YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugen Rochko

lines on the record: 100
first: 2023-07-25
most recent: 2023-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And they get a master on server as a bonus value add to that. We could actually talk about medium as an example of that because medium have spun up their own master on server. Now their publishing platform for long-form articles for writers, right? And what do writers do? They usually announce what they've written on social media in short form content. And so Mastodon is a perfect fit for them to...”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Programs on Linux and how to run them, where you can install Mastodon, and you just need your own domain name. And there you go. When you run the server for yourself, you don't really need to think about things like moderation because you're just responsible for yourself. And obviously you'll need to block bad actors and stuff. But you're just doing it for yourself. You don't have to worry about community management. completely different side from this is when you want to run a server for a community or for the public it's a whole different level of responsibility and obviously involves you know moderation burdens like you need to moderate you need to find people who will moderate for you sometimes for for smaller communities people just do it out of their pocket because you know the community matters to them or it's like an offshoot of their like main community website you know if they have like a”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really. It's not really about making money off of hosting Mastodon. It's more about When you host Mastodon for yourself, you're in control. You own it. It's your megaphone and nobody can say you're kicked out or you can say this. You can't say that or take your data and sell it to a third party. Your complete ownership over your own social media platform, right? But without losing global reach because people can follow you from other servers. And so hosting a Mastodon server for yourself or for your family for a small private group of people that you know is really relatively simple and it's not too expensive. You do need either a hosting provider, somebody who will offer mastodruns a service or you need like a small virtual private server from DigitalOcean or similar hosting company where you can if you have the know-how on how to install”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How decentralization is what the servers are before you get thrown into the server list, but also changes to the server list that allow a bit more sorting, a little bit just displayed information in a better way, but also provide a pick for me option where if you don't make a selection, it gives you a random option.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's still growing, and its fact is growing faster now than it was before because of some changes that we did to our official apps, as well as the changes we did to the official JoinMaston org website. I adjusted the sorting to highlight bigger servers first. It's a big change from what it used to be, where we tried to highlight smaller servers, and a lot of them at the top were the ones where you can't create an account straight away, but you have to wait for approval. And that was just not very user-friendly. So now the ones with open registrations and larger ones are at the top. And of course, that has had a very quick effect on the growth, increasing it. And similar changes have been made in the official apps, as well as the onboarding improvements in general that we've been working on since November. They've finally been released on both iOS and Android. They include both a better explanation of what”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but there's caveat to that spike, and that is the way that active users are counted on masterly in the software is if you log in, right? And every person who signs up logins. So it's kind of inflated through people who sign up and then bounce. So it's natural for it to go back down, back to more natural levels. And it's just an unfortunate side effect of how the statistics were implemented in it. It's both impressive because the big number highlights how many people checked out Mastodon, but it's also normal for the number to go back down to a more level area again.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God, I am unprepared for this question. I am actually unprepared for this question because the statistics API on artificial website has not been functional for a couple days because I need to change the code a little bit to make it more efficient. So I actually have not kept up with it, but I would say At least one and a half million monthly active users.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's basically somewhere between a hosting business is not really venture capital scale, right? It doesn't promise the same returns. What they seem to be interested in is More of a, you know, we'll give you money now, and you don't have to think about monetizing, but in two years. Figure out how we could turn your open source project around. And that's kind of a no go zone for me. It's a trap. It's clearly against our project's ideals.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I cannot say that anything productive has come out of it, and we've rejected every venture capital firm that has reached out to us so far. Now, when I say more sustainable funding model for the project, I obviously mean software as a service because it's the most natural way for an open source project to basically find a business model for itself. You have a product that you have the most familiarity with. You can offer it to other people in a way that they don't have to find out how to install it, how to manage it, and so on. So it is quite natural. And it's been on my mind for quite a few years as a sort of backup plan for in case for some reason people stop donating to the Patreon. But there's a lot of activity in that space right now.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've definitely had a lot of people from venture capital firms reach out to us and we've even tried having a few conversations just to see where they were at, what they wanted. We've obviously had considered ways to have a more sustainable funding model for the open source project that would not rely on Patreon. We've explored if maybe there would be a way to find funding for that.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you're describing now is familiar in shape, if not in the specifics, right? It's an open source product that has found product market fit, or at least the opportunity for product market fit, it's going to grow really fast. You need some help scaling. This is when venture capital firms show up at your door and say, look, we know how to do DevOps. We can install a bunch of lawyers to help you figure out open source governance, look at all these tools. Here's a whole army of people that have done this before. Let us give you the money and the help and we'll scale it as fast as we can. Has that been happening to you?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would not make any comments or claims about other areas of life, but in open source, I think it makes sense. And that's what I would prefer to stick with. But that doesn't mean that I don't think there's better ways to involve other people and have better communication.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is the That is how it is right now, and honestly, I subscribe to that model. I think it's effective. I think that it leads to a better product because a good product needs long-term vision and it needs cohesive vision. And that's something that a committee cannot give. When you have a lot of people who just have pet issues, one thing that they care about, it kind of ends up being a patchwork and it loses some of its focus and it can end up in a situation where it just stops being a good product, becomes too confusing. And sometimes, you know, you need to make executive decisions about changing stuff in a serious way, which might not be popular with what most people in a committee would want. And so I don't look down on the BDFL model. I think that it has its place in open source at least.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you build a social network using the tools of social networking seems like a recursive problem? We could do the entire podcast on open source governance models. We could probably do an entire conference on open source governance models. There have been a lot of them over time. Each of them has trade-offs. I'll just use Linux as an example because I'm confident the audience is familiar with Linux. At the top of Linux is Linux Torvalds and he literally has the title Benevolent Dictator for Life of Linux. And that is the governance model that flows down from that title. Is that what you're thinking of? I got to pick one of these sort of well-worn.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would get a way to know okay, so they've made their decision. So now I can either go along with it or not, but then I know there's some kind of backing to that, not just trying to figure out, okay, 40 people on GitHub have given a thumbs up to this feature request. What does that mean for the 2 million people using Mastodon today?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would want to get out of something like that. It's just a more organized way of inferring community opinion about specific features or directions. Because at the moment, it is quite chaotic. The main way that people can voice their opinion about what should be mastered on or what shouldn't be mastered on is issues on GitHub, which is basically feature requests, bug reports on our source code repository. It's just, you know, somebody submits a feature request. How do you know if that's something that a lot of people want that would benefit from or something that only one person would benefit from? Or if it's something that one person would benefit from, and then a whole bunch of people will hate it, you know? Right now, it's very chaotic. And, you know, my wish is to find a way to have some kind of vehicle where people would feel like they're represented.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Framework to make decisions sounds very serious indeed. And it makes me wish that I had a more Elaborate answer to that, but sometimes my decision making is led by what the community is asking for. But of course, it all comes down to my vision for the project and what I think is right. That is my framework for considering community suggestions or community demands and figuring out what the project needs and what it should avoid. In the future, I am really looking forward to having a more organized model for this kind of decision making keyword that has been thrown around is participatory governance. Now, I'm not going to promise anything specific, but that is something that I'm talking to a couple people about. One thing that”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well. That's fair enough. This is the classic decoder question. Just listening to you, it sounds like you've had to make an escalating set of ever more complicated decisions since you started this project and it was just you. You're now at what might be the most fun part, right? Which is staffing up, figuring out who to hire, how to hire. How do you make decisions? What's your framework to make decisions?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not really why I went into this, and no, I don't see that. It is an open source project. It is free software. And there's nothing to be reaped from it. But I think I see a good future for Mastodon. I see it growing both as a network and as a project. And, you know, my wage right now is really rather low. For the most part, it's because, you know, when new funds come into the project, there are important things that I think need doing more than paying myself more. But I'm hoping that at some point there will be a break-even point where I'll be able to just have a dignified wage as well.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually people go through that experience at a startup because they have equity and they might go public or they might sell to Facebook or something for a huge amount of return. Do you see that outcome for yourself, that there will be some kind of exit from Macedon where you'll reap some sort of massive financial reward or is it this is the vision it's an open source project and we need to stay focused and idealistic?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which can mean sometimes, you know, the times are quiet and there's not much to do. Unfortunately, sometimes it means that you have to work pretty much non-stop and it's extremely stressful and extremely draining. Like it's been for the past like three months. So that's the downside.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's my daily driver, you know. I have a home feed that I look at every day. I share what's happening in my life, the music that I listen to on my Mastodon profile. Most enjoy Catcher Day and looking through cat pictures and sharing cat pictures every Saturday. That's why I've stuck around. And of course, there is a personal element to this as well in that it's kind of a cool job to have. You're doing something unique. You're getting paid to work for yourself in a way at your own pace.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decentralized social networks. That was a little bit of site funding, but it was a one time thing. And, you know, in the past, there was another one. There was a prototype fund project, but that was more like a personal grant kind of thing. Like sometimes you find these grants that sponsor people who work on open source projects, and it can help continue working on this. But to answer your original question on why I stuck around, I mean, I believe in the vision. I believe that Mastodon is the better way to do social media. And I've stuck around because I am, well, I am dog fooding it. I am using it.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's pretty much it. One thing that we've done over the years is that we just sort of created an additional platform for the higher tier Patreon sponsors to give money to us as a sponsorship that would just allow us to give them invoices back. That's the only thing and save on Patreon fees a little bit. But for the most part, Mastodon is financed through Patreon. platform that we built for the higher tiers. And that's it. Last year we received the grant from NLNet, which was something that came from the European Commission, which is a grant for open source projects that work on”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you've described the sort of financial journey here is $600 a month in Patreon to $7,000 a month to $30,000 a month in Patreon. Is there another source of revenue? Is there a potential another source of revenue?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immune to that sort of thing happening. So you could see all the seven years that worked on this as kind of like a preparation for this sort of thing just without knowing when exactly it would happen and exactly what to do. It's been a long process of figuring out what are the right features, what are the right designs, what's the right messaging. How do you do this? How do you do that? So I will not claim that I had all the details figured out from the start. It was a long process of figuring stuff out.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just a shift, you know, because social media websites, they come and go, they die, even if they stay around like MySpace, nobody's talking about MySpace like it's a relevant thing anymore. And there's plenty more that have literally disappeared, like app.net, Google+, Friendster, whatever, friend feed, you know? Yeah. It is a graveyard. I never believed that Twitter would be completely...”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Placed on you? Why did you stay focused on it? Because you were ready in November of 2022 for the moment, right? The product was there. The servers were there. The ecosystem, the community was there, which is very important to be ready for the moment. But you could not possibly know the moment was coming. So what made you stay focused?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of these tasks are delegated, but in our case, it's kind of like we have to find somebody who's. Was able to multitask a little bit and just like fill in the role that until now I had to basically do”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we decided we need a DevOps person because I can't be running the company and solving technical issues 24-7. We need another developer so that it's not just me and Claire. So somebody else can work with Claire when I'm not around, right? And we need a product designer because we got this far by me doing like the design figuring out Usability, user experience, and so on, but I'm not actually qualified to do that. And I want Mastodon to be the best product that it can be. I want it to be polished. I want it to be on par with any commercial alternative you might throw at it. So it's really important for me to find the right design person that would also be able to take ownership and initiative at this stage because basically a lot of larger companies, they have whole teams working on this stuff.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Magazines like Mashable and The Verge have covered us back then for the first time. But in hindsight, it was much lower pressure back then. I was able to manage on my own, but now clearly the pressure is much, much larger and it's not enough for just me to be involved in the project. It needs to expand. There needs to be more people working on different areas. There needs to be more delegation. Since November, it's been basically a whole ongoing project within our company to figure out the hiring process because we're basically hiring for the first time. As you can tell from the story that I told about the development of the company, that's basically the first step that it makes from being like just me to having more people and like more full-time employees. And it's just, it's a huge step.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm not going to lie, it's quite tough, and it's been quite tough since November. For a long time during Mastodon's lifetime, it wasn't as difficult because, well, the pressure on the project was much lower, even during busy times. I mean, Mastodon didn't just pop out of nowhere in November 2022. We had our run-ins with global fame, even going as far back as 2017. That's when it went viral for the first time.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just the decoder for me is all about structure, right? How do these things happen? How do we put these companies together? Mastodon, there's a lot of pressure on the protocol, right? There's a lot of interest in it, there's a lot of new servers being spun up. There's having to develop and manage the development of a large open source project like Masson itself. How do you split the time, right, between all the things people want Mastodon to do, all the features people might wish to add to it, and then you actually running your company?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a sizable, well, not quite a sizable, but it is compared to where it started, it's quite a sizable company. There's me, full-time employee, developer, CEO, whatever you want to call it. There's another developer, Claire. We have a CFO on a contract basis. We have a talent manager. We're hiring for three positions full time. We have two developers working on our iOS app as contractors. We have one developer working on the Android app as a contractor. There is a user experience design agency that works with us on a contract basis. And yeah, that's about it. But it's quite a lot of people to manage.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until 2021, when we finally incorporated a separate legal entity for Mastodon, over time we got more people contributing to the code, someone on a voluntary basis. There were a lot of drive-by contributors on GitHub. Over 700 people have contributed lines of code to the software, but also just people that we work with regularly, contractors that I hired right now.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am the CEO of the company mastron that works on the software mastodon. It's slightly confusing perhaps, but It's also fairly straightforward that somebody is making the software and it's us and we have the same name. For the longest time, it was just me. I started working on this in 2016 when I was still in uni and I just, after graduating, I started a Patreon page for it. And it was $5 per month for a while. And then it gradually increased until I was able to work on it full time. And back then it was like, I don't know, $200 per month or $600 per month. And it was enough for me to live off of because of my situation back then. I started working at full-time and I was technically a sole proprietor. It's a type of way to do business in Germany where you're basically just represent yourself as a company sort of thing. And yeah, that went on for a long time.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, indeed, Mastodon is free and open source software that allows you to create a social media server or platform that connects to a decentralized network of similar servers all talking the same protocol, allowing not only different mastodone servers to exchange information, but also other software that speaks the same protocol. It's a very powerful ecosystem with a lot of potential.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I appreciate that. What I mean specifically by it's not exactly like Twitter is a company. Up until recently, it was a publicly traded company that had investor reports. It had to make a profit. It had employees. It controlled the entire product. Mastodon is not that in almost any way.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's not that far off from where it started. I started working on it in 2016 because I thought that something as important as Twitter should not be in the hands of a single company. I was a pretty heavy Twitter user back then. I started using it, I think, in 2008 or so when I was a teenager. And it quickly became a very important part of my life in the sense of talking to friends, finding out about things that happened in the world and so on. Around 2016, I felt fed up with how Twitter was being run as a company, where it was heading the community that was on there, the harassment and so on and so I started looking into alternatives and after viewing the landscape, I decided to build a product of my own and try to make it good.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do think, and this comes up a bunch in your conversation, like I think he's a true believer. It's very clear the guy is not in this to, you know, make a fortune. It seems like he has turned down several fortunes in this process. But he is in on this thing as a protocol, as a future of the internet. And I think seems to see meta as a net good, at least for now.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Destroying it in its wake. There's a version of this Eugen even hedges a little saying, you know, threads could abandon activity pub. But his point is we'll be exactly where we are now. They can't kill us, and that is kind of the point. He also says in general that he thinks Meta's work here is good for Mastodon. It's good for the whole ecosystem. He seems very bullish, which I think is what you would say in this situation. There's no real upside to running around saying this is bad news. I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Eugen posted this very funny blog post right over the July 4th holiday. I think the title is just what to know about threads. And it basically goes through everyone's deepest fears and sort of tells them not to worry. One of the headings in this blog post says will Meta embrace, extend, extinguish the activity protocol, which is the big worry, right? That meta comes in, drops this huge set of users in, kind of takes over the Fedaverse, and then slowly removes all of the openness and goodness in it.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've actually seen some emails on the various activity pub mailing lists where engineers are actually building the standard where meta engineers are now engaging in the engineering part of it. Which I think is much evidence as we can get right now. But I think they're actually going to do it. And I think they need to do it for antitrust reasons. I think they need to do it for content moderation, regulation reasons. I think there's a lot of good reasons for them to say, look, it's decentralized. If you want to leave, you can leave. Which none of the major social networks have ever been able to say before. And I think they're kind of excited about it. The flip side of that is the Mastodon community is having its own very conflicted conversation about meta joining decentralized social. What's going on over there?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know. There's a lot of debate about this, and I think a lot of correctly founded conspiracy theories about Meta's intentions and just about everything that it does. But I will say Meta has over and over said it wants to do it. It just reaffirmed again there were meta people all over threads posting about how they want to integrate with activity pub, and the work has already started to decentralize. So all the noise is happening very much in the right direction.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I will specifically call it Meta's numbers. Mark Zuckerberg has said, we'll wait till we see a pathway to 1 billion users. And then we'll turn on the monetization. That is an incredible scale to even be thinking about. It's far beyond what anyone on Mastodon or other Fedaverse sites have even considered before. And so Meta brings a billion people into this and lights up the money spigot. The nature of this whole project will change, which I think is fascinating. That brings us to, I think, the biggest open question of all, which is Meta has said they're going to decentralize and work with ActivityPub and Mastodon and others. Do you think they're actually going to do it?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this going to be a creator business? Are you going to find a way to pay money for content moderation? And he has essentially run this thing on a Patreon. Like he's not making a lot of money. He's not interested in making a lot of money. He invokes Linux a bunch of times, which I thought was really interesting. But this question of, especially again, as meta comes in, which is very, very, very good at making a lot of money on social networks, what happens if Meta is the company best at making money on the Fediverse? I think is a question that sort of lingers over a lot of this conversation. And it's really interesting to hear him kind of reckon with that in your conversation.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in listening back to it, two things really jumped out to me. One is that Eugen spends a lot of time reckoning with kind of how big he wants Mastodon to be, both as a company and as a service. And I think you guys had this conversation in the wake of all the stuff that was going on at Twitter, right? Twitter's changing a lot. There was this big influx of people into Mastodon. And he was already trying to decide how big and important do I want this to be. And obviously now we have threads, which just became the fastest growing app of all time. And the scale of the potential for this thing has completely changed. And so his idea of what he wants Mastodon to be in this space, I think is really interesting. And he seems very conflicted. And it really jumped out to me listening to it again. The other thing, and this is related, is money, right? I think the big question we've been asking about the Fediverse this whole time is how is it going to monetize?”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. All this stuff is sort of understood by these different platforms to be these universal ideas of this is a post, this is a like, this is a follow, this is a follower, and anything can understand what that is and actually write into that system.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's structured in a set of standards that exist across the internet that different things can send and receive as long as they exist in this simple structure. So it takes that idea and applies it essentially to social posts, videos, text, images, anything. It's a read and write system that anything can tap into.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. The true answer is there is no really quickly what activity is, but I'll do it as fast as I can basically it's the underlying protocol for how social things move around the internet. Basically, the same way that email works, which is instead of being run entirely within a platform.”
2023-07-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT