Notices by NO NAME (jeff@soapbox.hackdefendr.com)

@davidcelis

Uh. Nope. No single entity owns Mastodon. Mastodon GmbH holds the name trademark only. It doesn't fund the project nor pay the handful of active developers. Eugen Rochko created Mastodon in 2016. Development is crowd-funded, with no support for advertisements or monetized features.

@left_adjoint

@davidcelis

Yep, that's what I'm saying. It's a non-profit, and non-profits are funded by donations and possibly government grants. Non profits still hire people to do regular jobs, no different than a profitable company.

@left_adjoint

@left_adjoint

OK I will play devil's advocate for a sec.

Mastodon doesn't have a large development base, only a handful of unpaid volunteers. Release cycles that also contain features requested by the community are incredibly slow and ultimately get selected by one person.

Only speaking about Bluesky because it isn't owned by one single billionaire, and is run by committees built from decent sized investors. Because of said investors there is a larger development base which leads to quicker release cycles that produce features requested by the community.

Speaking as someone who runs a single user instance on Mastodon and another on Bluesky. The latter is hella cheaper to operate because it requires less resources per user.

Mastodon is kinda clique based and requires you follow accounts or hashtags to make it work. Not a bad design, just slow to show results.

@davidcelis

Well let's ask him directly.

Yo! @Gargron - care to disclose your base salary from Mastodon GmbH? Or maybe just confirm that it all depends on level of donations.

@left_adjoint