How’s it going, Mastodon?
Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.
Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire’s running of the social media platform.
Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in backing the product, following its fast growth.
But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”
Meanwhile, on Twitter:
Mastodon will never replace Twitter.
It isn’t designed to be anything like Twitter and has different operations and goals. It’s to act as a forum for smaller communities of people with narrower subject interests.
They also don’t have the bandwidth since Mastodon itself doesn’t provide the servers.
From the article, “Servers are grouped by topic and location, and are supposed to bring users together by common interest. The server is also where your account lives, so your account name will be nickname@server-name (more on this later).
There are currently just over 4,000 servers to choose from. Some are closed for registration as they have reached capacity or simply prefer to keep their communities smaller. For example, Mastodon’s flagship server mastodon.social is not currently accepting new members.”
Which leaves the problem that the world desperately wants and needs a new Twitter clone that isn’t Twitter.
Call it TwitterNG, or TwitterNM (NoMusk) or TwitterHaven or whatever.
I doubt that the software would be a problem. IIRC, very little of Twitter’s operating system is protected by patents. Clones like 8chan, Parler and Truth Social set up without much trouble and without much startup money either.
There is definitely a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make some quick big money. Provide a life raft for the tens of millions of people who want off of and out of Twitter.
That racist, Nazi thing just isn’t going to go over well.
Mastodon is building and building. I have got onto the swing of the thing and am meeting a lot of great people. Come on over.
Honestly, Mastodon reminds me of the early days of the internet, which is a good thing.
I’m just waiting for Twitter to expire now. It’s not going to be much longer:
https://www.joemygod.com/2022/12/twitter-users-see-first-widespread-outage-of-musk-era/
raven @ #2: Truth Social uses a modified version of Mastodon for the backend, and Soapbox for the front-end. They’re both open-source software — in fact, Truth Social initially violated Mastodon’s open-source license, but eventually complied when requested and published the modified source code.
Truth Social initially used a very niche hosting service and had trouble finding a content delivery network to take them on as a client, but eventually moved to a slightly more mainstream host (mainly known for hosting cat videos before), and Cloudflare relented too. Fox Business reported that their first hosting service claimed they still had an unpaid bill of over a million dollars. To be fair, this would be par for the course for a Trump business.
To get their app accepted by Google Play, they had to up their moderation standards. They use a lot of machine learning, but it still involves some level of human intervention. All this doesn’t come cheap. Per user, I’d guess they spend way more than Twitter, and I doubt their ad revenue is any healthier.
Musky canceled the janitorial contract so now employees have to bring their own toilet paper. I’d say to call OSHA but if they haven’t done anything yet, they’re not going to.
Alverant, Twitter runs one janitorial contract worldwide?
(There’s no stock at all whatsoever?)