Hi! Today is my first official day as the Executive Director of Mastodon, replacing @Gargron as CEO. I joined the Mastodon team more than 5 years ago, mostly working for Mastodon in the evenings on top of a 120% day job. I was the driving force behind the incorporation of the German non-profit, am a co-founder of the US 501c3 non-profit, and I have contributed to most of the fundraising success, which allowed us to expand the team. (1/13)
I’m humbled to be given this opportunity and want to tell you a bit more about myself and how I think about the future of Mastodon and the Fediverse. I have a business and finance background. I have worked for technology companies my whole career but have become increasingly tired of the extractive venture capital model of financing them, which only works for the rare outliers and seemingly never leads to the best product humans deserve. (2/13)
Mastodon and the Fediverse matter to me because they present a truly viable alternative to this model, by showing its users no advertisement, respecting users’ privacy, focussing on keeping users safe, and allowing them to connect to the Fediverse and beyond rather than putting them into a digital prison to extract as much metadata about them to please advertisers. (3/13)
My vision for Mastodon is a different direction than all previous attempts at social media, by focussing on community ownership, Trust & Safety features, slow user & server growth, and financial sustainability - for the non-profit project, the server administrators, the moderators, and creators in the Fediverse. I’m thrilled to have @haubles as Community Director and @renchap as Technical Director on my side in making this vision a reality. (4/13)
My personal heroes and projects I admire are @signalapp @Mer__edith @torproject @gnome @thunderbird @ryanleesipes . I’d much rather have Mastodon be inspired by the contributions of these people and projects to the FOSS and non-profit technology world than trying to rebuild early Twitter. (5/13)
Thanks to amazing people like @jaz @iftas @swf @mallory @bjoernsta @j12t we can see through topics larger than us related to policy, regulation, protocol development as well as how to deal with spam attacks, how to design a safer product for everyone, and how to deal with occasional interpersonal conflicts in our beautiful part of the internet. (8/13)
I want to send my heartfelt thanks @karienbez @alshafei for their wisdom and emotional support during this crazy journey so far, to @codinghorror @biz for your visionary strategic & financial support without which this restructuring would not have been possible, and to the team of Paul Hastings for your pro-bono legal advice. (9/13)
Thanks @Gargron for allowing us to do this the pure non-profit and FOSS way by saying no to earlier offers, some of which would have given you more than 10x the payout. I have been inspired by your vision about this project from the moment I met you 5+ years ago. It takes a lot of courage and greatness to let this project go. Super excited for continuing to work with you! (10/13)
But Mastodon wouldn’t be where it is without so many more people than Eugen. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to work with the best team we’ve ever had. Each one of you brings so much value to the Mastodon project and I want to thank you for making our mission your day job while you could certainly earn double or triple at one of our for-profit competitors. (11/13)
We’re still an absolute skeleton crew of 14 people, competing with teams sometimes 100x as large as ours. To get to our humble team size was only possible through the less than 1% community members who donate to Mastodon, a handful larger donations, & EU grants, all of which we are forever grateful for. We still have a large funding need for 2026, so please consider making a donation before the year-end if you’d like us to continue building and improving Mastodon joinmastodon.org/sponsors#dona… (12/13)
Once upon a time I called a restaurant and asked if they were wheelchair accessible. I specifically asked about stairs. They said yes they were wheelchair accessible, there were no stairs at all. We arrived, excited to try their food, to find there were steps to get into the restaurant. I asked why they said it was accessible when I couldn't even get in the door. They said the restaurant is accessible once you get inside.
I think about this a lot. It's accessible once you get inside, but they don't offer you any way to get in there.
This is common. That restaurant wasn't the first place to be inaccessible while saying it is accessible, it's just the one that stuck with me most because the host was so sure they were accessible and could accommodate me. They were even happy about being able to have me there.
So how does this go so wrong? Can you tell me, because I don't know. How did they get so close and still fail?
Here's a funny one for you: There is a restaurant on Staten Island that has a really great ramp. It's obviously up to spec. The only problem is to use the door at the top of the ramp you have to go up the stairs, inside the restaurant, and ask someone to open the door at the top of the ramp. So close, right? Disabled people would never be out without a nondisabled person, so this is a smart decision. (This is not a smart decision. Disabled people do in fact go out alone or with other disabled people.)
Nondisabled people do not understand disability or disabled people. Not at all. They think they do, but they view everything through their own biases and fail to truly know us as separate human beings. That's a problem, not that they realize it.
Luxchat, the Matrix-based instant messaging solution for the public and private sectors, is holding a Hackathon during the Luxembourg Internet Days 2025. We're shipping our guardian Matthew Hodgson there to contribute!
📆 November 18 & 19 📌 Chambre de Commerce (salle F01), Luxembourg
One thing that frustrates me about Mastodon is that you can do everything, engage with different people over different servers, have awesome, caring instance admins, etc. But still, half the data you can fetch is literally months outdated or incomplete. I see accounts in follower lists which instances are dead since God knows how long. From the 40 followers someone has, my client only displays 2. I love the concept and all that, but it is so unpredictable, not to say unstable, but I don't know a better word to describe it. And it's not my instance, I've tried on 2 different instances, with different profiles, some on the instance itself, some not.
I totally agree with your observations about how Mastodon seems qerky in a lot of ways. Some rather fundamental. I definitely have noticed inconsisitencies of data fetched at any given time. Fortunately, The latest FetchAllReplies framework they have released in 4.5 will hopefully start to resolve a lot of this inconsistent state stuff. It will be actively making connections and fetches of data from any remote instances mentioned in any given post as it is requested via the API or the web interface. It will add some performance penalty to the transaction, as well as potentially require larger instance admins to scale their resources differently, or in some cases reevaluate their entire resource distribution plan and rework. But from a user perspective, it will transparently appear that all posts and threads are consistent, no matter what instance they have been requested from.
Dieses Signal bashing geht mir langsam auf den Sack. Wenn die Leute doch meinen das mit einem dezentralisierten Protokoll wie XMPP oder Matrix ALLES in Sachen Instant Messaging besser wird und die Leute hinter Signal einfach nur blöd sind weil Sie Dienste wie AWS und Co benutzen, dann sollen Sie doch einfach aufhören Signal zu nutzen. Versteht mich nicht falsch, ich finde Dezentralisierung super. Das heißt aber nicht das man auf andere die dieses Konzept nicht nutzen dauernd rumhacken muss.
Joah, hauptsache kein WhatsApp hätt ich mal gesagt. Da gibt's ja in Deutschland noch genug Arbeit zu tun :P Leider ist aber WhatsApp eben immer noch das Barrierefreiheste das mir bekannt wäre. Wenn ich Signal bashe, dann wegen der Drecks-Desktop-App.
Let me be cheeky and preempt @pid_eins's systemd 259 posts:
In systemd 259, I'm making it possible to run commands that need privileges as your current user instead of as root. With "run0 --empower", you'll get a session as your current user in which you can do anything that root would be able to do, without actually being root.
This is very useful when you need to run something with privileges but still want all created files and directories to be owned by your current user.
It's been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else. During these five years I've met and interacted with a large number of awesome people at Mozilla, lots of new friends! I got the chance to work from home and yet…
and you just made me realize that 2018 was seven years ago... it feels weird, I still remember a lot of things that happened "a few years ago" .. like maybe three or four max but not seven!
Los 18 de noviembre celebramos el orgullo LGTBIQA+ en ciencia, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas (eso del #STEM). ¿Por qué esta fecha tan raruna? Por un lado porque noviembre suele ser un mes de la ciencia (yo mismo he estado montando más de 30 años celebraciones en estas fechas para llevar la ciencia a la calle). Pero también por Frank Kameny, astrónomo y activista estadounidense represaliado por las leyes discriminatorias del terror lavanda, que un día como hoy llevó su despido al Tribuna Supremo de los EEUU. Perdió, pero eso le animó a dedicarse al activismo en la Matachine Society. Creó, por cierto, eso de "Gay is Good". Otros años, desde el @pamplonetario solíamos hacer actividades que visibilizaran la ciencia LGTBIQA+, la situación de discriminación, la necesidad de seguir apoyando a este colectivo... Hoy lo dejo en un toot y os felicito a todo el mundo que vivís la diferencia y lucháis por una sociedad inclusiva.
This change increases the minimum stack cookie for the AmigaOS build of the curl tool.
In testing, the older stack size of 16384 was causing curl to crash on heavy TLS loads
These operations are si...
Guardando secreto de las materias clasificadas u otras cuya difusión esté prohibida legalmente, y manteniendo la debida discreción sobre aquellos asuntos que conozca por razón de mi cargo, sin que pueda hacer uso de la información obtenida para beneficio propio o de terceros, o en perjuicio del interés público.
4.5 just updated. First thing I noticed is that the established UI behaviour got broken again, this time by changing the tab order so I can't change language and visibility of a post with one or two tab presses.
At this point glitch-soc may as well be folded into upstream, since the idea of being better than upstream went out the window five minor versions ago. All that remains is that gs can do markdown.
Increasingly suspecting nobody on the Mastodon team actually uses a keyboard for anything except typing. Do they know what a tab order is. Have they ever used a keyboard shortcut.
Berlin, Brussels, Paris, 17 November 2025. On the occasion of the French-German Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, taking place in Berlin tomorrow (18 November 2025), more than 100 businesses, organisations, and individuals are publishing their …
I suppose there is a subtle predilection to assume that someone with a lot of books know all those things and not that these were interests and influences, they're probably not like memorizing everything about everything in their books. Otherwise they wouldn't want the books...
Berlin, Brussels, Paris, 17 November 2025. On the occasion of the French-German Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, taking place in Berlin tomorrow (18 November 2025), more than 100 businesses, organisations, and individuals are publishing their …
As the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) is into the final testing stage of its Deux-Montagnes branch, it the season’s first snowfall was able to bring at least two REM trains
One of my current pet peeves with "signing in" to basically anything these days is that I immediately get a message urging me to "stay logged in on this trusted device."
Now, I know in most cases that's mainly about tracking people around the Internet (especially if they use something like "sign in with Google" or "sign in with Facebook"), as well as gathering information about site users that can be sold/remarketed to others. It's just being presented as a "convenience," not a privacy invasion.
But my immediate gut response is always "What makes you think I trust this device?!"
Felix Hlatky
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Felix Hlatky
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GNOME
in reply to Felix Hlatky • • •@signalapp @Mer__edith @torproject @thunderbird @ryanleesipes 🥰
Congratulations on the role!
Felix Hlatky
in reply to Felix Hlatky • • •(6/13)
Felix Hlatky
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Felix Hlatky
in reply to Felix Hlatky • • •@jaz @iftas @swf @mallory @bjoernsta @j12t we can see through topics larger than us related to policy, regulation, protocol development as well as how to deal with spam attacks, how to design a safer product for everyone, and how to deal with occasional interpersonal conflicts in our beautiful part of the internet.
(8/13)
Felix Hlatky
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Felix Hlatky
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Felix Hlatky
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Felix Hlatky
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