I wonder if he's been watching Mullenweg and WordPress's recent drama?
I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads).
I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon.
Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this.
IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.
I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
You might have inadvertently fallen for the fallacy of composition. What to describe is only one type of algorithm; one meant to maximize engagement/revenue.
Mastodon has the potential for a user-centric "Bring your own algorithm" which may work similar block lists. Users could subscribe to algorithms matching their preferences by boosting or penalizing posts based on topics I like or don't like. This would be very valuable to me, and will reduce the need for moderation - I won't even see the random ragebait or porn spam
They don't. They are addicted to it. Imagine a world where you scroll in Instagram and you reach the end. What are you going to do?
Another problem is how opaque they tend to be; people have a mental model of how a feed should look like (not gonna describe the entirety of it, but a basic example would be "only the people I follow"), and most of the pushback tends to come from when an algorithm decides to break that mental model. (Such as for example showing you a random person you don't follow because the algorithm thinks you might like them, since someone you actually followed has engaged with their posts, to piggyback from the previous example.)
I think a really basic "no more than the X highest engagement posts from each followed user from the past 24 hours" option could do a lot as a basic heuristic to prevent people who no-life their social media from taking over the feed of someone who also wants to see what other people they follow are posting. (X can be any number but should probably go down the more people you follow.)
For a global feed, you don't need an algorithm, mostly because no amount of algorithmic curation can fix what's essentially looking into a firehose of posts - you'll probably find something you either like or conclude that it's not worth looking at to begin with.
[0]: Because anger and outrage is way easier for people to spread organically, algorithmic social media tends to overfocus on spreading it even more as that's what drives up engagement the best and that's what advertisers want. The fact that this creates a paradox where ads (that want lots of engagement) often risk ending up next to really heinous shit on those social media (what actually gets engagement) is an interesting side effect.
It's like trying to sell Blackberrys in 2025.
It seems much wiser to seed out a new post from someone to a few people's feeds, see if it gets their interest, and if so, boost it to more people that would be interested.
The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view.
Discoverability is another big one, and while I generally don't care much for algorithmically curated feeds myself, not being able to do a handle or keyword search is a dealbreaker for me.
Compared to Bluesky, which makes efforts to modularize/federate all essential components of a social network, Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.
All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server.
They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself.
> Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
I see this as a feature, not a bug.
I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes.
As opposed to:
A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.
I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok.
I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.
in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface used to just be the default.
Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
They can get that elsewhere. Mastodon will never win that battle. It's not wrong to want algorithms feeding you content, it's just that Mastodon will always be like the tenth best option for those users, and they always will be. Mastodon's advantage is with users that don't want posts written for algorithms. (I used Twitter that way for many years, but when they killed off Tweetdeck I visited less and less, to the point that I just don't often go there any longer.)
Reverse chronological can suffice if you’re spending all day looking at the timeline but algorithms can be helpful! Not all algos are engagement muck.
Of course not maliciously pushing people's buttons comes with a price and they are probably not as popular, but IMO they are as far as we can ethically go, and are well suited to the needs of the fedi dweller, i.e. 'I'm kinda bored let's see what other people in the community are talking about'
Mastodon had a minimal HTML-only interface before, you could read posts and replies of each profile.
They removed it some time ago, now you just see a blank page if you don't have JS, and I think it's a huge mistake; it was a clear albeit small advantage over mainstream social networks.
And you can add the /embed suffix to any mastodon post url, to get a javascript-free version.
But I understand its not the same as maintaining a JS-free version of their web UI. To be fair, with the little budget and little workforce they have, this was likely not high on the priority list.
It's just that I was used to read some people's feed with JS disabled, a kind of plain-HTML blog, and that stopped working suddenly, so I was a bit shocked. But it's not a tragedy.
Have you tried https://brutaldon.org?
Or perhaps you're the type of person that'd be willing to self host https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 or https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk?
Anyway I will try that site, thanks!
A good designed web app works just with plain html and minimal ressource use and than adds on top of that the get even better with css and js niceties. This used to be called progressive enhancement, if the client supports a feature, make your website better for these clients. It's just better and well rounded design with the added bonus of supporting clients with less capabilities.
https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser.
Doesn't that just move the JS from the browser into the extension? What's the benefit?
So it sounds like Mastodon was run by a non-profit, but the non-profit ran afoul of some legal issues, and they're now creating a fixed version? This seems to be administrative details, not news.
As I understand it, the new organization is supposed to be a non-profit association (e.V.), which is a distinct type of organization under German law that enforces democratic decision-making and enables people to become voting members of the NGO.
It's a bit difficult to explain as there is no analogue in most common law systems (sadly).
There are non-profit associations in the US (notably 501(c)(6) business leagues) but I don't know enough about them or about e.V. to speak about the differences.
In Germany only certain purposes qualify as "gemeinnützige" which makes the formation of non-profits at times difficult, especially in the computing space.
Maybe I didn't read careful enough. But it's actually not spelled out which form the new European non-profit is incorporated in.
Only if the current management approves. You can keep control over the club, if you wish, you just need two or three people helping you.
The CEO is stepping down. Also the copyright/ownership of the name won't be owned by the founder, but by a separate non-profit. Those 2 news are significant.
I was thinking something like Mastodon could be it: as a combination of Twitter + Discord.
They need to support create guilds and channels like Discord.
I really don't want Discord to succeed either, I want something that is fully E2E encrypted (except for guilds explicitly marked as "public", which should be able to provide the chat history to new members, and moderation tools).And something that isn't bloated as heck promoting Nitro any chance they get, to a point that it gets ridiculous.
Even the people who will tell me an how bad twitter is, are almost all still on there.
Talk and action just doesn’t go hand in hand, I can only assume they don’t care “that” much.
> Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we’re going to invest deeply in trust & safety. We want everyone, especially marginalized communities, to feel safe on our platform. We’re working on building a stronger trust & safety function—including hiring—which will contribute to new features, educate instance admins about best practices, assess community needs, and partner with organizations like IFTAS to share insights and expand the availability of resources in this critical area.
Which is bad ... why exactly? Public TV largely works.
Meanwhile, existing privately owned social media & news in the US falling into the hands of single billionaires is showing itself to have been a terrible idea. They're all kowtowing to the incoming president, and it's increasingly looking like we'll be seeing the death of the first amendment on the internet.
Sure. Committees suck sometimes. ActivityPub as a standard has been design-by-committee'd to uselessness.
But it's so much better than the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos having unilateral control over the entire platforms and (soon) gleefully clamping down on free speech because Der Führer decreed that LGBT content must be censored. (And yes, I am being facetious. But if you think that this attack on free speech won't be expanded and expanded, you're a fool.)
This organizational change seems aligned and is a good sign that there is ambition and appetite to build further, starting with solid governance.
The first chapter of the re-decentralization of the online experience is closing. Lets hope there are many more and curious what the shape of new things to come will be.
Now, I cannot give you a line-by-line account of the budget estimate that went into that number (you can look at the 2023 report https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/12/annual-report-2023/ with the 2024 report coming sometime in Q1 of this year I think, more timely anyway; and you'll see that's a big upswing / optimistic forward-looking goal); but, it is lower than some other non-profits, foundations, and other efforts elsewhere.
So by all means ask whether that number is valid, but also look around at other OSS efforts. I'd also point out that these are critical times for the future of the open social web, and we (all of us) need to sustain it.
I guess a separate question I would have is what the Foundation actually does - I need to read up more on that. To me, because of the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon is mostly a client/server piece of SW. Using Mastodon, I can interact with folks on Lemmy, Pleroma, etc and vice versa. It's not a self contained system. Anyone who disagrees with the Foundation can simply fork and pretend the Foundation doesn't exist - while interoperating with Mastodon servers.
Benefit corporation is a form of legal corporation in the USA that allows for other duties than maximizing shareholder value.
It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.
Rather they're incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation.
