Updates from the Mastodon team
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
Mastodon 2.0
About 6 months have passed since April, during which the major mainstream breakthrough of our decentralized social network took place. From 20,000 users to almost a million! What better time to run through a couple examples of what’s been introduced since then? Mastodon is defined by its focus on good user experience, polished design and superior anti-abuse tools. In that vein, the web app has received numerous updates. Using the latest browser features, the web app receives real push notifications, making it almost indistinguishable from a native mobile app.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
Mastodon and the W3C
Mastodon is a free, open-source federated social network spanning over 800,000 users spread across more than 2,000 servers. Mastodon v1.6 is here, and it is the first Mastodon release which fully implements the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is a new federated messaging protocol developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims to fix the shortcomings of past standards like OStatus. Mastodon is one of the first platforms, and certainly the first major platform to implement this new standard and prove it in the wild.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
M for Mastodon
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network with over 760,000 users. You can check it out here. The Mastodon project is finally well-represented visually. I always felt like the previous logo did not do it justice. To its credit, it was both an M, and 3 sideways speech bubbles, but it did not scale well and overall it was just a circle.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
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
Scaling Mastodon
My instance mastodon.social has recently surpassed 43,000 users. I have closed registrations both to have more time to investigate the infrastructure and ensure a good experience for existing users, and to encourage more decentralization in the network (with a wonderful effect — the Mastodon fediverse now hosts over 161,000 people spread out over more than 500 independent instances!) But providing a smooth and swift service to 43,000 users takes some doing, and as some of the other instances are approaching large sizes themselves, it is a good time to share the tips & tricks I learned from doing it.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
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
Learning from Twitter’s mistakes
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 22,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here. Very early on in the development of Mastodon I’ve decided that centralization and unexpected algorithmic changes were not the only one of Twitter’s problems. Harrassment and tools to deal with it have always been lacking on Twitter’s end.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder
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