Troubling things going on at Mastodon HQ. They have appointed new board members Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) and Amir Ghavi (partner in a blockchain & AI company) đ€ź
The Fediverse needs a good alternative to Mastodon. IMHO best option would be @gotosocial, due to enter public beta later this year.
âĄïž You can donate to GoToSocial at https://liberapay.com/GoToSocial or https://opencollective.com/gotosocial
âĄïž If you're a programmer, you can help with coding at https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
(Board news via @MF_Dume )
@FediTips @gotosocial @MF_Dume I think you may be confusing the US 501c3 they have set up with their management. Many European NGOs have a US 501c3. This doesn't mean that they will be working for that board.
If the board doesn't do anything, why are they appointing such divisive people to it? Why not just appoint absolutely safe inoffensive symbolic members?
At the very least, it gives us a clue as to what Eugen considers in keeping with his values nowadays.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services @weirdwriter@tweesecake.social @not2b@sfba.social
the obsession with selling Mastodon as a brand and with that continually citing numbers rather than fostering community were red flags for me. It was one of the things that put me off using Mastodon when I joined.
@FediTips the board members are for the new US based Mastodon non-profit, not for Mastodon gGmbH.
I think that's important context.
@FediTips Heya, it's sweet of you to write this but we're not currently in a position where more donations mean we'll write code faster or anything like that, just to temper people's expectations. Thanks to nlnet we have funding for the remainder of this year for the two devs working full time on the project, so folks should probably consider donating their money to the many mutual aid posts that regularly go around. Thanks for mentioning us though; again, that's really sweet and the support is appreciated â€ïž
I feel like this is a kneejerk reaction to Biz Stone joining Mastodonâs non-profit entity.
But if youâre that worried, use the many, many other server software for the Fediverse.
Iâm doing that right now.
Maybe? Looks to me though like the increasing centralisation around mastodon the brand and platform which eventually rubs against the decentralised âadmins relying on community management and donationsâ nature of the rest of the Fedi.
Should admins feel left behind or unheeded by the platform devs but also feel compelled to rely on mastodon the platform, moments like this, like the default mastodon.social in the app, will look like underestimated mistakes.
@maegul Well, mastodon.social becoming the default server for Mastodon was the big reason I started work on Firefish last year.
And what did I learn from that experience? That even small Fediverse projects draw outrage if they gain a little bit of notice. There were other problems but that was also a big one.
This is partially why Iâm building akkomane.social slowly. The moment you start a server, youâre taking on a little bit of risk. The best thing you can do is test and build incrementally.
@atomicpoet which is why I canât help but question the efforts of all the people working on platform diversity. Itâs not easy and the software is just the beginning. Masto have, AFAICT, arenât their spot, even if just with consistency over time.
Meanwhile there are many disparate alternatives around. If they all care about diversity, theyâd be better banding together into organisations more resilient against the tribulations of running a popular platform.
@maegul The problem isnât platform diversity. The problem is an HOA that does everything in its power to preserve the status quo.
For a good long time, their shenanigans worked. But now that actual big entities and influential people are involved, theyâre fast finding out that they no longer can enforce the status quo.
Whatâs funny is that most of the HOA uses Mastodon servers. They still federate with mastodon.social. For all the talk about forking Mastodon, it is highly unlikely theyâll do â theyâre certainly not contributing to any forks right now even though they keep complaining about Mastodon.
HOA? I know that only as 'home owners association', but that doesn't seem to fit here...
@maegul
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@wouter @atomicpoet @maegul High Output Alternator here, so IÊŒm in the dark, too. Guessing the A stands for agreement.
Oh geez... sorry about that, thanks for getting in touch about it!
I assumed you were open for donations as you have the donation links on the GTS profile, didn't realise you already had enough funding.
Is there a way you would prefer people to contribute to the project, maybe in code or testing or translations or something like that? I can edit the post to update it if needed.
@FediTips that's alright, I mean we are open for donations if people really want to send money to us specifically, it's just that it won't get code written faster because it's not a bottleneck for us right now, and there are many more important causes that money could be sent to, like helping struggling people pay their rent + bills. In terms of support for GtS it's always nice if people fix bugs on the issue tracker, or even just say "hey I like the thing you made", that kind of support helps a lot :)
Okay, I've updated the original post and linked to your reply. Think it's so cool you're taking this approach, says a lot about your project. Let us know what you need when you do need it. :)
p.s. That's very noble of you to say "we have enough, please support mutual aid requests from others". đ
@FediTips @dumpsterqueer if anyone has money to spare, these folks could really use it:
https://blackqueer.life/@moo/112344960320700755
https://ondergrond.org/@meatmech/112329501576693132
https://mastodon.art/@SingsongRaptor/112327733979192768
https://disabled.social/@thereaders/112344189664878117
https://octodon.social/@very_gay_tentacles/112332794302595777
@wouter@pleroma.debian.social @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org @maegul@hachyderm.io It totally is Home Owners Association. All the gatekeepers who want to dictate others what one can or cannot do with the Fediverse.
Chris is a nice guy so he only calls them HOA, personally, I prefer Taliban (or Mastodon Taliban as most of them don't even seem aware that not everything on the Fediverse is Mastodon)