His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
I’m not sure what the practicals of doing something like this will be, but it speaks a lot to who Eugen Rochko is.
He might also be an obtuse dick. I’ve gotten that vibe too. Still, good for him.
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uh… ok? So now it’ll be controlled by someone who DOES want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg?
No it is the opposite, this is the first paragraph in the article:
Mastodon announced Monday that it’s shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—“affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
What does ceding control even mean? Mastodon, just like Lemmy, is federated - each instance has its own governance. It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.
He can cede control of the GitHub repository, I guess, but:
- That’s giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
- The article does not even hint at the existence of source code, and the announcement itself doesn’t talk about changes in that aspect either, so I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.
I take it that you missed the whole WordPress situation that developed over the last couple of months?
It’s about control over the intellectual property (trademarks, copyright) as well as control over the company which pays the developers. One does definitely not want a single person in control of these things, otherwise they can hold the whole project hostage (like Mullenweg is accused of, in the case of WordPress).
Additionally, the change also gives them a preferable tax status than the previous arrangement.
Someone is still in charge of the git account. No matter how many commits there are being made, unless the owner of the repo approves to merge them, it’s not happening.
And sure, someone could create a fork that includes their changes if they aren’t being merged, but then this separate fork might at some point lose compatibility with the original software. And on a purely semantic note, this fork wouldn’t be the original mastodon either.
its an org, it can have multiple owners.
Noj profit does not have owners per se, but it is still controlled by somebody
I was thinking specifically about the github.
Ain’t he putting it under a non profit structure?
dunno. they were talking about git so i was assuming we were talking about git.
Once it is an organization, yes, that’s the whole point. Right now it is still an individual, that’s the point I was trying to make.
no it’s not? https://github.com/orgs/mastodon/people
unless we’re talking about different things?
That’s a virtual structure in github, not a legal construct. Those organisations have owners (minimum 2), but if they collude and go rogue, they can do quite a lot of harm. (See also https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/roles-in-an-organization).
A formally incorporated nonprofit organization has statutes, organs, supervisory boards and all that by which they must adhere, so once set up properly, the software would be fully protected from malicious intent on a legal level.
…but you were talking about the git project in the parent comment? the rest of the thread is about company structure.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.
The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.
Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.
Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of… other social media founders.
Will anyone be better than Tom?
Became everyone’s friend, became a millionaire, retired, (so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff. Kind of just a quiet dude.
The foil of Notch?
Notch was primed for that shit long before Minecraft took off. He posted early builds to 4chan, and was an active shitposter there.
The money just made him stop paying attention to anything else.
Weird man, had no idea that rupert murdock bought MySpace?
Ja der Typ.
Lmaooo. I forgot about Tom. Which shows how good of a tech founder he was. Memorable, but not in the headlines every other day.
Goals, for sure. The guy just does whatever he wants at this point. I think he’s doing photography now?
I read this as pornography, and was like I can believe that, this is the type of thing super rich bastards do. But then I googled it and realized that I got it wrong.
(so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff
People’s views typically tend to move slowly but what’s the current progressive position tends to move much faster, so if he’s young enough he’ll probably eventually fall off the progressive treadmill.
While this is a good move, I don’t think John Mastodon was making anywhere near the kind of money to turn into the next Musk or Zuck to begin with.
I read that url as blog.johnmastodon.org and for a second I was seriously wondering if that name was real lol
Not now, but in the future that was a possibility.
I mean in the future it’s a possibility I’ll be fucking Zendaya but that doesn’t mean it’s reality now does it?
Are you in a space/career where you could conceivably interact with Zendaya?
Yeah, I don’t get it. Mastodon is already huge with millions of users and hundreds of instances. Rochko is already on speaking terms with Zendaya, if you will.
mass market media can only understand the world through the lens of mass market media
The point isnt money. The point is the “benevolent dictator” model, see Matt Mullenweg and the current WordPress controversy. The whole future of that software depends on this guy because he controls the most important assets (like the trademarks) personally.
Eugen and the whole Mastodon development team want to avoid a situation like that.
He’s no Tim Apple.
Or Jennifer Facebook.
Or Lenard TikTok III.
Zhang Wei can change his name to whatever the fuck he wants he’ll still ve Zhang Wei TikTok
Please, “Mr. TikTok” was my father, call me Zhang.
We should not expect greatness from the men who create these corporations, they are not great men, they are not even good or especially intelligent men. They fell into their position by luck, the one in a million triers for whom circumstance clicked into position. The only thing that sets them apart and perhaps accounts for their success is how they are so consistently open to sycophancy and manipulation by the pack of cold and savage business graduates that flock to any form of success. When a person is against type, as seemingly is the case here, they stand out and just once in a while are capable of real greatness.
Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):
I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don’t feel remotely bad about being confused, it’s honestly pretty messy.
I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We’re not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that’s very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.
We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:
But you know, it’s really okay. It doesn’t have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That’s good enough.
I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn’t the worst thing.
One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can’t search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There’s also some sort of “invisible wall” for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don’t show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don’t know whether that’s a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.
Now I am wondering if there is a way to blast a message out to various micro blog platforms at once. Kind of like Ryan’s Woof idea from the office
Wuphf!
From my limited knowledge, you’d need one account on each instance and have all of them boosting the original post, which would make them more visible in their local instances.
You can write a script to hit the API of multiple sites.
The app openvibe does that for Mastodon and Bluesky. You have to have an account on both, though. I think they’re adding in other services eventually.
The Mastodon devs have received a grant to work on a search/visibility tool in 2025, so I definitely expect developments there
The Internet needs fewer Stalins and Hitlers and more George Washingtons.
Yeah, it’s refreshing to see someone not be an Absolute Dick™ on the internet for profit.
More slave owners it is then!
It is an imperfect system, but my comment was more about leaders not clinging to power to the detriment of society.
I was just kidding. I understand what you meant. Monkey paw wish. Lol
Fuck yeah RTJ
Micro-blogging didn’t click for me, it’s just so much less exciting than the forum format of Reddit / Lemmy :)
My issue with mastodon is it’s strayed so much from its vision. I use misskey but there is not a ton of clients for it at the moment.
Sorry I don’t really use it, what was it’s vision, and how did it stray?
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An interesting real time experiment to see how long it takes for stratification caused echo chambers and/or extremists zealots from both ends of the political spectrum to seize control of the platform. Turning the platform into a hellscape of zealots fighting each other for dominance and the eradication of all the others.
Sadly, humans as a rule need adult guidance for polite interactions to prevent violence. The sad part is it has become impossible to pick said adult capable of doing the job. And anyone in their right mind should run from such a job anyway.
His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
So uh… Mastodon will not have a moderation team?
I mean this makes sense, but how exactly is after-stopping-moderation Meta different then?
Do you think Eugen has been personally moderating all Mastodon instances up until now?
He hasn’t. Obviously the moderation system has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.
Interesting way to say you don’t understand federalisation. While using a federated platform.
Interesting way to be wrong. While thinking you’re being correct.
I think you know what they meant. “Mastodon” is not a platform, it is essentially a protocol. You cannot have a moderation team for Mastodon by design. The individual instances of Mastodon CAN have moderation and many of them do. That’s why you pick an instance to register an account under instead of going to “mastodon.com” and signing up on the front page.
The article and move isn’t about moderation of the content, it’s about development of the platform itself.
I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn’t bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.
Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.
I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn’t going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it’s totally free!
I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).
I know you have to make money…but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others…why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants…but he has the money to keep the site going…without charging people 8 bucks to get “Premium” service.
The only thing Mastodon doesn’t have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.
Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?
I am not really tech savvy
I think you’ll find that a lot of things you think aren’t for you because of that phrase are more accessible than you realize. Look at you go!
Sure! I am always learning.
I think it’s unlikely that Mastodon (or other federated short form blogging platforms e.g. Pelorama) will integrate live-streaming as it’s pretty far outside of the normal content they are built for. There is a project that does support live streaming and is federated though: Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/
I believe that since Tiktok is about to be banned - if no buyer is sought by Sunday, January 19; that a lot of people will flock to Red Note. Another Chinese-owned social media. Having said that, more and more people will start to try new alternative places. I like the idea of open source sites. I wished I have known this much sooner.
I like Odysee - an open source to Rumble - minus the ads. Unlike Rumble, you don’t have to pay to remove ads (among other features). Odysee never has ads on their platform. Which I like a lot.
I am also on Pixelfed. That site is pretty cool!
Another Chinese-owned social media.
Doesn’t that mean it’s just law enforcement noticing it exists and applying the law that bans TikTok away from also being banned?
WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.
The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.
And HTTP/2 can be used to provide video steaming, but that doesn’t mean that nginx will be the next YouTube. This isn’t a question of technical feasibility, but project focus. Though, I must admit, I don’t follow the development of fediverse software all that closely, so maybe it is on the roadmap.
yould like for it to pickup - it is a google killer app
Same here. I still try to use it once every day in support but I don’t like having such a low limit (or any limit at all, really) on how many characters I’m allowed to use for my posts or response. I am more of a macro-blogger as I tend to be very verbose; especially posting online. I do, however, think it is important to create accounts, use and donate to the project that is mastodon; as they are leading by example in this “New Social” era or movement we are all apart of. It would be a shame that something like this isn’t able to continue, let alone expand, because not enough people supported the project – even though such project is giving the people exactly what they wanted and asked for. Let’s all try to show our support behind such a bold and selfless decision.
I don’t like having such a low limit (or any limit at all, really)
Instead we should see value in opinionated software, when the alternative is software that tries to do everything for everyone.
There are different Mastodon instances with different post character limits. You could also use an ActivityPub based macroblog (like write.as / WriteFreely(?)).
Nice to know! I think lemmy has been meeting my needs pretty well, as there are no limits that I’m aware of here. What would be compelling for something like write.as and writefreely?
Right, Lemmy is very different from Mastodon, even though both use ActivityPub and can thus communicate with each other. Unfortunately, I don’t know that much about those platforms two platforms, other than that they do exist. You can find a ton of active open-source ActivityPub projects to explore on this list: https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub
Can anyone savvy to the nuance here please let me know how this is any different from Altman and ChatGPT?
As o followed along lightly, my read was that they used non-profit foundation structure to win public trust and calm initial opposition to them creating an unethical product that will ultimately destroy us all and then they fired all the people focused on ethics and codified the non-profit status.
Is this meaningfully different, or likely a similar tactic?
I am no professional but:
https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/21/openai-governance-structure-explainer/
This is what I have found about the governmance structure of OpenAI. It’s complicated but basically the working company is a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, controlled by employees and other investors, the non-profit is also controlled by a board of driectors. Also it’s all based in the US.
The Mastodon model is probably going to be a lot simpler and will probably not allow big investors to take ownership of the company. Also they are looking for a suitable country in the EU that will enforce the non-profit’s obligations to the people. Being based in the EU is in itself a huge difference, and by choice. They have not set anything in stone yet so it’s all specualtion essentialy.
Also there is the trust thing: OpenAI does not need trust from people, other AI companies are for profit too and work just fine. Mastodon is build around the fact that it is different from things like twitter. If they start doing maliciuos stuff, they will loose trust and in turn their main selling point. Also openness.
Also it is open source is it not? So any progress they have made can be used to create a competitor. Basically the whole business model is different.
Thank you, but look at the publish date on that, I think this info may be out of date at this point. Altman headlines in past year.
Also, seems his own sister is suing him for sexual assault, so that’s something to get to at some point as well I guess…
I haven’t seen their governance structure yet, but I don’t think it will ever be like Altman and OpenAI. Eugen just doesn’t have that cult of personality around him, and there’s not that much money in a free and open-source platform that doesn’t lock people in.
