I'm impressed by Eugen. Giving up full ownership is absolutely the right thing to do. But most people in this situation would become too greedy and start rationalizing why they should be in control (benevolent dictator). Hats off! Mastodon is heading in the right direction.
I have for some time considered some of his decision making and community leadership skills a bit suspect. But like you, I am impressed by this move.
I wonder if he's been watching Mullenweg and WordPress's recent drama?
Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably.
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.
> 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 tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
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 tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
It's probably the one big technical feature I like the best.
Not to say you're wrong, just that we use it differently.
I've never tried Threads (out for my disdain for Meta/FB/Zuck), but I can sort of understand why some people prefer Bluesky.
To me, Bluesy if a better alternative if you want to see (or become) "viral" things. If you secretly dream of having one of your hotcakes/zingers/memes/rants become viral and get millions of views/boosts/retweets/whatever, Mastodon isn't for you. Perhaps Bluesy is. And if you enjoy those occasional viral posts, you'll see them there and not on Mastodon (at last not without doing a lot more work curating the list of people and hashtags you follow).
I mute Mastodon posts linking to Bluesy, because I very explicitly do not want "viral content", at least not until it's been vetted and reposted by someone I've chosen to follow.
You can make lists in Mastodon, and put the noisy people there and exclude them from your main feed.
You can put all your Asian follows in a separate list as well if you want to quickly catch up with them.
No algorithm has its down sides, but I doubt they'll put in an algorithm that I'll like more than "no algorithm".
I'll add that I think algorithms should be the responsibility of the client, and not the server. The web client is merely one client. There's not much preventing any of the numerous other clients from implementing an algorithm.
The solution was always: provide several algos on top of chronological order, and let people choose.
Client side Algo cannot be implemented because the API does not give you enough controls (I know, I have written Mastodon clients)
Bluesky also has a followers feed like Mastodon. I use that one sometimes, but it's easy to toggle over to one of the algorithmic feeds as well. Sort of best of both.
Worth noting that some algorithms can be done client-side, but it may not be feasible or desirable to do so. For example in the open protocol of email, some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
Either way, I think the proliferation of sites is good for the digital ecosystem.
> some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
I once had access to the Twitter Firehose.
It was, as you say, a mindbogglingly tremendous waste of resources.
> 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?"
This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.
> Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online.
I saw this as a feature of sorts.
If anyone starts spamming my feed: instant unfollow.
Now my feed is curated towards a slow but interesting ephemerality, and not a firehose of psychological manipulation designed to keep me hooked.
> Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
Hard disagree.
Rather than following people willy-nilly, I've found I've become a lot more discerning who I allow on my feed. If I see an interesting comment / shared post / post on a hashtag I follow (e.g. #creativecoding), I'll always check their account and review their post history before choosing whether to follow them.
Twitter in its early years didn't compete against algorithmic curation.
It's like trying to sell Blackberrys in 2025.
> 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)
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
Mastodon simply cannot be that user centric because the user can only control the subset of the Fediverse that your instance is able and allowed to see. Given that single user instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks, your choice of homeserver matters more than anything. And of course, there's no good way to choose one as a new user. Most newcomers will simply give up when faced with the choice. Even with great interest I've gotten stuck at this stage multiple times, myself. No homeserver seems welcoming, and they're all a little culty.
HN looks at the federated model and thinks about how much control the homeserver operator has and imagine themselves in that position as a "user" when the truth is that each homeserver is a small fiefdom run by a dictator and users have even less control over what they see there than they do in the corporate networks
> the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks
Bring your own algorithm can tackle spam (like adblocks). ActivityPub is flexible enough for Mastodon to build up references to algo-providers.
I've been frustrated by Mastodons slow movement on this, I considered approaching the popular clients to implement this. After all, ad-blockers run entirely on the client. A basic standard to boost or penalize toots' visibility based on keywords, author or instance based on an updated list is viable today.
I used a single user instance, and it's perfectly viable. If anything it's less hassle with respect to blocks.
Relays can also easily mitigate the issue you describe, as can an algo provider that simply boost all entries it puts in your feed.
I also run a single-user instance, and it's fine. Maybe I'm not prolific enough or marginalized enough to attract much attention, but I've only had to block one person in 2 years.
> no good way to choose one as a new user.
I agree, lots of things I have just never gotten around to because I had do chose something, choice can sometimes be a bad thing.
>Given that single user instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse
Yeah, that's nonsense. I've been running my own single-user instance since 2018 and server blocks by other instance administrators have never caused any problems for my use of the Fediverse.
I also follow a bunch of other people who run their own and never see any comments suggesting it's a problem for them either.
My gut feel is that it's true for a specific subset of single user instances.
Those run by people who launched them because they keep getting kicked off decently moderated instances...
I use both Mastodon and Bluesky.
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).
> I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them
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?
Not too long ago IG removed the notice that would appear that "you're all caught up" when you had scrolled down to the end of the posts of those you follow; now it just continues to show you "algorithmically suggested posts" so you can't even tell
"Addicted" is negative value. Back when Facebook was not a never-ending feed, people would reach the end and go do something productive instead of spending all night on it.
I've said this for a while too. People got mad when their chronological feeds disappeared, and I think it should be kept around as a separate view you can pop into (and this does exist on twitter), but people follow so many accounts, and those accounts post so much, chances are when you go into the chronological feed, you won't see anything that really interests you. That's my experience any time I go into the Following tab on twitter.
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.
When did Twitter hit it's viral growth curve? And what was the user count before and after? To be clear, it's not necessarily the case that a platform needs to optimize for growth, but I wonder what can be expected without the sticky features that "addict" the most users to a given platform.
There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all.
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.
My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a level of control of it for myself.
What is functionally different from these tools other than the protocol providing a firehose of posts and APIs to filter it for people to make custom feeds?
> lack of algorithmic curation,
in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
> the UX has improved considerably.
Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
Yeah.
Thanks; that does seem to be the case, and (as someone afflicted by astigmatic halation) I will no longer avoid following Mastodon links.
Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.
How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.
Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
I had the same experience as you. But now, if you go to preferences, there's an option to disable "advanced web interface". If you uncheck that, you get the simpler view.
Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface used to just be the default.
> lack of algorithmic curation
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.)
Bluesky has the best of both worlds: reverse chronological primarily, and then rich alternatives for all sorts of content. Some are analogous to lists on Mastodon (though seem much more heavily used on Bluesky to me) and others more advanced.
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.
I'm not very optimistic about the technical direction of Mastodon.
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.
You can still get every user access through RSS
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.
I understand!
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.
The /embed thing stopped working recently.
The hilarious dichotomy of HN - this post says UX is going wrong because of JS requirements and HTML only was better, while the one below (currently this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682927) says UX is getting better.
I know right, almost like an internet forum or something
It's a legitimate point - the criticism carries more weight if its part of a unified collective consensus (e.g. the Unity fees debacle) than if it's a bunch of all-over-the-map criticisms that all contradict each other (Gamergate). Seems straightforward enough to me.
The latter can be especially important to observe because sometimes people are just full of it and it's all just a bunch of vibes, where people agree something is wrong, but they can't settle on a coherent idea. In those cases that phenomenon is often the most important thing to understand. I would go so far as to say vibes based psuedo-consensus is one of the most common things manufactured by internet mobs.
I mean, yeah. I read opinions I sharply disagree with all the time on this forum. If I didn't I probably wouldn't post here. ( Because contradicting opinions enrich my own, not because "someone's wrong on the internet again").
I actually love the official web client. So much that I never open Tusky (or Elk).
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?
I also loved the HTML interface, I hate having to temporarily enable JS on a bunch of weird domains just to read threads. But I also hosted a node for many years and realize how heavy it is to render stuff server side. So the decision is clearly to make it less resource hungry for selfhosters.
And even with JS enabled, it now needs more network round-trips, which is noticeably slower, even with a very low-latency connection to the server. For example, loading https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/ takes 1.2s to display the posts (or 3.3s when logged in), with a warm cache and 5ms ping to mastodon.social.
A truly overwhelming majority of users browse with JS enabled. Designing or even considering those who don't is (in the most literal way possible) a waste of time.
> ownership moves to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere in Europe, with the exact location still to be finalized. The organization is currently headquartered in Germany, where it was a nonprofit until its charitable status was stripped last year.
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.
The difference is that the previous non-profit was a not-for-profit corporation (gGmbh). This legal form is roughly analogous to most US non-profits (501(c)3 Inc.) and meant that as founder, Eugen Rochko still had more or less full control over the organization.
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).
It seems they lost the first game in the gGmbH (gemeinnützige GmbH, thus "charitable Ltd") leading to a normal GmbH (similar to a Ltd.).
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.
The Open Home Foundation (Home Assistant, ESPHome, etc) is a similar contemporary example. It's organized as a Stiftung in Switzerland, which as I understand it is somewhat analogous to a US 501(c)(3) private foundation, in so far as it is an independent legal entity that can't solicit donations directly from the public and isn't necessarily run democratically like an e.V.
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.
> enables people to become voting members of the NGO.
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.
> This seems to be administrative details, not news.
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.
Well Rochko is stepping down as CEO as part of the restructuring, which is a fairly big development.
I was hoping to see something like this in light of the WordPress situation and the lack of independence in the non-profit.
It's usually bad news when implementing control by commitee to a mass medium. Like what happens with publicly-owned TV
Control of the Mastodon software isn't control of the Fediverse.
From the announcement:
> 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.
Mastodon has a good track record so I'm going to give them some benefit of the doubt.
> Like what happens with publicly-owned TV
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.)
Strangely, the story fails to mention Bluesky, which is already owned by a B Corp. (public benefit corporation) and is Mastodon's real competition.
Is B Corp a real thing? It's not equivalent to non-profit and they can always stop being B Corps. Wikipedia lists Nestle Nespresso as a B Corp example, not very inspiring.
B Corp is a certification stamp that companies can buy from the B Corp non-profit. It has no legal ramifications. It's like UTZ, FSC and Fairtrade.
Benefit corporation is a form of legal corporation in the USA that allows for other duties than maximizing shareholder value.
It's a story about a different company and being a public benefit corporation is different than being a non-profit.
It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.
Bluesky isn't a B Corp as far as I can tell (certified by B Lab).
Rather they're incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation.
This is correct. But a public benefit corporation is still for profit. And the "benefit" is very vaguely defined. It might be defined in their charter, but the only people who can hold them responsible to it are the investors. And as we know, most of the investors are VCs... So...
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698196, where the article is different.)
Curious: Do they really need 5 million Euro?
As I posted elsewhere when this was asked yesterday: "there’s a big difference between running a service on volunteers, and having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an infrastructure spend. There’s also an amount of legal work involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements we’re looking at."
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.
Thanks for the 2023 breakdown. That's really what I was asking for (an unpopular question, apparently). Clearly, the amount being asked is a lot more than the 2023 expenses (by about 10x), but comparing with 2024 would give a better idea.
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.
Yes. Software gets good because of investment, both money and time. I want to see Mastodon improve and succeed.