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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

This is an indescribably devastating loss for a project that, whatever its imperfections, can fairly lay claim to the most intellectually consistent and sincere adherence to FOSS, privacy, and decentralization of any major social media project. Eugene has proven a spectacular and indispensable developer, and I don't know that Mastodon has the ability to move on without him. I want to praise Eugen but the uncomfortable truth is I think Mastodon as a project may not recover from losing him. Though I hope to be proven wrong.

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He's stepping down as CEO. He'll still contribute. Most gifted technical people are not strong organizational leaders so it's mature to recognize your own limits and find someone else who can fill that role.

I think Mastodon will survive. Other fedi projects (eg. Pleroma-fe) have been through all nine circles of FOSS hell and somehow still ship usable builds to a sizable community.

Eugen's presence is felt and appreciated in the community, but I can also understand why he stepped down. It's hard to represent so many people who don't always agree with you. I think back to Jack Dorsey's final days at Twitter with the NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers - he truly did not understand that his leadership had passed it's prime. The honorable thing for him to do was pass on control to someone responsible, but instead he spent his final days polarizing Twitter and guaranteeing it's own critical insolvency.

Eugen took the honorable route - I hope he remains vocal and influential in the community. It sounds like he knows himself extremely well and I applaud his honesty about the temptation for ego to ruin big projects. Most of us can't imagine the pressure in his shoes.

Even Stallman signed up. Let that sink in.

I met Stallman once when he was pamphleting outside a beloved book store because they were using meetup to organize a book signing. The guy is consistent.

I used to make so much fun of RMS in the late 90s. Then I met him and my entire view on that man changed. He absolutely is doing the world a favor and it would benefit everyone to think long and hard what a world would be like without GNU today

He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.

A few years ago there were some "personalities" that very much agitated against Stallman. Without generalizing too much it is these people you probably should keep a very, very large distance to. Toxic is likely an understatement.

An easy position to take when you have assurances that dissenting voices in this thread will have their rebuttals censored.

Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.

You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.

If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.

I do think this belongs on HN as a topic. This isn't a character assassination since I didn't name anyone. Quite the contrary, the character assassination was directed against Stallman and it was based on toxic slender and rumors and it even lead to consequences. If someone does feel addressed by my comment, I welcome that of course and perhaps it will lead to some self-reflection because I want to underline that it is strong criticism.

The problem comes when his principals turn out to have blind spots.

I feel like the refusal to close the network hole in the GPLv3 is a significant blind spot of his, and is a decision that has aged incredibly poorly in the age of cloud services.

It was one of his assistants that signed him up. Pedantic but he himself has never actually used it

Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:

> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]

The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I happen to be inclined to agree with what the post says. First it leads with a similing mastodon with hearts. Later on it says "I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity." I'm sad about part of the reason why he decided to transition away from being CEO, not that he's decided to transition away from being CEO, and I'm optimistic about Mastodon.

Eugen*

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