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The development of the next version of Mastodon coincided with the reveal of Vero, yet another commercial social network silo backed by millionaires with a shady past. Vero has struck a chord, at least until people caught on to its background, and it wasn’t just because of i...
Replacing the Pillars of the Internet
This article assumes you’ve read my previous two blog posts, here and here. Why not give them a quick read if you haven’t already?
To balance out the doom and gloom of an internet wholly under the thrall of corporate interests and fed through single channels devoid of compet...
Twitter is not a public utility
Isn’t it a bit strange that the entire world has to wait on the CEO of Twitter to come around on what constitutes healthy discourse? I am not talking about it being too little, too late. Rather, my issue is with “instant, public, global messaging and conversation” being enti...
The Centralization of Power on the Internet
The online space is dominated by a small handful of companies that command a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the entire online experience, not just social media. So much influence that several of these companies have fundamentally altered many aspects of ...
How to start a Mastodon server
So you want to be part of the Mastodon network, and you want to truly own your data, independent of anyone else. Perhaps you want to curate a niche community for a specific interest, or maybe for your own family or close circle of friends. You went through the documentation ...
This Isn’t About Social Media. This is About Control.
Human beings, above all else, are storytellers. It’s how we relate to our own past, or personalities, or each other. It’s how to connect with the world around us, make sense of events, and assess values. We rely on stories to function as agents in the world.
These stories ar...
Mastodon 2.0
About 6 months have passed since April, during which the major mainstream breakthrough of our decentralized social network took place. From 20,000 users to almost a million! What better time to run through a couple examples of what’s been introduced since then?
Mastodon is d...
Mastodon and the W3C
Mastodon is a free, open-source federated social network spanning over 800,000 users spread across more than 2,000 servers.
Mastodon v1.6 is here, and it is the first Mastodon release which fully implements the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is a new federated messaging p...
M for Mastodon
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network with over 760,000 users. You can check it out here.
The Mastodon project is finally well-represented visually. I always felt like the previous logo did not do it justice. To...
April post-mortem
This is an update for my Patreon supporters. It is posted on Medium because of its superiour formatting capabilities.
So, April, huh. A lot happened. I was putting off writing an update on here because I knew I had to go into detail on all the things that happened, and that’...
Scaling Mastodon
My instance mastodon.social has recently surpassed 43,000 users. I have closed registrations both to have more time to investigate the infrastructure and ensure a good experience for existing users, and to encourage more decentralization in the network (with a wonderful effe...
Two reasons why organizations should switch to self-hosting social media
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 23,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here.
If your organization is hosting a Mastodon instance, it i...
Learning from Twitter’s mistakes
My name is Eugen Rochko and I’m the creator of Mastodon, a free, open-source federated social network server. The flagship instance mastodon.social has over 22,000 users and is growing fast. You can check it out here.
Very early on in the development of Mastodon I’ve decided...
The power to build communities
Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto might be well-spirited, but one thing in it is fundamentally wrong:
In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all o...