this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025

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

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/technology

210 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn't bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.

Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.

I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn't going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it's totally free!

I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).

I know you have to make money....but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others...why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants...but he has the money to keep the site going...without charging people 8 bucks to get "Premium" service.

The only thing Mastodon doesn't have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.

Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

I think it's unlikely that Mastodon (or other federated short form blogging platforms e.g. Pelorama) will integrate live-streaming as it's pretty far outside of the normal content they are built for. There is a project that does support live streaming and is federated though: Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 hours ago

I'm amazed, he actually stopped corruption before it started

[–] Snapz 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Can anyone savvy to the nuance here please let me know how this is any different from Altman and ChatGPT?

As o followed along lightly, my read was that they used non-profit foundation structure to win public trust and calm initial opposition to them creating an unethical product that will ultimately destroy us all and then they fired all the people focused on ethics and codified the non-profit status.

Is this meaningfully different, or likely a similar tactic?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I haven't seen their governance structure yet, but I don't think it will ever be like Altman and OpenAI. Eugen just doesn't have that cult of personality around him, and there's not that much money in a free and open-source platform that doesn't lock people in.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what the practicals of doing something like this will be, but it speaks a lot to who Eugen Rochko is.

He might also be an obtuse dick. I've gotten that vibe too. Still, good for him.

[–] PriorityMotif 1 points 17 minutes ago

Good people are allowed to get annoyed when there's a ton of people complaining about non issues. From what I've heard Mastodon users are somewhat insufferable.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of... other social media founders.

[–] turmacar 47 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

Will anyone be better than Tom?

Became everyone's friend, became a millionaire, retired, (so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff. Kind of just a quiet dude.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Tom Anderson?

[–] Snapz 1 points 7 hours ago

Weird man, had no idea that rupert murdock bought MySpace?

[–] turmacar 1 points 7 hours ago

Ja der Typ.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

Lmaooo. I forgot about Tom. Which shows how good of a tech founder he was. Memorable, but not in the headlines every other day.

[–] ilinamorato 9 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Goals, for sure. The guy just does whatever he wants at this point. I think he's doing photography now?

[–] Test_Tickles 5 points 10 hours ago

I read this as pornography, and was like I can believe that, this is the type of thing super rich bastards do. But then I googled it and realized that I got it wrong.

[–] amon 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The foil of Notch?

[–] chaogomu 6 points 13 hours ago

Notch was primed for that shit long before Minecraft took off. He posted early builds to 4chan, and was an active shitposter there.

The money just made him stop paying attention to anything else.

[–] ysjet -1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

uh... ok? So now it'll be controlled by someone who DOES want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg?

[–] Kuma 8 points 5 hours ago

No it is the opposite, this is the first paragraph in the article:

Mastodon announced Monday that it's shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—"affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual."

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