Updates from the Mastodon team
The Mastodon Spring Creator’s Release
The development of the next version of Mastodon coincided with the reveal of Vero, yet another commercial social network silo backed by millionaires with a shady past. Vero has struck a chord, at least until people caught on to its background, and it wasn’t just because of its unlimited marketing budget. It has struck a chord because it promised an alternative to Instagram, which started getting progressively worse for creators after being acquired by Facebook. The algorithmic timelines have led to a reality where your post could either get lucky and be seen by all of Instagram, or never be seen by your own followers.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder
Replacing the Pillars of the Internet
This article assumes you’ve read my previous two blog posts, here and here. Why not give them a quick read if you haven’t already? To balance out the doom and gloom of an internet wholly under the thrall of corporate interests and fed through single channels devoid of competition, it’s worth being aware of just how pervasive and powerful an idea decentralization is in the 21st century. The structure of things now are remnants of the way things have always been done: we trust in a singular authority to manage everything behind the scenes so that our experience on this side remains seamless. ISPs, once a central requirement, are increasingly becoming outmoded, antiquated, and unnecessary. Do we need a middleman managing what is, for all intents and purposes, access to a utility?
Tremaine Friske
Guest
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? Who is Twitter really accountable to except their board of directors?
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder
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. each business not only depends on, but commands large parts of the technological landscape. What do all these companies have in common?
Tremaine Friske
Guest
How to start a Mastodon server
So you want to be part of the Mastodon network, and you want to truly own your data, independent of anyone else. Perhaps you want to curate a niche community for a specific interest, or maybe for your own family or close circle of friends. You went through the documentation and installed the software, or maybe you chose one of the available hosting options to avoid all the technical nonsense altogether. What’s next?
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder
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!’” In times past, we relied on an oral tradition to pass on values, moving towards the written form as literacy grew and cities became the primary way people lived.
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. It works faster and looks smoother thanks to many performance and design improvements.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, 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. It was a natural upgrade for our project, as we long ago reached the limits of what OStatus was capable of. And what we needed was better privacy, better defaults, better cryptographic verifiability, and better distribution mechanisms.
Eugen Rochko
Strategy & Product Advisor, 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. 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
Strategy & Product Advisor, Founder