Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
blog.joinmastodon.org
blog.joinmastodon.org
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
This. It's also not email - it's not vital that I catch every toot from everyone I follow. It's an entertaining list of posts that I can dip into when I have five minutes spare.
I love the no-algo thing. I love that I'm not being manipulated for maximum attention. This makes it actually practical for me to use because I don't get hooked into it for hours.
It's like the internet used to be :)
How is that a feature? It would be entirely unnecessary with a feed mixer.
Rather than have an algorithm and trying to hide any problems, Mastodon puts the problems front and centre. You are forced to deal with them. It makes you spend a little bit of time controlling your feed's hygiene and in return you end up with a feed that only contains useful content.
It's like the eating healthy alternative to doomscrolling.
It also has another interesting side effect. Not having an algorithm that concentrates on popularity means that the low effort content problem tends to evaporate away. Attention seekers aren't rewarded for spamming or rage baiting, since they lose followers every time they try.
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.
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.
I once had access to the Twitter Firehose.
It was, as you say, a mindbogglingly tremendous waste of resources.
Client side Algo cannot be implemented because the API does not give you enough controls (I know, I have written Mastodon clients)
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.
Lists group profiles, and I tend to have 2--4 of these, mostly organised by priority / interest, and explicitly NOT organised topically. Roughly, there's A, B, C, and maybe D. This is a system I'd come up with at Google+ and Diaspora*, and find it fits Mastodon pretty well.
I try to keep A limited to 20---40 people / accounts of greatest interest. That evolves over time, in part as people join or leave Mastodon, or as my own interests / frustrations shift.
B are still generally interesting but not as interesting. C and D are filled as I find profiles really aren't bringing me joy in A or B.
Mastodon lets you pin threads (in the traditional/power-user view), so I'll usually have 1--3 of my lists pinned to the display, unpinning as I find them distracting.
Other options are to use filters, to focus on your own instance's local users (if that's sufficiently topical), or to use various group systems (Guppe is the principle tool I use, there are others: <https://a.gup.pe/>).
Note that for topical filtering you're far better off using either keyword filters or group/community systems such as Guppe. As was learnt many times over at Google+ (and its Circles feature), people don't know how you've classified them, and may have little interest in accommodating your ontologies. (People yelling at others for not conforming to how the yeller had organised the others got to be a rather amusing if cringe trope on G+, that site's equivalent of "you're holding it wrong".)
Other tools include limiting reshares by people or within lists, and of course, muting and blocking profiles. I'm of the block early and often school.
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
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
Relays can also easily mitigate the issue you describe, as can an algo provider that simply boost all entries it puts in your feed.
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.
Those run by people who launched them because they keep getting kicked off decently moderated instances...
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.
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.
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 can be drawn up that governs how to boost or penalize toots' visibility based on keywords, author or instance, based on an updated list is viable today amd can run entirely on the user's device. Web-based clients are more complex, and require patching the standard Masto server or running in a sidecar.
> Most newcomers will simply give up when faced with the choice.
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?
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.
It's like trying to sell Blackberrys in 2025.
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.
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?
in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.
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.
Yes, on a cooperating outbound server. If it disappears, your handle is permanently gone, with no way for you to put up a redirect.
Contrast this with DNS-based handles on Bluesky, for example. All I need to do to change hosting providers there is changing a TXT record.
> I'd rather have a reddit [...] style moderation
Sure, that model works well in some situations, but why unnecessarily tangle content moderation with content and handle hosting?
Mastodon has a similar external identity pointer feature. It uses a html tag on the page the A record points to (which IMHO is better since we don't want anyone with just enough information to be dangerous to break their own DNS).
But the html tag is used to verify an account as the authentic account, not to handle redirects from one account to another.
Personally, I'm not sure I'm a fan of using an external identifier to also handle redirects...
If a social media handle gets hacked, you can put a notice on your website saying "Don't trust any account except this one: <link to your new account>", and by the same token: if your website gets hacked, you can put a note on your social media.
But with the external identifier controlling redirects, if your website gets hacked (or nameserver with the dns method), then both your website and social media are compromised at the same time.
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.
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.
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?
The benefit is that you don't need to enable arbitrary code execution in your browser. A variety of benefits flow from that; static pages, almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls, smaller attack surface etc.
I'm not sure I agree that it's a static page if there's a web extension running JS involved in the page render. I guess it's a grey area.
> almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls
We're talking about Mastodon, right? I thought it would not have those.
> smaller attack surface
This one I'll give you, but what kind of attacks would you expect from a Mastodon instance?
If all of this is a big enough issue to make you disable JS in the browser, wouldn't it be reasonable to whitelist Mastodon instances that you use?
> static pages
As in it won't change after you load the page.
> almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls
Indeed, haven't seen these with mastodon instances, but you never know when that will start happening.
> smaller attack surface
The instance could have been hacked, or you could have angered the admin, or you could have angered some other user who knows of a vulnerability they could leverage to send you custom JS.
The JavaScript sent by Mastodon is obfuscated, so it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to audit it and mark it as safe. You could YOLO and allowlist an JS from trusted instances of course, but that opens you up to the scenarios above.
That's not what static means in the context of web development. It means that the html is delivered from the server in a static form and doesn't need to be changed in any way to be displayed.
> The JavaScript sent by Mastodon is obfuscated, so it isn't reasonable to expect to be able to audit it and mark it as safe
This is what file hashes are for. But agreed, you do need to trust the upstream file provider. I had assumed that a federated system like Mastodon had considered this already and had a way of confirming js hashes to ensure against rogue nodes. Is that not the case? If so it seems like an oversight.
But anyways, thanks for replying to me. I asked because, as a web developer, I'm always curious about why people disable JS. I have yet to be convinced of any valid reasons for most people to do it, but I can understand that some people have stronger security concerns. For those people though, it always feels like it would make more sense to spin up a VM and browse inside there with all the unsafe JS, rather than enduring a daily struggle through a litany of websites that don't work properly.
File hashes only indicate the file and or hash weren't modified in transit, you can't know which party created the hash, and whether to trust that party, since they aren't authenticated from developer to browser, only from the server to the browser. Even if there were end-to-end authentication and there were a web of trust that could be used for authenticating developer keys, you can't trust code without auditing it, and you can't audit JS on most sites, because it is almost always minified/obfuscated or huge.
I expect it is unlikely Mastodon would care about JS hashes, because they are delivered by the instances rather than a CDN, and each instance can run a different version of the code, and each instance can modify the code as they please.
As above, many/most sites work fine, or much better without JS. The ones that don't can be dealt with using external tools like yt-dlp gallery-dl zygolophodon etc.
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).
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.
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.
Correct, this is underway, and we're looking in to the right option for the organisation. As of right now, we have options, but the new entity is not finalised so it is not possible to spell out the format yet.
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.
It's simply not that relevant. It's not that strange.
Benefit corporation is a form of legal corporation in the USA that allows for other duties than maximizing shareholder value.
Rather they're incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation.