His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
While this is a good move, I don’t think John Mastodon was making anywhere near the kind of money to turn into the next Musk or Zuck to begin with.
You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.
€60k
Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):
I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don’t feel remotely bad about being confused, it’s honestly pretty messy.
I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We’re not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that’s very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.
We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:
But you know, it’s really okay. It doesn’t have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That’s good enough.
I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn’t the worst thing.
One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can’t search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There’s also some sort of “invisible wall” for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don’t show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don’t know whether that’s a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.
