This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.
I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.
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 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
He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.
A few years ago there were some "personalities" that very much agitated against Stallman. Without generalizing too much it is these people you probably should keep a very, very large distance to. Toxic is likely an understatement.
Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.
You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.
If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.
I do think this belongs on HN as a topic. This isn't a character assassination since I didn't name anyone. Quite the contrary, the character assassination was directed against Stallman and it was based on toxic slender and rumors and it even lead to consequences. If someone does feel addressed by my comment, I welcome that of course and perhaps it will lead to some self-reflection because I want to underline that it is strong criticism.
The problem comes when his principals turn out to have blind spots.
I feel like the refusal to close the network hole in the GPLv3 is a significant blind spot of his, and is a decision that has aged incredibly poorly in the age of cloud services.
> I admired this dude but those words are, kinda, punchable offense.
I think that's pretty spot on. Saying stuff like that means that there shouldn't be celebration of the person or reverence towards them.
You can support the FSF views on free software and any good those do in the world, but it's not possible to ignore all of the other stuff a person has said.
One can guess whether he's not neurotypical to such a degree that he doesn't take a humane enough perspective (arguing about topics that perhaps shouldn't be argued about), but that doesn't really change anything.
When you want to talk about free software, probably talk about FSF not RMS.
"<some stupid shit you later changed your mind about>"
-- you, probably
Also, if you're not sceptical about it, you should be able to explain to someone like Stallman (as someone apparently later did) why it's still bad for children. If you can't then you're just as "stupid", the only difference is you happen to conform to the current accepted belief on this particular matter.
Opinions like this give rise to fascism.
You can not talk about how we want to protect children and where the boundaries are because some lunatics immediately accuse anybody of harming THE CHILDREN.
If someone is romantically into kids this is not socially accepted in most cultures, but someone merely being attracted without following up with actions does not harm any kids.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:
> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]
The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.
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.
Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.
I 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.
I think that in general the plain linear format is bad for debate. You always end up with one or two - often barely on topic! - threads dominating, and everything else below gets barely any attention.
For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.
It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.
There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.
You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.
There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.
That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.
I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).
Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.
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.
Kind of funny how you complain about people being mean to you and then accuse a high percentage of them of being apes flinging shit. You have some unresolved issues.
No, having experienced a small number of deranged individuals that does not excuse calling "a high percentage of people" barely functioning apes.
IME mods deserve a lot of the shit they get. It's not exactly well-functioning individuals that tend to choose such a (unpaid) position for themselves.
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things.
Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.
I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).
I don't find this analogy enlightening. Only a few people are ever trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, so of course it doesn't tell us much about humanity.
Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.
Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.
I'd agree with you, more or less. I don't find it horrendous necessarily. But I find the focus to be far more on the articles than the conversation. Most of my comments are just me screaming into the void.
Its a different business model though, HN isn't trying to increase your session time as much as possible. I find the UI to actually discourage conversation and interaction.
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.
3% variance on beliefs is way bigger than you think, and also he said “just about” everything, not everything.
And you can have whatever opinion you want, but also be prepared for me to tell you that your opinion is stupid, and when you assert that a falsehood is in fact opinion instead of a lie, I will point out that facts are not opinions and opinions are not facts.
You'd have to be around Mastodon to know what that means, but basically there was an effort by some Black folks there to not just create their own server but to also flag and identify racist/toxic servers etc, and anyone who fit that as they saw was put on their thing called "The Bad Space."
Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes.
I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
> Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy?
Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).
It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.
If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.
A good principle in theory, but did you miss that I mentioned that I am black as well?
And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc.
But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel compelled to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're a point of contact for "Blackness" for a lot of people who are not black. And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
As in, I never found "oh, they're just playing the race card" to EVER be valid.
I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say something critical - and especially something racist (you didn't say anything racist, afaik) - as if that somehow justifies it. It's a well-worn troll tactic to turn the tables on racism, etc.
> And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
Doesn't that take on the too common perspective toward black people (and lots of other groups), that each black person is like a spokesperson of a universal Black Persons Association and speaks for / represents every other black person?
Freedom is the freedom to be outrageous, wrong, disagreeable, etc. (Not that disagreeing with you or me is 'wrong'.) Look at what white people do.
Yeah, basically I agree with mmooss. As a Black person, I don’t really care how weird, wrong, creepy, or exhausting other Black people are, I still feel more kinship and alignment with them than a random white person I don’t know. I can’t really stand white people writ large, but there are a ton of individual white people I love and adore. Because I know the difference between whiteness* and a white person.
And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.
And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.
I tend to agree -- but what kept me around that particular flavor of Black mastodon bullshit was of course, not the people -- but my personal belief that Mastodon is the smartest model for social media, and as such I choose to try to see what I can do in there. I think the world would be better off if everyone saw/believed that the thing we do with twitter would work VERY WELL if done on Mastodon.
It's not an "argument?" And if anything it's just more of a confirmation of your exact idea of being against a universal Black Person's Association.
Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads some-kind-of uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure opinion (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uBPA.
I can imagine your point about it countering the uBPA perspective, but the comments feel more like what I said above. Are people that dumb about uBPA beliefs that they really need to know about one exception? I hope not.
I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.
And hey, in my experience, if you want that perspective, head on over to Mastodon; it's ALL there.
edit: ha, I'm being uncharitable. I think it is naive to not understand that there is some sliver of "truthful experience" for most people to the uBPA, regardless of who you are.
I don't consider those types of efforts well meaning anymore.
Rather than changing minds they without fail seem to attract narcissists and people utilizing victimhood like a status item or the like and that and purity spirals like a cudgel.
>I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
It's sad to say but I think black people aren't big in the tech space or similar spaces in general and not just in the US. Fosdem is one of the most pasty conventions out there in a rather international city.
As an outsider looking in I think just like with the lack of women in tech it's not primarily a barrier problem.
And this is a different subject but I in factthink some of the weird campaigning towards women to join has had the opposite effect (Think 'barbie and her pink laptop entering the male dominated field' type stuff just reinforcing pointlessly gendered preconceptions.)
Black people are emphatically absolutely big in tech in the US, just not in a lot of well known "classic" arena; way more in the business tech space. Like linkedin, not slashdot.
like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.
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.
a) They used 'Black' as opposed to 'black', which often is used specifically to mean a particular culture around african-americans specifically, not just a signifier of skin tone.
b) The charitable interpretation is that they are Black and that they share 97% of their views.
Its impossible to think you agree with 97% of any group without assuming everyone from that group thinks the same way. Even people from just one country don't think the same way due to color of skin, if we were to assume the point is only about americans.
They didn’t say “agree with” they said “97% similar views.” This seems like a pretty informal measurement, and we don’t have much insight into what it really means.
Feels like a lot of y'alls feelings are getting in the way of what I was saying here. Slow down and read carefully. You all should try thinking about this in perhaps Venn diagrams or something.
There are Black people on Mastodon, myself included. In my interactions with them, to me, it appears as of the (very tiny) subset of Black folks who are also on Mastodon, I have observed and interacted with them on views and issues about the world.
Presuming, for example, they vote - we would vote similarly. We would support the same causes, we would likely react similarly to things in real life -- and yet...etc see above.
Point being, it's not like I was in with like Black MAGA or some other group who I'd be unlikely to associate.
FWIW I was trying to disagree with the person I responded to and agree with you. Sorry if it came off some other way. Actually, thinking of it “we don’t have much insight into what it really means” could look be read as sounding negative toward your post; not intentional!
I though they were applying an overly-restrictive definition of “agree with 97%,” and was trying to point out that what you actually wrote “97% similar,” left plenty of room for reasonable interpretations (like the one you posted).
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.
I think very few people on this forum would qualify as intellectuals, most are just ordinary people. Now, some users certainly present themselves as Renaissance polymaths, but typically they just suffer from Engineer's Disease :)
Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
> Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.
A couple of decades has taught me that there's no hard boundary between those two sets. The concept of "public intellectual" itself is a bit suspect, since it becomes just another form of celebrity and/or cult leader.
Meh, the worst I see in this thread with show dead on is some tedious criticism, politics slop and one guy posting a racial slur. I can't imagine making decisions about the direction of my life over such mild nothings.
Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated sensitivity goes with the territory.
I 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.
You are exaggregating. Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media. Its a tool, and like with many tools, the user has responsibilities. Hammers are incredibly hurtful if you never learn to not hit your hands with 'em.
I have a FB account since, what, 16 years or so. It has helped me to connect with people, it helped me to partially break out of my (disability-inflicted) social isolation. Heck, it even brought me and my partner of 14 years together. Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well. People are people, and some people are plain assholes. I dont need facebook to be triggered by people.
> Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media.
Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic. Not everyone who gambles is a gambling addict.
> Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well.
Anywhere can be toxic. The difference is that social media is incentivized to drive engagement, and the way most social media is set up leads to the kinds of anti-social behavior that is rampant on most social media sites these days.
Not all of them. Discord has quietly become the 10,000 gorilla of functioning communities due to the fact that servers are invite-only and moderated by humans, without any populism-driven moderation. Most of the folks I know from the oldschool forum and IRC era ended up there, and I've met loads of new people simply through connections and friends of friends.
Ha, your first example already shows how lost your cause is. America once tried prohibition, and pretty much gave up on the idea. These days, even though it might be harmful to many, alcohol is pretty much legal in many places on the world. Trying to make it illegal to protect the few that can not deal with it sounds--and actually is--hilarious. Same with social media. So calm down, the train has left the station.
Erm, I actually agree with you. Blanket prohibition wouldn't work, and in any case isn't really viable, due to the amount of money in the status quo.
I suppose I hope that future generations will consider social media in its current form to be a vice in the same way that alcohol or gambling are, but I don't claim to know what an actual society-wide solution would look like.
All I can do in the here and now is point out how fake social media is, try and articulate why, and gently guide people who might want off the ride towards spaces where they can connect with actual human beings.
In a way, I feel sorry for terminally online social media addicts. I never understood the appeal of sites like Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram in the first place. Facebook seemed neat until the artifice of real people + real names + real pictures turned out to be smoke, then I stopped bothering with it. Reddit was probably the closest to being appealing that social media ever got, but it had some serious systemic issues with community-building that only got worse as moderators went from community curators to doing janitorial work for a large company >for free.
> 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.
> This really condescending. They are addicts and victims.
Not everybody who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everybody who gambles is a gambling addict. I was quite specific about who I was talking about.
> 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.
In my experience, the toxic conversations stopped because a moderator stepped in and gave them a time out, forcing them to touch grass.
And that's ultimately the problem. All spaces can be toxic. Social media sees toxicity and thinks to themselves, "This is drawing eyeballs and engagement. Let's double triple and quadruple down on it.". The incentives of social media are totally maladjusted for creating good social spaces on a fundamental level. Not every old-school social space was run well, but at least the possibility was there and not being actively subverted.
The idea of having user-run social spaces without populism-driven moderation is thankfully an idea that is coming back. Discord has quietly become a 10,000 pound gorilla based on that exact model. I have also found that VRChat is also quietly amassing a following of VR enthusiasts, as it turns out that there is value in maintaining long-distance relationships with a sense of presence you don't get out of group chats and video meetings.
On the other hand, I don't really get the point of BlueSky. It suffers from the same underlying incentives as Twitter, and we all know how that story ended.
Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody
And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that other people say (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where nobody runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.
IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.
Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.
Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.
The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if someone else could see them, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.
I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue you for making it available on your server, even temporarily.
From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.
In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
> Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
Yes. I follow several remote users who default to "unlisted" posts. (To be honest, I don't know if they're unlisted or follower-only posts -- I can't tell.)
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.
There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/) with its light and low-tech UI.
Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).
Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.
One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
My understanding is that ActivityPub relies on the server having a stable domain name and be reachable from the internet so that other instances can talk to it. So your client must continuously run its server in the background (impossible on mobile) and be reachable from the internet at a static IP or dynamic DNS with low TTLs (very impractical on mobile unless you perpetually leave your "mobile" at home).
Though some downtime is usually handled by servers with "backoff retries" eventually you're server will be marked as offline and servers might never bother contacting it anymore.
Similar to email which - at least technically - has the idea built into its protocol that servers are going to be down.
But mastodon was built with more modern web in mind, so having a server that's offline more than online will be highly impractical.
I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies. Either hosted by others for you (as a service) defeating the entire premise of you being the full owner, or hosted on your nas or cheap hosting. Such a proxy would be far simpler than a full blown server, as all it needs to do is ingest messages and keep them for X time and forward them to your "actual server inside the client" once that connects online.
The server-in-the client can handle outgoing messages and handle downloading linked media and such.
I am not aware of such proxy software. But currently gotosocial is the simplest and lightest server software I am aware of, so maybe stripping that could work.
> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies
That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.
(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.
I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.
> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse”
Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore criticizing my vegetarian diet for not being good enough because I wear a leather belt).
The issue with the current iteration of fedi is that it misses the main problems that average, non-technical people experience with social media, so those people remain unaware of fedi and/or can't get past the friction of using it, as a result they remain on the mainstream services, all while fedi remains a nerd echo-chamber with significant unsolved issues around funding, moderation, spam protection, etc (the only reason it doesn't collapse under spam/unsavory content is that it's mostly just not even worth spamming due to its irrelevance).
I'm not particularly sure the current iteration of fedi being around is better than other systems... it sucks the oxygen out of the room and reduces/fragments demand for an actually good replacement for FB/X/etc...
> For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios.
That sounds like Nostr. My understanding is your node is the nostr relay. Your nostr client can publish messages to your relay. Any "subscribed" clients or relays can then access and forward the message from your relay.
On the GoToSocial website it's clear what it is, how it works and how to get started. The Nostr website seems more like they want me to sign up and start using their server/relay. And I had to spend some time searching for how to set up a private relay. This fact is off-putting. Feels like they care more about their product than about free communication.
Nostr doesn't have "a website". nostr.com is its own thing, nostr.org is another thing and nostr.how is yet another. None of these (AFAIK) is related to the Nostr project, whose only web presence is on GitHub.
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
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...
Hard to remember the idealism Twitter was founded with now, but I suspect Biz saw where Twitter was headed long, long ago and didn’t want to be party to it.
He’s used his status to support awesome projects since then.
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)?
It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!
There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.
Personally I've always built my follow list via manual snowball sampling, so Mastodon discoverability is almost exactly the same as on twitter, except without the useless suggestions that I have to ignore at the start.
There's really only one trick to it, search for a hashtag and use the people there to get the list started, then it's the usually check at who's posting interesting stuff and who they in turn are reposting to find potential follows.
This used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
This is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
To me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity.
Decentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
Yes, this is a structural vs. social thing. My gut is that though, it would be entirely possible to build "nice and easy to find" ON TOP OF, as opposed to fully integrated with, a decentralized service.
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)
Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.
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.
Influencers get paid by social media platforms. What if private users sought to fund influencers to actively post on mastodon? Towards having more content and activity on instances.
Many influencers have patreon and are keen to attract more funding. Many could maintain mastodon in addition to other platforms.
Influencer's approach to posting tends to be the "shotgun" / "throw shit at a wall and see what sticks" approach.
Since Mastodon only sorts by date and not by popularity/virality, anyone who follows those influencers are going to get spammed by every single one of their posts.
Mastodon users have a simple solution for dealing with spam, they unfollow that person.
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.
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.
How can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?
There are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :/
I think one is the result of the other. It is a nice place because there are few people there.
Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.
The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That its not an interesting target for phishers, spammers, scammers or attackers: the ROI is too low. And that the low number of people keeps influencers and other commercial entities, like brands or news-agencies away: not much to make money off.
>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.
The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will always be smaller instances doing their own thing.
But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system.
So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate.
Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely.
And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc.
The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.
You can do your own thing as much as you want, and choose with whom you federate, and others can do the same. That's just freedom of speech and freedom of association. Large instances aren't "dictating" anything to other instances. The point is you can't do that with Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit to the same degree. The fediverse will never have an Elon Musk trying to purge it of the "woke mind virus."
>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)
Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.
It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.
But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.
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.
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".
>unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
In the context of social media most human behavior is addiction-reinforcing, because that is the behavior that those platforms are designed to reinforce. The medium is the message.
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.
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
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.
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
People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?
But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]
They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.
I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.
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?
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.
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.
I believe you. I absolutely would not have suspended your account for that. But in so many other cases, they’re too slow to respond to reports of spammers, scammers, etc.
I reported several spammers impersonating with posts like „click here to verify your account“ phishing links and they disappeared in less than 2 minutes. There is little arguing about malicious content, it‘s about political and „tone“ related moderation. You can‘t be successful by just doing X but with an authorian left point of view. It‘s just the other side of the populistic, hateful spectrum. Some people want it, I get it. I‘m still running several accounts on other instances publishing open data and aggregating news (cycling and chess related) but the content I want to read is not created by people on the Fediverse.
I view these online platforms as the modern town square. If they are silencing people, that’s a problem in my book. Who is deciding what is acceptable? Who put them in change of what people are and aren’t allowed to say?
Provided the person isn’t breaking any laws by saying what they’re saying, leave the post up and they can get their repercussions, positive or negative, based on their post being available.
I know people like to take a hard line view and say a violation of free speech is only happening if the government is arresting you for what you say, but in my opinion it’s everyone’s responsibility. To have the privilege of free speech means one must also be tolerant to hearing things they don’t like from time to time. After all, free speech doesn't exist to protect popular opinion, it exists to protect the unpopular.
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.
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
This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.
We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.
A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?
I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.
It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.
To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.
Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.
It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.
The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.
So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.
Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.
The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.
I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.
Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.
Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.
Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.
Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.
It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.
One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.
But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.
This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!
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.)
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..
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.
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
> 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.
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!
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.
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
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
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.
>A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation.
>
>As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
My understanding is that the non-profit in the US exists exclusively to handle fundraising from US donors who might not be able to give to non-US organizations for tax reasons.
Or for a tax receipt. I give modestly to Wikipedia, but their lack of a Canadian entity means I direct the bulk of my giving toward entities that I get the CRA kickback for.
Though if you are in the US odds are you don't need this tax deduction anyway. Few people understand how US taxes work and so give their accountant all their deductions because they know tax deductions exist. They don't realize that the standard deduction applies and they don't/can't deduct anything.
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.
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).
You don't seem to know how Mastodon works. If moderators aren't self-consistent in their judgement, users can literally take their profile to an entirely different website with no service disruption at all.
Mastodon needs to push for more activity and users though. I kind of know what it is, but I am not really using it. We could need, say, some replacement of Twitter-owned-by-billionaires.
> I 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.
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.
What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox.
> the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
This used to form spontaneously around shared events and hashtags. But ultimately the culture war poison comes for everyone. Elon is just the highest profile example of someone who got rage-poisoned and then took it out on everyone else, and is now using the platform to automate rage-spreading. Like a crap version of 28 days later, infectious viral rage.
Amusingly the same thing happened to us, though we ended up on Slack/Signal/iMessage group chats. And I was the only left who stayed on Twitter and consequently the only one[0] with the confrontational style. To my good fortune, it was Twitter that I left, rather than the group chats.
And yeah, Elon is certainly a victim of this virus. I think Bill Ackman getting snookered into paying a tip twice in a classic cabbie scam was the first time I could clearly see how people could end up suddenly stupid through this disease
> 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.
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.
IME Lemmy is more predominantly far left although a very small userbase.
Mastodon has islands of different culture on both the left and the right that don't interact much save a few of the largest instances. Some of the medium-sized ones vouched by joinmastodon have a lot of far left people. There's also a lot of mastodon forks which have been rebranded and closed off (at least one is far right), which complicates things. If you look at Mastodon blocklists you can get a feel for the boundaries.
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.
We followed each other and wrote before on Twitted. It‘s a tragedy. I‘ll be in Pforzheim again next year for the annual memorial ride. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WX7LVxzZem8
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'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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.
Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?
> 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.
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
This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter what nationality you're talking about. Drive-by snark is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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
> 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>
I guess I love the idea of the rails community being owned by the community not an individual. I find some of his stances on topics problematic (e.g the latest posting about London). Regarding rails itself I have no major issues, but, as titular head of rails itself I think he should be more inclusive.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.
If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.
Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
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.
This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.
He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.
I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.
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.
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
He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.
A few years ago there were some "personalities" that very much agitated against Stallman. Without generalizing too much it is these people you probably should keep a very, very large distance to. Toxic is likely an understatement.
An easy position to take when you have assurances that dissenting voices in this thread will have their rebuttals censored.
Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.
You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.
If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.
I do think this belongs on HN as a topic. This isn't a character assassination since I didn't name anyone. Quite the contrary, the character assassination was directed against Stallman and it was based on toxic slender and rumors and it even lead to consequences. If someone does feel addressed by my comment, I welcome that of course and perhaps it will lead to some self-reflection because I want to underline that it is strong criticism.
The problem comes when his principals turn out to have blind spots.
I feel like the refusal to close the network hole in the GPLv3 is a significant blind spot of his, and is a decision that has aged incredibly poorly in the age of cloud services.
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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?!?
> I admired this dude but those words are, kinda, punchable offense.
I think that's pretty spot on. Saying stuff like that means that there shouldn't be celebration of the person or reverence towards them.
You can support the FSF views on free software and any good those do in the world, but it's not possible to ignore all of the other stuff a person has said.
One can guess whether he's not neurotypical to such a degree that he doesn't take a humane enough perspective (arguing about topics that perhaps shouldn't be argued about), but that doesn't really change anything.
When you want to talk about free software, probably talk about FSF not RMS.
"it's not possible to ignore all of the other stuff a person has said"
I don't know, for me it's not only possible but very easy, not only regarding pedophilia but also his various political opinions I don't agree with.
Let's also keep in mind that he has changed his mind on this topic.
"<some stupid shit you later changed your mind about>"
-- you, probably
Also, if you're not sceptical about it, you should be able to explain to someone like Stallman (as someone apparently later did) why it's still bad for children. If you can't then you're just as "stupid", the only difference is you happen to conform to the current accepted belief on this particular matter.
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Opinions like this give rise to fascism. You can not talk about how we want to protect children and where the boundaries are because some lunatics immediately accuse anybody of harming THE CHILDREN.
If someone is romantically into kids this is not socially accepted in most cultures, but someone merely being attracted without following up with actions does not harm any kids.
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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.
Plenty of people are on the spectrum and able to talk about this stuff well. Please don't smear the rest of us with RMS's nonsense.
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.
rms defined epstin "a serial rapist"… if you call this siding with someone you might have to consider the idea of being wrong.
As well as the hundreds of other unnamed underage victims who were coerced into sexual favors for Epstein personally.
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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.
It was one of his assistants that signed him up. Pedantic but he himself has never actually used it
Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:
> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]
The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.
[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.
Eugen*
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Looks like the inmates won again:
Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.
I 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.
I think that in general the plain linear format is bad for debate. You always end up with one or two - often barely on topic! - threads dominating, and everything else below gets barely any attention.
For submissions with lots of comments the majority of comments are all under the top comment, branching off into all kinds of places.
It only works when there is not a lot of participation, unless you count participation itself as the goal.
There is also the limit of usefulness of longer comments, a few paragraphs - not too little, but also not too much - and everything unstructured severely limits the quality of the information.
You have many layers but it is all pressed into the linear format. You usually have less than a handful of actually on topic posts that really add significantly to the OP submission, but you may also have a lot of great discussion that is adjacent. Now, it is hard to find those few great on-topic posts, and people who may have something interesting to say may not even do so when they see they are comment #200+ because they know they won't be read far down the list.
There is also no connection in time. Every single comment only gets a brief moment in space (the submission's comment space) and time (a few hours at most before nobody will ever see it again). You can't build something up over time, it's all quite superficial.
That is not HN specific, all comments sections are the same everywhere. I am disappointed by the lack of innovation in this space. It reminds me of how many everyday things are not improving, for example, bad public toilets. I see the same ones clogged again and again, and dirty and stinking. And yet, they never make any changes, and the new constructions all have the same problems. For example, why does cleaning them remain such a disgusting chore? They could just have better surfaces, a hose and a drain so that the cleaner or even a user can just use the hose to clean a stall or the entire room. I saw that in a sausage factory when I worked there while in school, hot water hoses you could use any- and everywhere, and indeed everything was very clean because everybody just used a hot water hose a lot.
I no longer believe in automatic improvements, and it has nothing to do with whatever system society uses. There is just a lot of inertia, things just continue and nobody really spends much effort to improve many easily improvable things. Part of it is not just starting something, it's also the (correct) expectation that even if you provide something better it will be shutdown, and it has nothing to do with price (cleaning and unclogging those toilets must add up over time, never mind that e.g. the big 10 theatre cinema owner should have the idea that maybe customers always having to go into stinking restrooms is bad for business long-term?).
Back to comment systems, we have TONS of comment systems, but they all do pretty much the same. I don't believe for a second that there is no other way and we have a global maximum. We have a local maximum, and we cannot seem to get out of it.
It's on-par with extreme moderation to the point where they will flag/mute whoever disagrees with them
Who, the mods? It's just not true. I would go as far as to say they don't mute people enough.
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.
Kind of funny how you complain about people being mean to you and then accuse a high percentage of them of being apes flinging shit. You have some unresolved issues.
I think when you get literal shit mailed to you, it’s ok to think that people can be shit-flinging apes.
No, having experienced a small number of deranged individuals that does not excuse calling "a high percentage of people" barely functioning apes.
IME mods deserve a lot of the shit they get. It's not exactly well-functioning individuals that tend to choose such a (unpaid) position for themselves.
That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks
> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.
That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things.
Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.
I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).
I don't find this analogy enlightening. Only a few people are ever trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, so of course it doesn't tell us much about humanity.
Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.
I don’t believe it’s necessarily human nature. But it’s definitely human culture.
> I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.
Why are you here there?
Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.
I share the same sentiment about the HN community, but there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here that are fun to read
Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.
> Why are you here
I agree with, uh, assbuttbuttass: "there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here".
As for commenting, it's just a matter of too much time on my hands, temptation, and bad habit.
> Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.
You can respond, anyway. ;-)
> You can respond, anyway. ;-)
Well, since you asked ;-)
I'd agree with you, more or less. I don't find it horrendous necessarily. But I find the focus to be far more on the articles than the conversation. Most of my comments are just me screaming into the void.
Its a different business model though, HN isn't trying to increase your session time as much as possible. I find the UI to actually discourage conversation and interaction.
Its a decent feed for articles.
The culture is fucking terrible
Look at some of the comments in this HN discussion, and you can see what Rochko means.
Like the other poster said, there's nothing worth losing sleep over in the comments here. Some people trying to start flame wars about politics, and a guy who thinks it's funny to drop racial slurs. None of those is 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.
3% variance on beliefs is way bigger than you think, and also he said “just about” everything, not everything.
And you can have whatever opinion you want, but also be prepared for me to tell you that your opinion is stupid, and when you assert that a falsehood is in fact opinion instead of a lie, I will point out that facts are not opinions and opinions are not facts.
Too many of y’all get this confused.
You seem like exactly the kind of person I was alluding to in my comment.
I think his point is that we all have more in common as humans than differences, and yet the differences prevail, which is a shame (and unhealthy).
So we make our own choices about where we spend our time, and some of us simply disconnect.
>(And for those curious/interested/familiar, yes it was "Bad Space" aligned people)
What do you mean?
You'd have to be around Mastodon to know what that means, but basically there was an effort by some Black folks there to not just create their own server but to also flag and identify racist/toxic servers etc, and anyone who fit that as they saw was put on their thing called "The Bad Space."
Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes.
I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
> Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy?
Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).
It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.
If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.
A good principle in theory, but did you miss that I mentioned that I am black as well?
And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc.
But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel compelled to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're a point of contact for "Blackness" for a lot of people who are not black. And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
As in, I never found "oh, they're just playing the race card" to EVER be valid.
Until I went to Mastodon.
> A good principle in theory
And especially in practice.
> I am black as well
I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say something critical - and especially something racist (you didn't say anything racist, afaik) - as if that somehow justifies it. It's a well-worn troll tactic to turn the tables on racism, etc.
> And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
Doesn't that take on the too common perspective toward black people (and lots of other groups), that each black person is like a spokesperson of a universal Black Persons Association and speaks for / represents every other black person?
Freedom is the freedom to be outrageous, wrong, disagreeable, etc. (Not that disagreeing with you or me is 'wrong'.) Look at what white people do.
Yeah, basically I agree with mmooss. As a Black person, I don’t really care how weird, wrong, creepy, or exhausting other Black people are, I still feel more kinship and alignment with them than a random white person I don’t know. I can’t really stand white people writ large, but there are a ton of individual white people I love and adore. Because I know the difference between whiteness* and a white person.
And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.
And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.
I tend to agree -- but what kept me around that particular flavor of Black mastodon bullshit was of course, not the people -- but my personal belief that Mastodon is the smartest model for social media, and as such I choose to try to see what I can do in there. I think the world would be better off if everyone saw/believed that the thing we do with twitter would work VERY WELL if done on Mastodon.
Would not tolerate otherwise.
[flagged]
It's not an "argument?" And if anything it's just more of a confirmation of your exact idea of being against a universal Black Person's Association.
Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads some-kind-of uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure opinion (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uBPA.
I can imagine your point about it countering the uBPA perspective, but the comments feel more like what I said above. Are people that dumb about uBPA beliefs that they really need to know about one exception? I hope not.
I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.
Are people that dumb?
In my experience? YES YES YES YES YES.
And hey, in my experience, if you want that perspective, head on over to Mastodon; it's ALL there.
edit: ha, I'm being uncharitable. I think it is naive to not understand that there is some sliver of "truthful experience" for most people to the uBPA, regardless of who you are.
I don't consider those types of efforts well meaning anymore. Rather than changing minds they without fail seem to attract narcissists and people utilizing victimhood like a status item or the like and that and purity spirals like a cudgel.
>I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
It's sad to say but I think black people aren't big in the tech space or similar spaces in general and not just in the US. Fosdem is one of the most pasty conventions out there in a rather international city.
As an outsider looking in I think just like with the lack of women in tech it's not primarily a barrier problem. And this is a different subject but I in factthink some of the weird campaigning towards women to join has had the opposite effect (Think 'barbie and her pink laptop entering the male dominated field' type stuff just reinforcing pointlessly gendered preconceptions.)
Black people are emphatically absolutely big in tech in the US, just not in a lot of well known "classic" arena; way more in the business tech space. Like linkedin, not slashdot.
like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.
> interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything
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.
was literally saying the opposite
that's WHY I said "with whom I shared views" and not BLACK PEOPLE GENERALLY.
so many feelings people get into.
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?
a) They used 'Black' as opposed to 'black', which often is used specifically to mean a particular culture around african-americans specifically, not just a signifier of skin tone. b) The charitable interpretation is that they are Black and that they share 97% of their views.
Its impossible to think you agree with 97% of any group without assuming everyone from that group thinks the same way. Even people from just one country don't think the same way due to color of skin, if we were to assume the point is only about americans.
They didn’t say “agree with” they said “97% similar views.” This seems like a pretty informal measurement, and we don’t have much insight into what it really means.
Feels like a lot of y'alls feelings are getting in the way of what I was saying here. Slow down and read carefully. You all should try thinking about this in perhaps Venn diagrams or something.
There are Black people on Mastodon, myself included. In my interactions with them, to me, it appears as of the (very tiny) subset of Black folks who are also on Mastodon, I have observed and interacted with them on views and issues about the world.
Presuming, for example, they vote - we would vote similarly. We would support the same causes, we would likely react similarly to things in real life -- and yet...etc see above.
Point being, it's not like I was in with like Black MAGA or some other group who I'd be unlikely to associate.
FWIW I was trying to disagree with the person I responded to and agree with you. Sorry if it came off some other way. Actually, thinking of it “we don’t have much insight into what it really means” could look be read as sounding negative toward your post; not intentional!
I though they were applying an overly-restrictive definition of “agree with 97%,” and was trying to point out that what you actually wrote “97% similar,” left plenty of room for reasonable interpretations (like the one you posted).
Yes, that's what I was trying to do with "y'alls," trying to respond to the whole thread -- I understood that you, bee_rider, got what I was saying.
[dead]
Lmao if you have to ask this it tells me a lot
Sometimes I really wonder what the crowd I interact with here on HN is really like. Are they true tech intellectuals, or are they people who wouldn't hesitate to hurl 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.
Plenty of people trying to hurl racial slurs here, but they're mostly all shadow banned and not really truly participating in the discussions.
I think very few people on this forum would qualify as intellectuals, most are just ordinary people. Now, some users certainly present themselves as Renaissance polymaths, but typically they just suffer from Engineer's Disease :)
Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
> Needless to say, even "intellectuals" can be racist.
Not "even" intellectuals. Eugenics and racial superiority were progressive intellectual concepts less than 100 years ago, with people writing self-important letters to each other about it.
Why do you have to wonder? Are people on HN just abstract text to you? Just talk to people.
I promise you, you can be both.
A couple of decades has taught me that there's no hard boundary between those two sets. The concept of "public intellectual" itself is a bit suspect, since it becomes just another form of celebrity and/or cult leader.
HN comments rarely resolve only into personal insults. It's sometimes accompanied with the actual arguments but never just insults
Meh, the worst I see in this thread with show dead on is some tedious criticism, politics slop and one guy posting a racial slur. I can't imagine making decisions about the direction of my life over such mild nothings.
Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated sensitivity goes with the territory.
I 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.
You are exaggregating. Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media. Its a tool, and like with many tools, the user has responsibilities. Hammers are incredibly hurtful if you never learn to not hit your hands with 'em.
I have a FB account since, what, 16 years or so. It has helped me to connect with people, it helped me to partially break out of my (disability-inflicted) social isolation. Heck, it even brought me and my partner of 14 years together. Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well. People are people, and some people are plain assholes. I dont need facebook to be triggered by people.
> Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media.
Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic. Not everyone who gambles is a gambling addict.
> Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well.
Anywhere can be toxic. The difference is that social media is incentivized to drive engagement, and the way most social media is set up leads to the kinds of anti-social behavior that is rampant on most social media sites these days.
Not all of them. Discord has quietly become the 10,000 gorilla of functioning communities due to the fact that servers are invite-only and moderated by humans, without any populism-driven moderation. Most of the folks I know from the oldschool forum and IRC era ended up there, and I've met loads of new people simply through connections and friends of friends.
Ha, your first example already shows how lost your cause is. America once tried prohibition, and pretty much gave up on the idea. These days, even though it might be harmful to many, alcohol is pretty much legal in many places on the world. Trying to make it illegal to protect the few that can not deal with it sounds--and actually is--hilarious. Same with social media. So calm down, the train has left the station.
Erm, I actually agree with you. Blanket prohibition wouldn't work, and in any case isn't really viable, due to the amount of money in the status quo.
I suppose I hope that future generations will consider social media in its current form to be a vice in the same way that alcohol or gambling are, but I don't claim to know what an actual society-wide solution would look like.
All I can do in the here and now is point out how fake social media is, try and articulate why, and gently guide people who might want off the ride towards spaces where they can connect with actual human beings.
In a way, I feel sorry for terminally online social media addicts. I never understood the appeal of sites like Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram in the first place. Facebook seemed neat until the artifice of real people + real names + real pictures turned out to be smoke, then I stopped bothering with it. Reddit was probably the closest to being appealing that social media ever got, but it had some serious systemic issues with community-building that only got worse as moderators went from community curators to doing janitorial work for a large company >for free.
> 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.
> This really condescending. They are addicts and victims.
Not everybody who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everybody who gambles is a gambling addict. I was quite specific about who I was talking about.
> 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.
In my experience, the toxic conversations stopped because a moderator stepped in and gave them a time out, forcing them to touch grass.
And that's ultimately the problem. All spaces can be toxic. Social media sees toxicity and thinks to themselves, "This is drawing eyeballs and engagement. Let's double triple and quadruple down on it.". The incentives of social media are totally maladjusted for creating good social spaces on a fundamental level. Not every old-school social space was run well, but at least the possibility was there and not being actively subverted.
The idea of having user-run social spaces without populism-driven moderation is thankfully an idea that is coming back. Discord has quietly become a 10,000 pound gorilla based on that exact model. I have also found that VRChat is also quietly amassing a following of VR enthusiasts, as it turns out that there is value in maintaining long-distance relationships with a sense of presence you don't get out of group chats and video meetings.
On the other hand, I don't really get the point of BlueSky. It suffers from the same underlying incentives as Twitter, and we all know how that story ended.
Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basically the same caveat as with the corp social medias, but on a smaller scale. Mastodon is definitely an alternative to big corps, but it has the same flaws. I don't see it as a way the decentralised community should go.
> When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody
And that somebody can be you. There are Mastodon servers operated by individuals for their friends or their small company. Anyone can host a server with their own rules.
Though that will then open you up to legal liability, including for things that other people say (if their messages reach your server, even if you haven't personally seen them): https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Being a user on someone else's server is much less legal risk. Using E2E software where nobody runs a server is much less legal risk. Running a one-person instance of Mastodon is the worst case for legal liability.
Just use your server only for you, and ingest the federated feed.
Even if you do that, you're still - legally speaking - liable for hosting all those federated messages.
IANAL, but my understanding is the most effective way to run your own server is to have it completely hidden, e.g. behind classic HTTP authentication so that nobody but you can even see it's a Mastodon server, and definitely can't see anything the server is ingesting, without first logging in.
Even then, if you're a resident of California, your server "collects and maintains personally identifiable information from a consumer residing in California who uses or visits" so you need a privacy policy for yourself, legally speaking. See how much work it is to be legally compliant with laws that never really considered your use-case but apply to you anyway?
> liable for hosting all those federated messages.
Mastodon do not permanently stores these messages. They are cached, and evicted after some time. I linked to a video some time ago, and now that link is unreachable because it's expired.
The URL contained "/cache/", and I didn't understand what it meant until my video died.
That's true, but while they're cached, if someone else could see them, they're hosted, and you're liable for hosting them.
I understand that Mastodon has a "local feed", and even if you're its sole user, if you don't block anonymous readers from access, that means someone could technically see a message by someone else that you're subscribed to, take umbrage at it, and sue you for making it available on your server, even temporarily.
From what I've seen of Mastodon, it does seem possible to block access to the server's local feed, but I don't know that for sure.
In addition to the local feed, there's also what you personally boost. I'm not sure how one strikes a balance, and if the software is still usable, if you were to hide the main URL for your feed (at least, the URL so that visitors from the web can read your feed on your server). Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
> Would it still be possible to participate in conversations, would people still be able to subscribe to you?
Yes. I follow several remote users who default to "unlisted" posts. (To be honest, I don't know if they're unlisted or follower-only posts -- I can't tell.)
But that's en entirely different discussion then the "mastodon is not fully decentralized".
Yes, I know this. But it feels overkilling to host a server which is capable of hosting thousands of users just for me alone. I'd like something small, dedicated just for my own usage. Kind of a way to have my RSS feed discoverable and commentable.
I run my own Mastodon instance and it's definitely heavy and unoptimized for this use case. That seems to be a common theme with Ruby on Rails applications, to be honest.
There are lighter clients that will integrate perfectly into Fediverse/Mastodon networks, though, such as GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/) with its light and low-tech UI.
Many Mastodon alternatives expose a Mastodon API so that you can use the standard Mastodon apps with them, even if you're not really hosting Mastodon itself.
Do you know about gotosocial? That’s pretty much exactly what you’re describing.
Never heard of it. Thanks! I'll take a look.
Modern software deployment methods can fill the gap between your selfhosted need and the work to be done. I won't name technologies here, because existing have its flaws (docker, helm, etc).
Mastodon is federated and thus basically fulfills your whish. IMO "decentralized Web3" such as IPFS may rempve that need for classical "hosts" but at the costs of an entrance barrier for users (have to install that client).
There’s really nothing to stop you running your own server.
One of my impractical, but dream ideas was to create a Mastodon client that had a server embedded in it. No more ‘Signing up for a server’ by default you had your own instance
What’s impractical about that? It seems like a great idea.
Well, I guess doing any big open source project is a bit impractical.
I wonder if it would be possible to (as a hack) come up with a set of scripts to smoosh the general Mastodon server into this shape…
> What’s impractical about that?
My understanding is that ActivityPub relies on the server having a stable domain name and be reachable from the internet so that other instances can talk to it. So your client must continuously run its server in the background (impossible on mobile) and be reachable from the internet at a static IP or dynamic DNS with low TTLs (very impractical on mobile unless you perpetually leave your "mobile" at home).
Your understanding is right.
Though some downtime is usually handled by servers with "backoff retries" eventually you're server will be marked as offline and servers might never bother contacting it anymore.
Similar to email which - at least technically - has the idea built into its protocol that servers are going to be down.
But mastodon was built with more modern web in mind, so having a server that's offline more than online will be highly impractical.
I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies. Either hosted by others for you (as a service) defeating the entire premise of you being the full owner, or hosted on your nas or cheap hosting. Such a proxy would be far simpler than a full blown server, as all it needs to do is ingest messages and keep them for X time and forward them to your "actual server inside the client" once that connects online. The server-in-the client can handle outgoing messages and handle downloading linked media and such.
I am not aware of such proxy software. But currently gotosocial is the simplest and lightest server software I am aware of, so maybe stripping that could work.
> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies
That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity.
(One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this since they can talk any protocol to any host and implement their own logic to authenticate messages. I think Mastodon was just never expected to become this big.
I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” if you’re curious, just search for my username and those keywords. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a blog post.
> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse”
Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore criticizing my vegetarian diet for not being good enough because I wear a leather belt).
The issue with the current iteration of fedi is that it misses the main problems that average, non-technical people experience with social media, so those people remain unaware of fedi and/or can't get past the friction of using it, as a result they remain on the mainstream services, all while fedi remains a nerd echo-chamber with significant unsolved issues around funding, moderation, spam protection, etc (the only reason it doesn't collapse under spam/unsavory content is that it's mostly just not even worth spamming due to its irrelevance).
I'm not particularly sure the current iteration of fedi being around is better than other systems... it sucks the oxygen out of the room and reduces/fragments demand for an actually good replacement for FB/X/etc...
> For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios.
That sounds like Nostr. My understanding is your node is the nostr relay. Your nostr client can publish messages to your relay. Any "subscribed" clients or relays can then access and forward the message from your relay.
On the GoToSocial website it's clear what it is, how it works and how to get started. The Nostr website seems more like they want me to sign up and start using their server/relay. And I had to spend some time searching for how to set up a private relay. This fact is off-putting. Feels like they care more about their product than about free communication.
Nostr doesn't have "a website". nostr.com is its own thing, nostr.org is another thing and nostr.how is yet another. None of these (AFAIK) is related to the Nostr project, whose only web presence is on GitHub.
Feels messed up already. But I’ll have a look at their GitHub. Thanks.
Yeah, Nostr is a bit of a free-for-all, and I think it's by design.
And to make matters worse, Mastodon relies heavily on domains (and indirectly TLS root certs) as protocol primitives.
Even if you run your own server, you just change who your "overlord" is.
Why do you think that decentralization isn’t real if it’s not at the furthest extreme?
Even Eugen himself set to position of labelling opposite opinions (1) and censorship. Fediverse, in Mastodon way, actually feeds social bubbles.
(1) https://ibb.co/qY082NjX
That's what puzzles me. In the fediverse where you can mute anyone on the user level, admins feel the urge to ban those who they see as bad actors.
Yes. It's just larping as long as you are to use a username and a password to log in to a server - even if it's your own server. This is why I have never tried bluesky, their apps wants me to enter a user/pass and my date of birth. Nostr fixes this.
> and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit
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).
You might be surprised to learn more about him.
Hard to remember the idealism Twitter was founded with now, but I suspect Biz saw where Twitter was headed long, long ago and didn’t want to be party to it.
He’s used his status to support awesome projects since then.
Jay Graber Mike Masnick (techdirt) Jeromie Miller (XMPP) Investor seat
Hi Paul
Hey
"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!
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).
It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!
There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.
Personally I've always built my follow list via manual snowball sampling, so Mastodon discoverability is almost exactly the same as on twitter, except without the useless suggestions that I have to ignore at the start.
There's really only one trick to it, search for a hashtag and use the people there to get the list started, then it's the usually check at who's posting interesting stuff and who they in turn are reposting to find potential follows.
I have this impression too, I open Mastodon and the timeline usually doesn’t have many interesting things.
This used to be the case for me too, but hasn't now for years. I've followed plenty of people that migrated during the big exoduses from Twitter and then for a while started liberally following people whose reposts I liked and now the timeline is oozing with life ever since.
I don’t want to argue about the overall trend based on a single example, but Terence Tao’s substantial use of Mastodon for communication does change the picture a bit.
This is because you are holding it wrong. BlueSky and Twitter and alike are algorithmic attention grabbers. They try to feed you as much controversial stuff you might react to as possible. In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms yet, so you need to make sure to connect with people you are interested in proactively.
To me, Mastodon's overwhelmingly the best model. Even Bluesky has already shown that it's too centralizable, and I think very few people have considered the idea that "you can take it with you" is actually a bug as much as it is a feature, it's like Bluesky has added on potential surveillance and less anonymity.
"Just be kind of like email" is better.
Decentralization sounds nice in theory but seems to be detrimental to this type of social media, though. I briefly tried mastodon, and it wasn't easily possible to explore content spread across various hosts, which made it uninteresring.
Yes, this is a structural vs. social thing. My gut is that though, it would be entirely possible to build "nice and easy to find" ON TOP OF, as opposed to fully integrated with, a decentralized service.
What happened last summer? (I couldn't find anything on it)
It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.
@dang if possible please stick this reply to the top, @gargron is the author himself (the CEO stepping down)
Which controversial topic did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse?
Why would it be their responsibility to succeed at topics in the fediverse more than it's your responsibility?
So which topics did you fail/refuse to crack down on the fediverse @Maken?
I personally failed to push harder for DIDs so switching servers without losing followers is easier.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
I know we must have some terminally online fediverse users here. One of them must have an idea what he is alluding to.
I'm not entirely sure, I wonder if that is related to the "fight" between fans of ActivityPub and fans of Bluesky AtProto where he was personally involved.
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
Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.
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.
> ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).
$300M? Or $1.5T? Because $300B isn't tiny compared to $1.5B.
Do you mean $300M for ByteDance? Because $300B dwarfs $1.5B and $3.4B.
Do you understand that Bluesky is just the example implementation of a protocol that’s currently in the process of becoming an IETF standard?
> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have
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.
Influencers get paid by social media platforms. What if private users sought to fund influencers to actively post on mastodon? Towards having more content and activity on instances.
Many influencers have patreon and are keen to attract more funding. Many could maintain mastodon in addition to other platforms.
It would be hard to make it work.
Influencer's approach to posting tends to be the "shotgun" / "throw shit at a wall and see what sticks" approach.
Since Mastodon only sorts by date and not by popularity/virality, anyone who follows those influencers are going to get spammed by every single one of their posts.
Mastodon users have a simple solution for dealing with spam, they unfollow that person.
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.
How can a communications network with 700,000 users not be culturally meaningful? Are they all just re-tooting the same Willy Wonka meme and possessed of the memory of a goldfish? Or do they all live in the same suburb of Lagos and not use any other social media?
There are over 324 comments about this leadership change, which at the time of counting was more than 23 of the other stories I see on the frontpage, so I'm not sure by which metric you say it's not culturally relevant.
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 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.
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
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.
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
Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
I think the fediverse is great but: the specific desire for "more people that you already know coming to the Fediverse" is good; the general desire "more people" is not such a useful goal.
Yeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people.
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 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 :/
I think one is the result of the other. It is a nice place because there are few people there.
Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.
The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That its not an interesting target for phishers, spammers, scammers or attackers: the ROI is too low. And that the low number of people keeps influencers and other commercial entities, like brands or news-agencies away: not much to make money off.
>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.
The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will always be smaller instances doing their own thing.
But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system.
So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate. Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely.
And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc.
The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.
You can do your own thing as much as you want, and choose with whom you federate, and others can do the same. That's just freedom of speech and freedom of association. Large instances aren't "dictating" anything to other instances. The point is you can't do that with Twitter or Facebook or even Reddit to the same degree. The fediverse will never have an Elon Musk trying to purge it of the "woke mind virus."
>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)
Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.
It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.
But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.
> It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
You mean like HN?
I wish it were better. I really want to move to it, but they’ve somehow managed to even make something as simple as liking a toot unintuitive. Boost and favorite don’t fit the bill.
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.
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".
>unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
In the context of social media most human behavior is addiction-reinforcing, because that is the behavior that those platforms are designed to reinforce. The medium is the message.
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.
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.
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?
If i logged into my account, its probably just some german hackers, some weird people, and a bot that posts the current big ben chimes in an amusing way. I love it. Empty is good.
On boarding is too complicated for your average social user
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
> You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up
I don't. I make these analogies, because they show that almost everyone is able to deal with the complexity of selecting a service provider.
I acknowledge that it is not their expected sign up flow, though, because they you can only expect what you already know.
That’s actually why I never tried it. Server selection. Choice paralysis. Gave up.
how did you get internet access?
Usually there's a couple of options for internet access based on your address, not hundreds of servers.
Yeah one choice for me, the local cable company.
But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]
They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.
I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-pick-a-mastodon-server
It's another centralised service
At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
Mastodon is alright; it could be much better. And I find that disappointing. Mastodon is where some of my techie friends live (the less sociable types generally, which is ironic IMHO). Bluesky seems to have a much broader appeal. They both aspire to federation. So why not federate them together? I'm sure there are technical challenges but those aren't the reason this is not happening.
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 view it as a good thing.
Yes, it's disappointing frankly to see how many smart people still are on X.
Then again it's disappointing to see how many people with fuck you money don't say "fuck you".
>The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
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.
I believe you. I absolutely would not have suspended your account for that. But in so many other cases, they’re too slow to respond to reports of spammers, scammers, etc.
I reported several spammers impersonating with posts like „click here to verify your account“ phishing links and they disappeared in less than 2 minutes. There is little arguing about malicious content, it‘s about political and „tone“ related moderation. You can‘t be successful by just doing X but with an authorian left point of view. It‘s just the other side of the populistic, hateful spectrum. Some people want it, I get it. I‘m still running several accounts on other instances publishing open data and aggregating news (cycling and chess related) but the content I want to read is not created by people on the Fediverse.
I’m always amazed at how little people on the internet understand the concept of free speech.
Free speech has never meant that you can say whatever you want anywhere you want with zero repercussions.
I view these online platforms as the modern town square. If they are silencing people, that’s a problem in my book. Who is deciding what is acceptable? Who put them in change of what people are and aren’t allowed to say?
Provided the person isn’t breaking any laws by saying what they’re saying, leave the post up and they can get their repercussions, positive or negative, based on their post being available.
I know people like to take a hard line view and say a violation of free speech is only happening if the government is arresting you for what you say, but in my opinion it’s everyone’s responsibility. To have the privilege of free speech means one must also be tolerant to hearing things they don’t like from time to time. After all, free speech doesn't exist to protect popular opinion, it exists to protect the unpopular.
They're not saying it is.
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.
This is unfortunate and ultimately wrong. The ultimate stupidity is exemplified by Musk and Bezos, and others of their ilk. To step away from Mastodon because people compare you to them is an error.
We need not just Mastodon's but to find new ways - non-corporate - ways to come together and collaborate. I am beginning to suspect that Democracy is not a political system but an economic system.
A better way to address your situation is perhaps to work on implementing a distributed democratic system that works. We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?
Just my 2cents
> We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?
I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.
It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.
How do you ensure "one user, one vote?"
This seems impossible without intrusive government ID verification, and not immune to government meddling in any case.
To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.
Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.
It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.
The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.
So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.
Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.
The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.
Do you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?
I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.
Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.
Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.
Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.
Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.
It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)
When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.
One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.
But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.
This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...
interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!
Godspeed, John Mastodon
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
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..
> 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
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400017
This guy doesnt drama. Seems very selfish aware and down to earth. Good on him. Good to hear in a world of Wordpress and Ruby dramas.
I think it's good for the future of Mastodon as a decentralized platform to not depend essentially on any one person. After all, the web itself no longer depends on Tim Berners-Lee. That doesn't diminish their accomplishments, which were never about king-making.
Truthfully, the web never did depend entirely on Tim.
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
Jeff Atwood is too nice for our own good.
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.
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)
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.
Sure he does. He lives in Germany. They are gonna rip that 1 million apart.
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
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'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.
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!
>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.
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
Depends how old you are how much you already have saved. If you still have a mortgage payment it's probably not going to make it. If he fully owns a farm out in the woods somewhere where you don't have to buy health insurance it might be possible. Taxes are probably the biggest worry, inflation the next.
It’s not impossible to retire on that (assuming the stock market keeps going indefinitely), but you probably wouldn’t unless forced to, at his age. With €2-3M it would be less of a question.
Why is retiring mentioned? Most jobs pay zero when you leave so 1M is cool.
He was the founder and head of the company, so probably wouldn’t have had to step down if he didn’t want to.
Because that is the common thing someone will do when they get what looks like a large sum of money. It isn't the only option, but it is a common one.
€1M would not even cover the property tax to retire in the cheapest bay area home.
Uh, that's one of the most expensive places to live in the world. That's kind of the opposite of frugal. It's very doable in most of the US, as that's almost double what most retired people have, let alone the rest of the world.
Retired people generally are a lot older and get income from things like Social Security. They also get medicare taking care of health insurance. Between those two you need a lot more money to retire before you turn 65 vs after.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
thankfully nobody's forced to live in the Bay Area. With a million in the bank you could live off the interest in Portugal or an even cheaper city in Asia without touching the principal. Frankly on 40k you can even live here in Germany comfortably where Eugen hails from too.
It is if you deliberately find a low cost of living area and control your costs.
Do you have a reference for this?
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Found it interesting they've lost status as a non-profit for tax exemption in Germany, and now establish a non-profit in the US for attracting investors while dev and ops remain in a German gGmbH.
They're part-way through setting up a Belgian non-profit entity (AISBL) which will be the main organisation.
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
>A vital aspect of our restructuring initiative is transitioning Mastodon to a new European not-for-profit entity. Our intent is to form a Belgian AISBL as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. > >As an update on our current status, Mastodon is continuing to run day-to-day operations through the Mastodon gGmbH entity (the Mastodon gGmbH entity automatically became a for-profit as a result of its charitable status being stripped away in Germany). The US-based 501(c)(3) continues to function as a strategic overlay and fundraising hub, and as a short-term solution until the AISBL is ready, the 501(c)(3) will own the trademark and other assets. We intend to transfer those assets as soon as the AISBL is ready. To enable tax-deductible donations for German donors, we partnered with WE AID as our fiscal sponsor.
My understanding is that the non-profit in the US exists exclusively to handle fundraising from US donors who might not be able to give to non-US organizations for tax reasons.
Or for a tax receipt. I give modestly to Wikipedia, but their lack of a Canadian entity means I direct the bulk of my giving toward entities that I get the CRA kickback for.
Though if you are in the US odds are you don't need this tax deduction anyway. Few people understand how US taxes work and so give their accountant all their deductions because they know tax deductions exist. They don't realize that the standard deduction applies and they don't/can't deduct anything.
(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.
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.
You don't seem to know how Mastodon works. If moderators aren't self-consistent in their judgement, users can literally take their profile to an entirely different website with no service disruption at all.
I’m guessing he’s on mastodon himself and posted this to his feed. Can anyone share a link to his mastodon post for this announcement.
Here's his post: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115569820207257167
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.".
He sounds like a remarkable human.
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.
> 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
What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox.
> the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
This used to form spontaneously around shared events and hashtags. But ultimately the culture war poison comes for everyone. Elon is just the highest profile example of someone who got rage-poisoned and then took it out on everyone else, and is now using the platform to automate rage-spreading. Like a crap version of 28 days later, infectious viral rage.
Amusingly the same thing happened to us, though we ended up on Slack/Signal/iMessage group chats. And I was the only left who stayed on Twitter and consequently the only one[0] with the confrontational style. To my good fortune, it was Twitter that I left, rather than the group chats.
And yeah, Elon is certainly a victim of this virus. I think Bill Ackman getting snookered into paying a tip twice in a classic cabbie scam was the first time I could clearly see how people could end up suddenly stupid through this disease
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Outrage_is_the_Universal_Par...
0: I actually got called out on this once https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Bridge_Nodes
> 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.
My low-information answer is that I'd suggest trying both and make heavy use of the keyword muting feature.
Well, fuck. Cue community-destroying drama and infighting, right?
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.
> 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.
IME Lemmy is more predominantly far left although a very small userbase.
Mastodon has islands of different culture on both the left and the right that don't interact much save a few of the largest instances. Some of the medium-sized ones vouched by joinmastodon have a lot of far left people. There's also a lot of mastodon forks which have been rebranded and closed off (at least one is far right), which complicates things. If you look at Mastodon blocklists you can get a feel for the boundaries.
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.
I instantly had to think about a cyclist activist on Mastodon who was all over the news after he got killed by a car:
https://digitalcourage.social/@natenom
We followed each other and wrote before on Twitted. It‘s a tragedy. I‘ll be in Pforzheim again next year for the annual memorial ride. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WX7LVxzZem8
Wait now I love the fediverse.
A very relatable post and a good explanation for stepping down.
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
You can say that again.
"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...
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.
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.
It also glosses over or ignores the fact that Discord is low key crushing it, and is hardly a "capitalist hellscape"
It's better than the vast majority of social media, but it's still a walled garden. I wouldn't use it for anything important to me.
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro credits to access those characters on my keyboard
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
those new Discord ads sure are great!
I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...
And he'd ask why the hell you're paying for a taxi for your burger.
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
unfortunately he can only pay you back in 1925 dollars so youll have to take the dime as down payment and get the farmer enrolled in a BNPL
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see 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.
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.
The quote from the “jackass” crew is the opposite. If you’re famous you don’t need money. You just walk up and ask.
In addition to that: With money you can always buy popularity easily, but converting popularity into money is hard work at least. I'd even say that turning fame into significant wealth is an art only few have truly mastered.
And if you can't buy popularity you can always buy a really high wall.
> With money you can always buy popularity easily
I don’t know if Elon Musk is an example or a counter-example. Maybe both?
What he can’t buy is being at peace and content with the popularity he already has
Well he was doing a good job at buying popularity until he fired his PR team so..
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.
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.
> It's well known that among the group that I would call "pro-America technologists"
You should start calling them “pro-India technologists”
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Yes this is what people like you do, go around calling everyone nazis and making up hitler salutes.
https://www.wired.com/story/neo-nazis-love-elon-musk-nazi-li...
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
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It's effective for buying popularity with a crowd that likes nazi salutes.
It’s certainly a good way to get people like you to talk about him.
> The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
Many physicists between 1859 and 1915ish talked about how Newtonian mechanics was incorrect because it could not explain the perihelion precession of Mercury [1]. No one had any idea what the better system would be, till Einstein developed the theory of general relativity ~1915.
Why would not point out what is wrong with the current system?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...
> 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?
You would really have to ask a person to know that.
The open internet, open-source software, and federated protocols allow people to manage their own affairs without any experts in the state. You may have to pay a capitalist firm for access to the internet to run your Mastodon server, but you don't have to run the server itself as a capitalist activity. Open-source software and money are two alternative ways to collaborate successfully with people you don't trust.
Just remember Marx created Capitalism as a strawman to argue against. Marx of course couldn't tell people the classical liberal ideas (not to be confused with what we call liberal today) of freedom were bad things - they would not like being told freedom is bad. So he found something he could push to 11 and argue against that.
He defined what "capitalism" meant, did he not? Just using the word isn't some fringe rhetoric, it's mainstream economics. Neither is categorizing ideologies after they happened - of course new ideologies would frame themselves in the noblest ways possible, so we need unrelated people as a second opinion to put their ideas into concrete terms. Insisting that we must call it "freedom" or even "classical liberal freedom" is like me creating an ideology that professes "universal happiness and free prosperity of wonder" and then insisting that everyone must call it that, regardless of what the ideology entails and whether it results in universal happiness or not.
sure he defined it. However what he defined is not what anything is based on or is so it isn't nearly as useful a term as supporters like to think.
clasical liberalism is a lot more complex than what he defined, and that is the system most of us live in. Calling it capitalism is wrong, as is thinking ecconomics based on that term matters much in the real world
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This is not an acceptable comment on HN, no matter what nationality you're talking about. Drive-by snark is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972558 and marked it off topic.
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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>
I guess I love the idea of the rails community being owned by the community not an individual. I find some of his stances on topics problematic (e.g the latest posting about London). Regarding rails itself I have no major issues, but, as titular head of rails itself I think he should be more inclusive.
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What does that mean?
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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!
So, was he wrong implementing it?
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.
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.
It highly depends on an instance you join and a people you follow.
I never see that on the php instance.
this was on the math instance
It's the people you follow and perhaps your Mastodon instance. I suggest setting one up on your own.
No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.
If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.
Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.
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It seems like strixhalo is a pipe-cleaner part of sorts and the real deal may have to be Medusa Halo. That one could be a monster. The bad news is that it sounds like it's a long way off (2027 sometime) so who knows what Apple M5 or M6 Max could look like by then for competition.
Did you perhaps intend to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968611
i think this is on the wrong thread