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.
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.
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.
You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.
€60k
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?
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.
Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of… other social media founders.
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.
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.
Is this actually true? The UIs don’t seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon’s design that’s bad?
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
I think the lack of quote tweets is a feature and not a bug. They facilitate a lot of antisocial behavior on other microblogging sites as I recall.
