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https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-behind-mastodon-eugen-rochko-built-it-for-this-moment/
Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German programmer is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative to Twitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Elon Musk's ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.
Rochko began developing Mastodon shortly after leaving university in 2016. He was a fan of Twitter but wanted to create a platform not controlled by any single company or person, reasoning that online communication is too important to be at the whim of commercial interests or CEOs. He believed that the lack of profit motive and canny design could discourage harassment and abuse, and provide users more control.
[...] Mastodon grew slowly after the first code was released in 2017, appealing mostly to free software enthusiasts. Then Elon Musk took control of Twitter for $44 billion. His promises to weaken moderation, deep staff cuts, and chaotic changes to the platform turned many dedicated Twitter users off the platform. In the past few weeks, Rochko says, some 800,000 new Mastodon accounts have been created, overwhelming popular servers and flooding existing users' timelines with introductions, questions, and complaints from newbies. Last year, donations to the nonprofit that runs Mastodon and where Rochko is CEO totaled 55,000 euros; it spent only 23,000 euros.
Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has been working long hours to keep his own server, Mastodon.Social, running, while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon, but he took time to videochat with WIRED from his home in Germany. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. [...]
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:01AM (2 children)
I have no interest in that myself. But the Fediverse [wikipedia.org] is much more than just Mastodon. Mastodon is just one platform (a twitter-like microblogging platform) of many using the ActivityPub [wikipedia.org] protocol.
Other platforms (all of which can federate to share users and content) include:
hubzilla [hubzilla.org]:
Misskey [github.com]:
Diaspora [diasporafoundation.org]:
GNUSocial [gnusocial.network]:
FunkWhale [funkwhale.audio]:
Friendica [friendi.ca]:
Nextcloud [nextcloud.com]:
Open Source sharing and collaboration platform
PeerTube [joinpeertube.org]:
PixelFed [pixelfed.org]:
Pleroma [pleroma.social]:
Mobilizon [mobilizon.org]:
WriteFreely [writefreely.org]:
Castopod [castopod.org]:
And a bunch more too. All of which you can host yourself if you like and share just with those you choose or federate with other instances. Or you can join an existing instance that's already (or not) federated.
Twitter is lame (as is, I guess. Mastodon too ) but there's lots of other stuff out there in the Fediverse.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:03AM
Oops. I screwed up the link. Fixed above.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2022, @12:07PM
I've heard Diaspora is not a good example because they appear to have little motivation in federating with anyone else. The services that do federate with it have had to reverse engineer things to get it to work.