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I’d encourage people to read the article, because it’s pretty no-nonsense and has some other interesting details and background information. It’s not very long, either!
But here’s the important part that the headline speaks of:
Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.
It also differentiates it from Bluesky. It was just Twitter’s endeavor to spearhead decentralization, just like Threads. Jay Graber has Bluesky’s users by the balls and at their whims just like Musk has Twitter. Anything proprietary and for profit will always eventually enshittify. Threads was born already enshittified and Bluesky is on the early part of the curve.
Nothing of substance to add, but for the record Jay Graber is a woman
It isn’t proprietary though. You can run your own instance. Not decentralised atm but nothing indicating they aren’t pushing towards that.
It is proprietary, only the Authenticated Transfer protocol is open. Thus far saying it is decentralized is a controversial topic, depends on the definition of dencentralization. A regular user can only hope to host a Personal Data Server, without any real or consequential power over the network, though. Relays are not practical to be hosted by anyone but huge companies. And even then, the content and data is still under absolute power of Bluesky.
For example, if a Mastodon server decides to censor something and you don’t agree with said decision, you can change servers and still access the content and participate on the Activity Pub stream. But, if BlueSky decides to censor you or someone else, you are out of luck. Even if you host you own server, the canonical repository of the network activity is under absolute power of BlueSky.
You could host your own AT network, but it is not clear how or even if it will be able to interact with other AT networks or the canonical BlueSky network.
Here’s some sources:
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
https://next.ink/158967/bluesky-est-il-decentralise/
https://tormentnexus.substack.com/p/is-bluesky-really-decentralized-its
In the past few months, the ownership of open-source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.
The steps taken linking Mastodon > Fediverse > Wordpress > Matt Mullenweg makes sense and is the kind of publicity/damage control the platform needs to get ahead of.
This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.
This is good news and will affect its dozens of users.
I know you meant it in jest, but I think the last I saw, it was at 9mil and growing steadily.
And TBH, that relative lack of general attention is probably a good thing. Too much growth too fast could swamp or sink some instances.
Regardless of user numbers, it seems DEAD there. I go out looking for content and can’t find anything worth sticking around for.
If you follow hashtags, and you’re a big frickin’ nerd, Mastodon actually has pretty good content.
I follow lots of cool stuff but also notice that none of that cool stuff gets any sort of interaction whatsoever. That’s because discoverability is shit. Search is broken. The only thing that gets any sort of attention is TRUSK BAD.
BSky has the right idea with user-configurable/sharable algorithms. So there are still algorithms, but you the user are entirely in control of them.
Oh, I hear you…
Filters can make it so the Mastodon feed doesn’t force you to want to walk out into traffic.
Yeah, I don’t have that problem, because I just don’t follow those sorts of accounts but popping over to the search column also coincidentally throws you into the “trending” posts and holy balls.
I tried searching my interests of hockey, guitar, and recording music. There were a few things, but not much. I don’t have the highest expectations either. I know we are in the Fediverse.
Be the change you want to see, man. I lurk on mastodon and love hockey. Surely we’re not the only ones (bit of a do as I say, not as I do moment on my part lol)
Yep. The “big frickin’ nerd” part carries my statement pretty hard.
Homelab, videogames, Linux stuff… Content for miles.
