2w ago

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

arstechnica.com Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

Mastodon shifts to nonprofit ownership, calls for $5M in donations to expand.

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.

Technology @lemmy.zip

Universal Monk @lemm.ee

2w ago

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

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Technology @beehaw.org

riot @beehaw.org

2w ago

Mastodon’s founder cedes control to non-profit

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

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218 comments

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.
  
  I think Mastodon changed their mind about it due to user feedback, and "Quote Posts" is on the current Mastodon roadmap. Not sure when it will be added - maybe sometime in 2025?
  https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
  
  Oh dang. I'm sure users wanted it, but it's too effective as a mobbing tool. I don't think it'll help the protocol.
  
  I think they decided on an opt in feature.
  
  If you block somebody that quote posts you on Bluesky, their quote post no longer has your post in it or anything pointing to you. You also can straight up delete people's replies to your posts there. Hopefully Masto's iteration on QRTs works similarly, though people always have the option to "screenshot dunk" instead.
  
  Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out..
  But also I don't really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is "nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to".
  
  That part I understand, but how can I get those first followers? And if I am just going to join the flagship instance, why wouldn’t I just join bluesky since it has more users.
  Just trying to give a reason why people might shun mastodon for blue sky, this isn’t supposed to be a real argument against Mastodon. I’m on it and love it
  
  Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you'll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.
  I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won't see that for another couple of years... Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.
  
  Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you'll get followers.
  That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?
  And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn't going to pan out.
  At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don't necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon's user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.
  
  You don't have to promote yourself or be fake at all. If you reply to people and they like things you say, they or others who read it may follow you. Often if you follow someone they'll follow you back--but that most likely depends on you having put some info about yourself in your profile so they can get an idea of who they would be following, and even more likely if you've interacted with them before.
  Since there's no algorithm, hashtags are big on Mastodon. By subscribing to some you'll find people to follow and interact with. Also, a common way for people to find and follow you is to write an introduction post and pin it--include the 'introduction' hashtag plus hashtags of your interests. That way when people search for hashtags they're interested in, they'll find your intro post and may follow you. And whenever you post about something you want to have more reach, put a relevant hashtag or two at the end of it.
  
  So if you set up on small server A, and want to be discoverable by users on server B, C, D, and E, you have to do this for many different users and hope that they follow you back just so that those servers' users can find you.
  And it basically defeats the main use case for where I actually understand microblogging, which is one-way announcements by semi-automated accounts that are widely followed that do not actually follow anyone else back.
  It just sounds like a bad arrangement for discoverability and search.
  hashtags are big on Mastodon
  But I can't view the posts of any users by hashtag if those users aren't already being followed by someone from my server, right? That means I'd never want to join a small server if I'm just a lurker who doesn't really want to actively interact with others, because my own feed would be limited.
  there's no algorithm
  Sounds like an algorithm that's just more complicated and has unintuitive human inputs in it.
  
  I think you're making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.
  Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they'll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It's not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a "please boost and follow for federation" post to get them kick started.
  But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.
  
  An app I use for Mastodon (Called Mona) allows quote toots.
  
  Thats a good example of the UX issues, when only 1 specific app supports a feature.
  
  Apparently it’s either become or will become a Mastodon feature.
  
  That is called freedom of choice, apparently people are used to totalitarian system where everything should look the same and perfect for masses.
  
  I agree but that isn’t gonna help normies get onboard at all. If we ever realize the semantic web then those different features will be amazing. Right now it’s confusing because the other apps can’t understand the data.
  
  Yes, but it also makes the experience worse for people that aren't invested in the ecosystem because of privacy or similar reasons.
  If I'm using an app that allows quotes, but my friend isn't and wants to quote a post, they're going to be annoyed.
  
  Bluesky literally allows people to finetune controls on things like allowing quote posts and replies. Thats way more freedom that the average social media platform gives to a user.
  
  As someone who had never used corporate social media like FB and Twitter (for my own reasons), when I found out about Mastodon back in 2017-18, I decided to join it because of its philosophy and it not being a corporate-owned walled garden. It has its flaws of course. But since I didn't have any preconceptions, I mostly liked Mastodon as it was and didn't find it confusing at all. That's probably because I read up on Mastodon first to decide whether I'd want to try it, so I knew what to expect.
  So I can understand how people who had been using Twitter and had their expectations shaped by it would assume that Mastodon was just a Twitter clone, not having learned anything about it beforehand. That's why they were confused and disappointed to find that it was its own thing with its own philosophy, and had existing communities aligned with that philosophy.
  Some (not all) of those who saw the differences as flaws, complained that Mastodon was crap for not having certain Twitter features, and some (not all) existing communities didn't take kindly to demands that Mastodon abandon its philosophy and transform itself into a Twitter clone, so there were conflicts as well, and those new people didn't stick around.
  OTOH, many other new people found that they liked the different philosophy and those people did stick around, so Mastodon has grown. But IMO since most people like the Twitter-style algorithms and "broadcast/consume" culture (as opposed to Mastodon's more personal interaction culture), Mastodon will always be a much smaller thing. But its existence is an important and good thing, like the quiet room away from the riotous street party, where you can hear each other speak.
  
  I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you've said.
  I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.
  
  More UX than UI. The entire on-boarding process is hard on Mastodon. Who is on there? How do we find them, etc. it’s all rather nebulous. BlueSky has been innovative with some of their ideas. Things like starter packs are simple but greatly help new users get going. It’s shocking other social networks have not thought of them.
  
  imho: UX-wise.
  a: marketing, the name Mastodon is not in common usage, at all… it’s named after a (very cool) metal band… i love it, but your avg chap will hear “mastodon” and wrinkle their nose and move on in the sea of infinite new apps that are shinier… i think this hurt Diaspora a lot as well… at the end of the day, it’s a social network and people have to actually talk about it…
  like, regular schmoe’s who don’t love new words have to drunkenly say at a bar “hey add me on ____” and bluesky is so so much better for that.
  … remember, regular sports bar types need to say it to each other… grandma’s in nursing homes need to be comfortable with it.
  “federated” is a big word and concept, but still the best word for it… after decentralized….
  ….
  b: probably bigger but Jack Dorsey is kinda touted as this super moral tech luminary, even though he quit bluesky for centralizing, he still added a lot of weight to that critical mass a social network needs to achieve to be useful at all.
  ….
  c. actual UI: trying to tag a username and instance is pretty cumbersome… on twitter or insta or most things, you can type @username and tag anyone, on lemmy it’s not as big of a deal because it’s little forums organized around posts, instead of posts organized around users… on a microblogging or friend-network thing like diaspora, it’s just not easy enough.
  like, granny in the nursing home isn’t going to type !sonnyboy@dopemastonny.federaloo.org… or get all that….
  if you don’t abstract all that away, regular users will be afraid and you’ll get mostly techies and people ideologically motivated to join….
  and of course, most of the ideologically motivated ones will take bluesky as close enough… especially because it’s gotten big enough….
  
  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.
  
  "Why can't the algo find me better content?"
  Motherfucker, it's social media. You have to get social with people. Make a fucking friend, right?
  Like, I fixed that shit by following George Takei and Mark Hamill and some reporters. The algo shouldn't be finding things for you. You should be finding people.
  Yeah, scratching my head just the same. My only problem with Mastodon is the same I had with StumbleUpon. It's way too good about putting neat people and conversations in front of me and I feel bad not rising to the occasion more when I just want to deadbrain.
  
  Following hashtags is also a great way to find content you're interested in.
  
  Apparently not nearly as many people as those who prefer Bluesky’s approach.
  Most new users want to easily see feeds related to the things they’re into and that’s objectively more difficult with Mastodon unless you already have a list of accounts to follow. I want Mastodon to succeed and grow but it won’t if it only caters to tech heads.
  
  Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I've heard that they're working on this feature.
  
  Genie's out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren't. Bluesky's were. Casuals don't care about what-ifs or principles, it's a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It'll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.
  
  I hear what you're saying and think you have a good point. It's very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.
  
  There's also just the naming problem. Social media works best when its name sounds like a place and its verbs sound like normal actions. Mastodon is a three syllable elephant (or a metal band), versus a sky or a book (note: this isn't a hard and fast rule, since Twitter and Instagram pulled it off). And they call their posts toots. Officially, too, unlike the user-made meme of "Skeets". Toots are farts. No politician or business professional is going to say "retoot" with a straight face.
  
  I don't think either of those are major issues. I happen to think that Mastodon is OK, almost catchy. Their mascot is very cute too. They officially did away with the Toot terminology quite a while ago, like a year or two, but some instances modified the code to keep that, and the old hands keep calling it that too. Also, keep in mind that I said that I fully expect Mastodon to stay a minor but viable player. It's never going to overtake a corporate behemoth like Meta, and most likely not even Twitter.
  
  This is a good point. Success isn’t a zero sum game here and maybe the era of giant social networks is changing to smaller communities again.
  
  I'm not sure I would go as far as saying that the trends are tipping toward smaller communities again, but we can hope.
  
  Bluesky has the USP of people being able to choose from multiple algorithms or even use multiple ones at the same time; and that certainly has resonated with a lot of people.
  
  That sounds pretty neat. Are all the algos developed by Bluesky (i.e., corporate/billionaire/VC-driven) though?
  
  no, but the various algorithms that control and construct these "user customized feeds" is precisely the part of bluesky that is architecturely a bottleneck, and it isn't a bug, the ceo of bluesky has gone on record that bluesky hasn't ruled out using this intentional centralization point to force ads on the system
  
  Good to know, thanks!
  
  No, anyone is able to create a "feed"
  
  Cool, thanks.
  
  That's actually a fair point. I've seen it in the UI but I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it seems like there's communities to moderate and curate and you can simply enable them to moderate your feed, if I'm understanding it right. If so, it sounds like a really good way to compartmentalize that stuff to allow users to sort it themselves.
  
  Mastodon has an early days of Twitter feel to it.
- 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.
  
  Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
  
  That and finding relevant things or anything at all sometimes; also I hear that people want to see everything like a friendica environment but don't like the differences from the social medias they know already. I'm not sure if it is all valid or relevant because I am extremely new to the fediverse in general myself.
  
  Mastodon could definitely do with some more discovery methods. Hopefully something like bluesky's starter packs get implemented eventually (but I understand why they aren't rushing it, there are abuse risks).
  Best approach for now on mastodon is to follow all the hash tags you're interested in, and then follow everyone in your feed who posts anything interesting. Takes a few weeks to ramp up, I guess. My feed got good once I was following around 1k users. You can always unfollow if someone's annoying.
  
  Thanks for the tip -- new to fediverse altogether and my most annoying challenge is the social aspect of finding people to connect with and making an interesting feed! Lemmy has been the easiest; right above friendica!
  
  Yeah, Lemmy is good because of the topic and threading focus. Mastodon seems better for exploring lots of issues. I'm finding them fairly complementary, they cover different bases.
  Still need something I can pull my IRL friends in with though. Pixelfed might work for people who are used to Instagram, but I think it's probably still a bit sparse content wise.
  
  I guess I don't understand. Why would someone want to "find" microblogs of people they don't already know about from elsewhere? It's like wanting to find someone's email to me.
  
  Not sure; I guess as a new person, I'd like to find micro blogs about topics and things that I might agree with? I was never really into twitter or micro-blogging; I don't really understand the appeal but I figure since it is a social media, you might want to find similar people with like-minded blogs or whatever? Like I found a new up-coming political streamer that I like from another. Maybe that isn't what micro-blogging is for and I'm off base.
  
  I see microblogging as a way of following the thoughts of someone you're already interested in. Maybe a friend, maybe a famous person. But it's not a way to get deeper understanding. Nothing profound has ever been conveyed in a tweet. So I don't know why I would look for the tweets of strangers. It's more of a event tracking or relationship-maintaining kind of communication tool.
  
  Fair enough, I just figured that as a social network, part of the goal is to connect new people together. You can look at Facebook in the same way you described it. That’s what its original purpose was. To just connect with people you already know, but I feel like social networking in general has since evolved from this. We can look at things like Facebook groups for example where it is more on the lines of what I’m thinking, people join groups that interest them and interact with like minded people that they have likely never met before.
  I find the idea of using hashtags as the same.
  
  Not saying I never made a friend online, but it was generally through more long-form blogging, friendsof friends, or gaming. That is, through more in-depth interaction than a quip-making machine. But I think the Internet was a little more innocent then too. People could be weird or awkward or overshare without getting doxed or harassed, maybe because we had more in our unmediated lives. Very little interaction is unmediated now it seems. I have seen even IRL friends, or people I thought were friends, start acting like online trolls. Online at least. "The medium is the message" seems to hold.
  
  I can't speak for others, but when I joined I was definitely confused by instances, federated internet, moderation variances, and how to operate the various ~ 4 beta apps I downloaded at the same time.
  I'm definitely not a tech normie, but it was still unfamiliar and I would never have migrated if I hadn't been fed up with Reddit.
  Most people don't want to have to look up guides to figure out how a system works, they just want to download an app that their friends all use and move on with their day. Blocking instances you don't like? Doing research to find a "home" instance? Ain't nobody got time for that.
  
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but how did you choose an email provider, or a phone service? How do you block spam? Those are basically identical questions, and yeah, they can be annoying, but I don't think anyone finds them that hard to comprehend.
  
  Maybe, but those questions are part of the normal daily zeitgeist. Everyone is exposed to those concepts and services through natural osmosis, but when I wanted to join Lemmy I got an app and I didn't realize until I started trying to use it that it was a distributed system. Then I'm like, wait what? And I had to go read some stuff about it. Wasn't anything too crazy but I was confused at first.
  
  It's absolutely insane to hear that a streamer, of all types of people, said there's a learning curve to it. Twitch is/was bewildering to me, just as a user, much less a streamer who would need to learn to configure and use OBS, etc. SMH.
- bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.
- 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...
- 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.
  
  Mastodon has far more features. What it doesn’t have is centralization.
  
  What features?
  
  Lots of little things that add up. Some of the better include temporary muting, hashtags, and hashtag subscriptions. Plus it is resilient with no single point of failure.
  
  I'm pretty sure Bluesky has hashtags. Subscribing to a hashtag and muting someone temporarily is nice. I think the main feature Mastadon is missing is discovery algorithms. Most people use that heavily on social media, whether they admit they value it or not.
  
  What is this, then? It’s on the front page of a Mastodon server before you log in and afterwards the discovery section with posts, hashtags, people etc. is on the search page after login. Bluesky was far harder to get a decent feed going on till people started building lists (and those are pretty flawed in that you only follow the individuals - not the list - so it doesn’t update for subscribers).
  
  Oh cool, I didn't realize they added that. I tried Mastadon a while ago and couldn't find anything interesting. I don't use any micro blogging apps.
  
  Bluesky has had a very fast development cycle and now already has features it didnt have 6 months ago. Mastodon's main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version. There are features on their github ready to be merged in for 2 years and when asked, no one on the development team was able to find out why it had not been merged.
  
  Mastodon's main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version.
  Bluesky's main problem IMO is how it is fundamentally a profit driven venture that cannot tolerate slow and steady growth and how fundamentally, no matter what anyone including the CEO says, Bluesky must and always will unflinchingly support the interests of its investors over the interest of its users, period. To really spell things out here, the continued employment of anyone at Bluesky is fundamentally predicated on their ability and desire to do this very thing.
  Bluesky is a business, after all
- Someone (probably bluesky) almost definitely spent a large sum of money on marketing/astroturfing for Bluesky
- Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
  What makes you assume Mastodon is superior as a solution for the people who are flocking to Bluesky in droves?
- Considering the people pushing bluesky are the same ones usually praising government surveillance, I don’t trust it for one second. Smells like a psyop honeypot.
  
  Can you show me an example of that? Of the people pushing Bluesky also praising government surveillance?
  
  The Washington Post published a guide encouraging and teaching users how to migrate to the platform.
  But don’t take my word for it. Jump on and look around. It’s as crowded with neoliberals as Truth Social is with Red MAGAs.
  
  Kinda depends on what you're filling your feed with. Mine is filled with naked gay men, and I'm pretty pleased with that.
  
  But do the naked gay men have an exhibition fetish, especially by government agents?
  
  Do a bunch of men who post nudes on the internet in a very public forum for free have an exhibition fetish? The world may never know...
  
  I'm just trying to extrapolate to being supportive of government surveillance, and proving that other commenter right.
  
  And I was ignoring your point since it's not as if the government is going to draw the line for surveillance at Mastodon.
  
  Oh this line of comments was serious? I thought we were making jokes.
  
  You were? Oh damn poes law got me. Oops.
- Bluesky has jack dorsey, Twitter founder, in its DNA. Dorsey cheered musk on and they call each other friends. Bluesky is not the win people want it to be, it's just a bandaid for your conscience with the same infected wound under the surface.
- You can't pry people away from their AI algorithms
- It just feels more like Classic Twitter, and I can imagine some users like that vibe, despite Mastodon perhaps having the better technicals to keep social media federated. I use both and they have their audience. There are services that allow crossposting too, so I've got a BlueSky instance out there copying my Mastodon into that feed. Just to reach out.
- You just got the answer in the headline and you answered yourself.
- Chris Titus on YouTube had a decent break down of some the technical points he liked more about it.
- At least this provides more time for mastodon to become better for even wider use. Hopefully bluesky wont go to shit too soon.
- The sad fact is that I will follow the writers and creatives where they migrate to. William Gibson moved to Bluesky so did I.
- Your u/n pretty much sums up the delivery of your comment
- Mastodon’s interface creates a self-selection bias of more technically inclined people, and is too dissimilar to twitter for the average user to want to invest time in learning it.
- Russian talking points already filtering down to the average user.
- I keep hammering this point every time this is brought up, PR and NAMES matter! BlueSky is a nice non threatening name, Mastadon is an awful name for an app. It sounds way too close to mastrubate.
  
  Lol, I guess we all make different connections, but to me "mastodon" doesn't sound like "masterbate" any more than "blue sky" sounds like "blue balls" ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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