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posted by hubie on Thursday November 17 2022, @01:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the be-careful-what-you-wish-for dept.

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. [...]


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:07AM (2 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:07AM (#1280180) Homepage Journal

    I've run my SMTP server from home for over two decades now and have not have any trouble staying off blacklists. Set up MSA properly so you don't relay accidentally, add SPF and DKIM on top, toss in amavis/clamav and it mostly runs itself. Sometimes a package upgrade will turn out to have some incompatibility with my config, but that's rare.

    Same here. I haven't had any deliverability problems in at least 10-15 years. Not sure why folks complain about this. I haven't had problems with stuff like that in a *long* tme.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday November 17 2022, @11:39AM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 17 2022, @11:39AM (#1280182)

    Same here. I haven't had any deliverability problems in at least 10-15 years. Not sure why folks complain about this.

    I'm involved in a non-profit that, while it was running its own mail system, had a serious problem with mail delivery because part of how that non-profit worked was email mailing lists. Which means you need to send out an identical email to about 1500 people at a time on a regular basis. Which is exactly the sort of thing a spammer would do, which makes it the kind of thing that less-sophisticated spam blockers would block if they didn't understand where it was coming from. Yes, we added SPF and DKIM, and still got blocked by about 30% of the recipients. Which was a pretty significant problem in running the group because those emails were how we were distributing things like "Here's the link to vote for the officers next year ..."

    As soon as we switched to GMail, the problems stopped. So either we were wildly misconfigured, or our recipients were more likely to trust GMail because it was GMail.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:02PM

      by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 17 2022, @10:02PM (#1280255)

      Trust Gmail? That's where the vast majority of the phishing and spear phishing emails come from these days.

      --
      The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.