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.

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 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 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

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'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

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.

Why are you here there?

Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

The culture is fucking terrible

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. ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

So we make our own choices about where we spend our time, and some of us simply disconnect.

What do you mean?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would not tolerate otherwise.

There's a word for this: "racism".

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 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.

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 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.)

like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.

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.

that's WHY I said "with whom I shared views" and not BLACK PEOPLE GENERALLY.

so many feelings people get into.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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).

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

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…

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.

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.

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).

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.

Even if you run your own server, you just change who your "overlord" is.

This is refreshing and exemplary; especially in the light of recent wordpress, rubygems, or similar power struggle dramas.

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.

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!

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)?

https://github.com/mastodon/featured_collections

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.

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.

"Just be kind of like email" is better.

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.

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

Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.

Because both protocols can actually interface together, we had people on both side of the 2 networks talking to each other in the same thread (which is truly impressive when you think about it)

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

It 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.

$300M? Or $1.5T? Because $300B isn't tiny compared to $1.5B.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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 :/

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.

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.

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.

>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.

You mean like HN?

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.

No, this is the digital analogue of a non-verbal expression. Basic table stakes - 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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