Mastodon Exit Interview

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures | TechCrunch

Eugen Rochko is stepping down as CEO of decentralized social network Mastodon. Felix Hlatky will now become the executive director as the company becomes structured as a nonprofit government by a board.

Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse

In a wide-ranging interview with Eugen Rochko, creator of the decentralized social network Mastodon, Rochko shared why Threads federation fell flat, why ActivityPub and ATProto will likely never merge, and what it will take to grow the fediverse.

The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...

Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...

The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...

Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...

FR#156 – Share Where?

On Mastodon's new Share button, and protocol ownership.

Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social)

We’ve moved our internal communications from Discord to Zulip at Mastodon, and I think there are plans to do the same for our Patreon community Discord. The harder part will be untangling my gaming communities from this…

Mastodon - Decentralized social media

Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke

Does it matter which Mastodon instance you choose? I've seen many people claim that it doesn't matter, and moreover that you can easily switch instances. I learned the hard way that this claim is unwarranted, a disservice to new Mastodon users. Your choice of instance is important, indeed crucial. Until yesterday I was on mstdn.plus, a Mastodon instance with well over 4000 active users according to its server stats. Yesterday morning I woke to a "frozen" timeline. At some point my home timeline stopped showing new posts. I stopped receiving new notifications too. My desolate experience was the same on the web site and in several third-party Mastodon client apps that I have installed on various devices. It turned out that my own experience was far from unique: looking at the federated timeline of mstdn.plus, at a certain point all posts from other Mastodon instances stopped, leaving only posts from local users. The last post from another instance was at 07:45 UTC on January 30, 2023. In the local mstdn.plus posts that appeared afterward, I saw a number of users complaining about frozen home timelines and missing notifications. (It was difficult to have conversations with them, because we weren't getting notifications for each other's replies.) Clearly, the entire instance was now severely dysfunctional.