How to Build a Social Network Using the Tools of Social Networking

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A good product needs long-term vision and it needs cohesive vision. 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 patch work. And so I don't look down on the BDFL model,. I think that it has its place in open source at least.

Today I’m talking to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon is the open-source, decentralized competitor to Twitter, and it’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in this, our post-Elon era. The idea is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls, you join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server, or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave, and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email and you’ll get it – if you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.

Now if you are like me, you hear the words open-source and decentralized, and then the word CEO, and you think – wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends – you’re going to hear Eugen and I say the phrase benevolent dictator for life in dead seriousness, because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.

Of course, we also talk about money, and structure – Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scale past just a handful of people — but keep that in mind, actually. This tiny mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking, and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things are seem a little messy in the moment.

Links:

More than two million users have flocked to Mastodon since Elon Musk took over Twitter

A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone

Elon Musk

Benevolent dictator for life

Mastodon Social

Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social)

XKCD

Erase browser history: can AI reset the browser battle?

Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

Denial-of-service attack