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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, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 17 2022, @05:19PM (3 children)
As opposed to what's happening with Twitter? A billionaire who already has way too much to do running an edgy electric car company, a space exploration and space tourism company, and a few other things, hasn't got the attention to spare to run yet another. He nevertheless seems to be giving his new purchase most of his attention, and, sadly, making a big mess, because it seems his ideas on how Twitter should be run are at best half baked. The Twitter experience has become much shittier.
As others have hinted, that it's possible for so much value to be bungled away is a problem with our systems. This purchase shouldn't have been possible. There are some things that should not be owned or for sale.
Social network utopias can be stronger than you think. For instance, the postal service in the US is as old as the nation itself, and still operating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2022, @04:26AM
"This purchase shouldn't have been possible. There are some things that should not be owned or for sale."
It's just a domain name... let it go.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday November 18 2022, @05:36AM (1 child)
I agree that there are things that should not be sold or owned. Some examples are National Parks, Water Reservoirs (can you imagine?) and Police Forces.
Twitter is not in the same category as those.
The world will not end if people can't tweet their thoughts out to others. If Twitter collapses tomorrow, it will most likely mean that a bunch of people suddenly have a little more time on their hands. It won't hold up progress in the sciences. It won't eliminate partisan politics. It won't lead to the overthrow of a democratically elected government (actually it will probably reduce that possibility!). It won't affect the stock market (beyond Twitter stock itself). It won't stop the war in Ukraine.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 18 2022, @08:59AM
If you "s/Twitter/US Postal Service/", does that argument still hold?
The USPS screams for modernization. That they are not in the business of handling at the very least email is a massive failure to modernize. Instead, they're busy figuring whether their next fleet of delivery vehicles should be all electric or gas, so they can keep handling communications on paper. That question would be somewhat moot if they had moved into electronic communications. Would need the fleet mainly for parcel service.
If the USPS could handle tweets, all this Twitter takeover drama would not have happened.