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U.S. election results - a critical moment for Mastodon
🕑 Added 2024-11-11 12:11:00 +0000 UTCPatrons and Mastodonians,
Two years ago, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and rapidly corrupted the platform through extensive layoffs and hobbled content moderation. No wonder hate speech and misinformation have flourished on the platform now known as X.
In response, many of you sought an open, secure social media alternative, and joined Mastodon. Crucially, your recurring donations have enabled us to sustain our mission while our user base has grown to over 7.3 million accounts.
Today, with the recent U.S. election results, our work is more important than ever.
The scenario of turning X into an ‘app for everything’, following the Chinese example of WeChat, was previously blocked by regulations. Once Elon Musk has privileged access to the Whitehouse, those hurdles may fall.
Unlike other platforms centrally operated out of the U.S. for a profit of a few, Mastodon is and always will be independent, decentralised, and globally distributed, but our vital mission depends on your support.
Your donations have already accelerated Mastodon’s development by funding two new full-time hires this year, bringing our full-time team to five, but there is still so much work to do.
With additional funding, we will grow our team and be able to apply more effort faster to sustain a safer and more resilient network, including:
Enhancing our trust and safety tools, like moderation and server blocklists
Usability improvements
Quote posts
Thank you for your continued support. Please consider topping up your commitment today by donating what you can or increasing your recurring donation by a dollar or two.
It only takes a minute to fuel a mission that empowers millions.
Thank you,
The Mastodon team and Plushtodon
Comments
Matt Falcon
I had a hard time on Mastodon because of the lack of connected reactions and comments... browsing around, everything looks like a ghost town unless you're part of a large server - which defeats the entire nature of decentralized social networking. You can reach out to specific posts but everyone's comments and reactions and counters are local to one server unless that server gets outside information. I had hoped that would be improved and enable a sense of global scale uniformity with some clever mechanisms (while remaining decentralized), but... judging by reactions I typically see... seems that's just not on the radar.
Aidan Raymond
I believe a small ad campaign on these other social media services is in order if it is affordable
Greg Johnson
Hi, I'm committed to the success of Mastodon. But I have a question. What is the cost to run things, on a per capita basis? Just using as a motivator for my deliberations.
Di Elliffe
Done.
Tom Fichtner
Very good point. Overall, Mastodon needs more granular, user-friendly customization on push notifications in the official client. Currently it's pretty much an "all or nothing" approach. See also Github issues #7692 and #22944.
Tom Fichtner
Decentralisation is not a problem, if it is managed correctly. One issue is that you always have to identify your own mastodon server whenever you want to follow someone on a different server. This is because browsers do not allow to share cookies between different domains. Possible solutions would be a browser extension (not great, mass market won't install) or a unified login such as OAuth. I don't know if Mastodon plans any other solutions to manage decentralisation without interrupting user experience.
Tom Fichtner
My main issues with Mastodon is lack notification management. It is impossible to customize notifications for people on certain lists (e.g. close friends) and for certain hashtags. This makes casual, real-time interaction difficult, if you don't want to refresh the homepage all the time. This lack of customization and usability makes it hard for me to fully recommend Mastodon to less tech-savy peers. See Github issues #7692 and #22944.
David Erdman
That's because people need a "mainstream" place to start from before they learn the platform, how to adjust it to themselves, etc. There does need to be a default "commons" that people land in, can choose to stay, etc. Bluesky, for example, seems to understand this. Instead of starting with infinite servers, they only have one, to build the critical mass. Even though the platform can be distributed, it's effectively centralized right now. So, it's basically a pre-Musk Twitter and that makes sense to people.
Jonathan
And part of the reason "few people join Mastodon" is the confusing decentralization of it.
Goldmaster
The biggest challenge to Mastodon is the networking effect. Few people join Mastodon due to few people on Mastodon, which leads to few people joining Mastodon. As long as sign up process is as easy as say Bluesky, then hopefully it would gain as much traction as the competition and many profiles that joined but stopped posting due to low engagement rate may start backup again. We do need to be able to schedule post and repost in the app and browser.
bla laber
Quote Toots are one thing but Subscriptions to Toots when someone replies would really get the discussions going.
Kevin Darling
Done ✔️
Grant Morrison
Thank you for sharing this critical platform
Lucas
I see donations are tax deductible for US citizens. Is or will this also be possible for Europeans? Apparently it's relatively easy to get an 'ANBI' status in the Netherlands (like Wikimedia inc. has), but I don't know the details.
Kees de Kooter
Is it possible to donate via a non-US platform and a non-US payment provider?
Ренат Ескенин
Ok, I did
Aidan Raymond
Make the plush an extra on one of the higher tiers!
