation policies vary wildly. The instance I run moderates much differently than mastodon.social, which tends to get a lot of criticism for being seen as chronically under-moderated, if anything.

Just to clarify, my account was banned without a reasons mentioned. The „reason“/cause field is empty. I didn’t insult anyone, I didn’t break any laws, I didn’t call to unalive people. I didn’t violate TOS. I just dared to criticize the praise of the former East German regime, called it an „Unrechtsstaat“ which is not a controversial opinion and even part of the school curriculum. They shot their own people ar the border.

I think at least one of their moderators was insulted by that personally.

And? That's the beauty of it, i'm sure there's more to it to your story, but if truly you were banned for something silly, you can join another server (or even create your own!), there's a lot of alternatives.

You can't move a banned account, you lose all followers.

What a revolution in social media

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.

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.

"Just be kind of like email" is better.

Godspeed, John Mastodon

Haha, you might have slexdyia.

I think it's more the keming of the domain portion of the HN title, especially combined with HN's rather small font size choice (it's a meager 8pt¹!) there, and that it just happens that the mis-kemed result ends up with "John Mastodon", and is thus not trivially noticeable as "wrong"…

(I read it the same way, too.)

(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)

It’s a Mastodon community joke.

https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...

TIL! (Though I'd also wager that originated from someone having to squint at more bad kerning.)

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon

> keming

Kerning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

Also, if that was the mistake, it's kinda funny given the likelihood it was caused by a kerning issue.

An intentional "pun".

E.g., reddit.com/r/keming

HN is simple enough that it scales well with browser zoom, and so (imo) is excusable for not following that 12pt standard.

Agreed. I need a larger font on a lot of sites nowadays, but HN is probably the one that behaves best with simple browser zoom. I have it set to 125 or 150% depending how tired my eyes are..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400017

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

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.

He’s also receiving €1 million as a one-time compensation. Not quite enough to retire on that.

Here's more information on that: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

> 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.

Was already linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45971902

Still enough to have a good lil nest egg that generates okay-ish passive income if invested correctly.

@ 4% that's €40k/year

more than what most regular people have

Does he not have to pay taxes on that 1m euros in the eu?

Absolutely. That is either "Teileinkünfteverfahren" (60% of 1 Million EUR are taxed, 40% are tax-exempt) or "Abgeltungssteuer" (Government takes a 25% cut). Fun fact: there is no tax on winning the lottery in Germany!

Loto is well-known (in France) as the poors' taxes

Only if you lose (not win) :) (irrelevant side node: poker is treated as skill based game in Germany, hence you have to pay taxes on wins)

Some countries have 0 rate if sold after x years. Although many had it in the past, they’ve started eliminating it.

And some countries have the opposite - they tax your invested gains as if you turned them to cash

Sure he does. He lives in Germany. They are gonna rip that 1 million apart.

I guess top rate in Germany is 45%

If you live in the west, 47.5% even. But that's income tax, whether that applies here depends on how it's structured.

You pretty much pay taxes on everything in the EU. In Germany there are ways you can reduce the total tax you have to pay and as far as I know you wont have to pay social security contributions on that. It'll still be 6 digit tax amount.

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.

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

Hence why I said it’s not enough to retire on it.

It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and control your costs.

Do you have a reference for this?

From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

Damn, where is Mastodon getting €1M from?

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.

> 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).

From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

Depends on your age and where you live. If you're single, no kids, and don't need healthcare, sure.

Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".

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.

I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.

Healthcare is taken care of by his taxes.

A quick google suggests more than a third of Germany pays for supplementary private health insurance (Zusatzversicherung) in addition to what their taxes take care of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He could then try the same at Wendy's, and walk to retire on 64k a year.

Compound interest is one helluva drug!

The hard part is housing and transportation. If you've managed to pay off your house before retiring and it and its major appliances are in good shape, and if you are someplace where you need a car you have that off too, and you can find a place where property taxes aren't too bad living on $30k/year is actually quite reasonable if you don't have expensive hobbies.

(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).

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.

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.

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.

That leaves $1800/year out of our $30k/year, which can cover the occasional need to repair or replace a major appliance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

well and septic is cheaper than city services. However the city services are a small monthly cost while the well/septic is a big one every 20-30 years: budgeting is easier

>You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.

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.

I would count moving to a significantly poorer country that you have no connections to in order to get your cost of living down a "frugal" way to stretch out your retirement fund.

Shit Americans say...

It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.

Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.

Why is retiring mentioned? Most jobs pay zero when you leave so 1M is cool.

He was the founder and head of the company, so probably wouldn’t have had to step down if he didn’t want to.

Because that is the common thing someone will do when they get what looks like a large sum of money. It isn't the only option, but it is a common one.

€1M would not even cover the property tax to retire in the cheapest bay area home.

Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.

Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better.

And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.

He sounds like a remarkable human.

Fantastic!

Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just include the link preview in the toot. 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.

It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecommen...

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.

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.

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.

For anyone reading, quote tweets are now available on Mastodon.

> This was also the largely held opinion of the community at a time

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.

The context for those who wonder what "single-handedly" means: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726

He was right!

This comment is a great illustration of the needlessly hostile interactions mentioned in the blog post.

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.

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 it has been 7 years and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more useless traffic every time someone links to a site.

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?

This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string just to fuck with webmasters - 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.

It sounds like you have a personal kind of beef with Mastodon?

It's not personal, but Mastodon has DDoSed my website and many others, e.g.:

https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/

https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me/

https://chris.partridge.tech/2022/request-amplification-in-m...

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/mastodon_delays_fix_d...

Mastodon servers' collective behaviour DDoSes the sites its users link to. They just do. They don't have to, they've never had to, but they do. And they've been in no hurry to fix it.

I've never used Mastodon and I'm not part of its community. But it irks me that its community has completely failed to remediate its collective bad behaviour, for years.

Having read the relevant discussions in Mastodon's issue tracker, my view is that it's Eugen Rochko's ideological belief that you can't just include the link preview details along with the post (which you totally could do, and it would solve the problem)... and that has led to years more DDoS than there ever needed to be.

[Admittedly, we now also have the problem of completely amoral "AI" scraping companies, who have zero qualms about pumping millions of requests into webservers, knocking them offline, completely eschewing all common indexing behaviour... but that doesn't make Mastodon's behaviour acceptable because it's no longer the worst source of callous DDoSing]

> automatically assume the worst intentions

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.

Related:

The Future Is Ours to Build – Together

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

Mastodon: Building for the Long Term

https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-137854404

Does Jeff Bezos even dress well?

10 years leading. I would have fatigued.

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.

>Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though.

No it absolutely does not.

The only people Mastodon needs are people who respect the culture, everyone else can fuck off to Bluesky.

This is the problem with a stressful role, with little compensation. Most people wouldn't want to be in this position.

It sounds like anyone that runs a moderately sized open source project.

More money would solve most of these issues.

I used to volunteer moderate a very busy forum.

Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.

The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down.

I do wonder though if you have people doing it for 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).

“Moderator” used to sound like a boring role as well once upon a time.

You can probavly get better, more accountable moderators, if it meant losing your job for violating the rules.

Money could also be invested in developers to maintain Mastadon and issue security fixes.

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.

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.

The W3C was its own thing.

Also kind of like John Gruber and Markdown.pl

It depends what the alternative is. A vacuum is worse for example.

There's no power vacuum. There's now a Mastodon nonprofit organization with an executive director and leadership team.

Right, and it's TBD if that will turn out to be more or less effective. I'm hopeful, but more voices isn't always better.

So worse... a committee.

A committee from the beginning would definitely prevent something from really ever starting. Could you imagine Linus working under a committee to get Linux running?

At some point, you do have people that need to step back. If you turn it over to another single person, they could pivot and "ruin" the product. By turning it over to a committee, hopefully, any ruinous ideas get overruled. At least in theory

It's an open source project. What exactly are you expecting?

Keep in mind that every for-profit publicly-owned corporation has many shareholders, as well as a board of directors, which is, gasp, a committee!

yes, but they typically hire a singular CEO to drive a cohesive vision and strategy with the check that they can fire the CEO at anytime.

Yes, and Mastodon has an executive director (as I already mentioned), which is basically the nonprofit equivalent of a CEO.

Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't sure that's what that role was intended to do.

Title is: My next chapter with Mastodon

Ah, CEO can't help but use corporate-speech.

How to break up your girlfriend: "I've been thinking about the future... you're not in it.".

Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?

Why? I think a lot of people are going to be pretty happy about this.

Yeah, the people who hate him. That's what I mean.

Mastodon seems pretty unhealthy to me.

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.

I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.

I never see that on the php instance.

this was on the math instance

[dead]

"The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape."

This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad

dunno what world you live in, but that was the line that resonated the most for me...

I think it's a great quote. Even bsky is part of the problem until regular people can host nodes in it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

those new Discord ads sure are great!

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.

I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...

I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.

Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.

And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.

unfortunately he can only pay you back in 1925 dollars so youll have to take the dime as down payment and get the farmer enrolled in a BNPL

The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) 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.

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.

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.

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.

The quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.

I was poor and recognizable in a tiny niche related to open source tools and 100% this was true. The recognition creates envy and ambitious people invest extra effort to sabotage you... Often, people who are rich see you as a threat and go all out war on you... And you don't have any buffer or support so you have to be 10x better just to stay afloat. Convincing people to work with you is much harder since you can't offer them any money and must offer pure equity... And your reputation, which fades over time, is the only thing that makes such equity potentially valuable.

OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.

In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.

And if you can't buy popularity you can always buy a really high wall.

> With money you can always buy popularity easily

I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?

Sadly, I suspect he's reasonably successful at being popular amongst the people he wants to be popular with.

Taylor Swift is super popular in the demographic she plays to, while being unpopular with, say, techno or metal fans.

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.

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.

> and spaceflight fans.

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.

> As a spaceflight fan who was a fan of Musk all the way back in ~2012, I'm still a fan of him today

Elon is a rare human being.

He is pretty much what his haters think of him (a political/social troll/child).

And he is also what his worshipers think (a generationally incredible technical and business visionary).

Most people, whether ordinary or extraordinary themselves, have trouble with dissonance. Elon is dissonance. They see a joke or a god.

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.

is your idea of "pro-America" being a white supremacist state by chance? that hitler salute not subtle enough?

Yes this is what people like you do, go around calling everyone nazis and making up hitler salutes.

> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists"

You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”

Well he was doing a good job at buying popularity until he fired his PR team so..

Elon Musk has never had a PR team... Which is maybe the better point. (Or if he did, he hasn't had one in the 15+ years I've been watching him.)

After the taking Tesla private tweet that got him in trouble with the SEC he hired some people, but that didn't last long. Tesla had a PR team until a few years ago but he probably did not listen to them very much.

His companies have certainly had PR teams a various points in time. Tesla even does advertising now. But the topic is specifically about the man himself which is independent of his companies. Most very rich but (un)popular people have personal PR teams.

What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has

He’s an example. He has to burn massive amounts of money to counteract the fact that he wants to be the town asshole in public constantly.

If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right

Yeah, giving Nazi salutes is a great way to buy popularity.

It’s certainly a good way to get people like you to talk about him.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

0: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...

1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545

2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165

3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349

4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...

5: https://bsky.app/profile/forbes.com/post/3m5tlsetevz2t

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.

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:

> Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah...

> 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.

- mrc109 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw

beautiful

This Video Will Make You Angry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

> 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.

Somewhere, HN moderators talk about this concept: Bad behavior is a cancer and spreads through the community.

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

Wait ’til the masses hear about this one.

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

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.

human rights and sustainability also

That would be great but wasn’t the case. I‘m a „green“ guy and cycling advocate but we failed to get traction on the Fediverse.

I was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon?

In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups?

Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.

People want to get entertained and informed. Very few original content is available and sharing of content from other platforms will lead to harsh reactions from self-claimed activists. I got insulted from completely random people who don’t follow because I didn’t remove an UTM key from an URL I shared.

In general the tone went super harsh and cult like. While neo nazis dominate X, the authoritarian left dominates on Mastodon. People call to dispossess „the rich“, „fight capitalism, support my gofundme“, antisemitism and open support of Hamas and other BS.

If you dare to reply and ask for rationality, you will get attacked personally. It‘s a toxic service like Twitter but just the other way around, and way too few insightful or funny content to lure new users. „Run your own server“ is also BS because discoverabilty is very poor.

Wait now I love the fediverse.

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Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.

Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...

You would really have to ask a person to know that.

> 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”.

He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.

Is this a new talking point you just learned about?

The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.

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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.

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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Yeah he did a lot of harm to the community by expending so much of his effort on segregating communities. I understand what he was going for but I think it was both the wrong tone and the wrong tools, and it crippled the growth of the fediverse

> expending so much of his effort on segregating communities

Wanna tell us more about this? I'm out of the loop.

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> Now.. if only DHH would do the same for Rails... Random comment - what is DHH gatekeeping about Ruby or Rails that would be better if he was not? <genuine question.... I like Ruby but don't pay attention to the general happenings>

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What does that mean?

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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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968611

i think this is on the wrong thread