Updates from the Mastodon team
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. Now, after months of planning and weeks of back and forth with the designer, we have a distinct shape and a distinct font.
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. I no longer work directly on the master branch. I (and other volunteers) work on feature branches. Something can only be merged into the master branch through a pull request that receives a review and approval from at least one trusted contributor. This means that the master branch is a lot more stable, and there is a lot more accountability for who does what and when. However, the master branch is still not a stable enough medium for the (literally) thousands of Mastodon instances running in production. Therefore, we now do actual releases — v1.1, v1.2, v1.2.2 etc. The releases now contain detailed changelogs, linking back to the pull requests in which the changes were made, with a list of all contributors for the release at the bottom. This replaces the changelogs I was publishing on this blog.
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. It’s like those sticker ads on cars, except you don’t have to pay for them and it doesn’t disturb anyone because you’re providing a service.
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. I reached out to people who have been affected by it to collect ideas. Here is what I gathered:
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. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching.
Eugen Rochko
CEO / Founder