this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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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.

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[–] Chozo@fedia.io 199 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 99 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 55 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] stinerman@midwest.social 56 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.

€60k

[–] slampisko@lemmy.world 41 points 1 week ago

I read that url as blog.johnmastodon.org and for a second I was seriously wondering if that name was real lol

[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 34 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Not now, but in the future that was a possibility.

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[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 week ago

mass market media can only understand the world through the lens of mass market media

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[–] Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 133 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I have recently been using it more to connect with others on a new subject, but now for the first time ever on the internet since early 00's, we are all owners of it ourselves. All the great new stuff was always owned by others and frankly I'm sick of it.

I never even liked twitter. Then I followed #nature and #bloomscrolling on mastodon for a while and my home feed was a feast of beautiful pics. So now there's one use for me for microblogging. Neat! Mastodon does what it says it does and even offers 'default' instances. I'd love for some GO's to help reach that donation goal quicker, so we can all get with the program and ditch corpo social media. -Why doesn't my library host it's own peertube?? #MakeLibrariesGreatAgain

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[–] sighofannoyance@lemmy.world 114 points 1 week ago (29 children)

Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?

Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on.... That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.

[–] RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 77 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Because BlueSky has designers and Mastodon is a nightmare for new users. Same reason a lot of “superior” open source apps never take off. Devs are rarely also good designers. Until we start caring about normal people it will stay that way.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Is this actually true? The UIs don't seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon's design that's bad?

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago (21 children)

Just the UX rather than the UI. It’s also missing some features like quote tweets. But it can be confusing to onboard either your own instance and know that your discoverable or to join an instance and know how discoverable you are.

Like I am a career man in IT, servers, and networking. I have no idea if I were to run my own instance, who exactly on the network would be able to see my public posts

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[–] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 week ago (17 children)

Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon's UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.

In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that's constantly bubbling content to the top, but that's a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.

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[–] rascalnikov@literature.cafe 29 points 1 week ago (17 children)

I think it is because Bluesky is simpler and easier to understand, as well as more familiar to use than mastodon. My favorite streamer said he is reluctant to move to the fediverse because of how different it is and the learning curve it has to it. I'm also, like, EXTREMELY new here and understand but once you start to get used to it, its easy to see how the fediverse and this "New Social" wave is far superior; the only hard part is getting "normies" to try it long enough to build enough familiarity to see that.

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[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 22 points 1 week ago

bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 21 points 1 week ago

Because Bluesky has a marketing budget.

"We need to get away from these billionaire-ran social media sites! Ooh, a new billionaire-ran social media site!"

Same with the people who fled reddit and set their communities up on Discord...

[–] Dragon@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

It has more features, and most people don't know why Mastadon might be better. The average person doesn't even know what a server is.

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[–] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Someone (probably bluesky) almost definitely spent a large sum of money on marketing/astroturfing for Bluesky

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[–] ToucheGoodSir@lemy.lol 66 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of... other social media founders.

[–] turmacar@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 61 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

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.

[–] Microw@lemm.ee 18 points 1 week ago

The Mastodon devs have received a grant to work on a search/visibility tool in 2025, so I definitely expect developments there

[–] Corkyskog 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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

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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 45 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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:

  1. That's giving the controls to the contributors, not the users.
  2. 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.
[–] stinerman@midwest.social 68 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.

The computer program called Mastodon was (and still is for now) completely controlled by Eugen Rochko. In the future it will be controlled by a non-profit.

See this and this for more info.

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[–] viking@infosec.pub 15 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] crossdl@leminal.space 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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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[–] TheOneAndOnly@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

152k to 1.5 milhouse is definitely an astronomical increase. Where does that number come from? For that matter...has he been funding all of this on his own up until this point?

[–] viking@infosec.pub 62 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I agree that 1.5 milhouse is quite a lot.

[–] funkless_eck 25 points 1 week ago

everything's coming up thrillho

[–] Vincente@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.

Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system

[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 28 points 1 week ago (18 children)

I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 42 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Absolutely nothing. I fully expect it to follow a similar trajectory.

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[–] billiam0202@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Bluesky is still running on VC cash. We haven't seen how they plan on monetizing it yet, but if anything that is where their major fuckup will happen.

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[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The Internet needs fewer Stalins and Hitlers and more George Washingtons.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago (1 children)

More slave owners it is then!

[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 45 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It is an imperfect system, but my comment was more about leaders not clinging to power to the detriment of society.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago

I was just kidding. I understand what you meant. Monkey paw wish. Lol

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[–] seven_phone@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago

I'm amazed, he actually stopped corruption before it started

[–] hector 15 points 1 week ago

Micro-blogging didn't click for me, it's just so much less exciting than the forum format of Reddit / Lemmy :)

[–] DocumentingReality@lemmy.cafe 14 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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?

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[–] CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The blog discussed progress on a "privacy-respecting search tool" that could be used to explore the entire Fediverse, a collection of independent social media networks that Mastodon connects to. That could make it possible to discover more content without depending on a "For You" algorithm mining user data.

Inshallah. Lack of search is my biggest gripe with Mastodon.

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