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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 bzipitidoo on Friday November 18 2022, @08:59AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday November 18 2022, @08:59AM (#1280318) Journal

    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.

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