Mastodon

Updates from the Mastodon team

Op-Ed

Twitter is not a public utility

Isn’t it a bit strange that the entire world has to wait on the CEO of Twitter to come around on what constitutes healthy discourse? I am not talking about it being too little, too late. Rather, my issue is with “instant, public, global messaging and conversation” being entirely dependent on one single privately held company’s whims. Perhaps they want to go in the right direction right now for once, but who’s to say how their opinion changes in the future?

Eugen Rochko

CEO / Founder

Op-Ed

The Centralization of Power on the Internet

The online space is dominated by a small handful of companies that command a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the entire online experience, not just social media. So much influence that several of these companies have fundamentally altered many aspects of life offline; often described with the floral language of the privileged as ‘disruptive,’ but more clearly understood in the common tongue as ‘destructive.’’ The five most valuable companies at the end of 2017 were, in order: Apple, Alphabet (the company that owns Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

Tremaine Friske

Guest

Op-Ed

This Isn’t About Social Media. This is About Control.

Human beings, above all else, are storytellers. It’s how we relate to our own past, or personalities, or each other. It’s how to connect with the world around us, make sense of events, and assess values. We rely on stories to function as agents in the world. These stories are often told in-person: “oh, I did this today, I felt like this, then this happened and I was like ‘whoa no way!

Tremaine Friske

Guest

Op-Ed

April post-mortem

This is an update for my Patreon supporters. It is posted on Medium because of its superiour formatting capabilities. So, April, huh. A lot happened. I was putting off writing an update on here because I knew I had to go into detail on all the things that happened, and that’s quite a daunting task. Before I dive into things, a couple short notices: The way I work with the GitHub repository has changed.

Eugen Rochko

CEO / Founder

Op-Ed

Two reasons why organizations should switch to self-hosting social media

My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 23,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here. If your organization is hosting a Mastodon instance, it is essentially a self-perpetuating brand awareness campaign. When people from other instances talk to or follow your users, they see your domain name all the time, since it is part of their globally unique usernames.

Eugen Rochko

CEO / Founder

Op-Ed

The power to build communities

Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto might be well-spirited, but one thing in it is fundamentally wrong: In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us. Facebook isn’t, and can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything. Facebook doesn’t even have the pretense of a non-profit like Wikipedia or Mozilla; there is no doubt about the company’s main focus — extracting as much as possible from you — by analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money.

Eugen Rochko

CEO / Founder