COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém
COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém - Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief provides in-depth analysis of all the key outcomes in Belém – both inside and outside the COP.Carbon Brief Staff (Carbon Brief)
Compromises, voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal
A deal is welcome after talks nearly collapsed but the final agreement contains small steps rather than leaps
There Can Be No Information Integrity Without Scientific and Political Integrity
There Can Be No Information Integrity Without Scientific and Political Integrity
I'm just back from COP30 in Belém and it is making me feel crazy to watch so many climate advocates and reporters declare the final text coming out of it a victory.Amy Westervelt (Drilled)
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Climate Talks End With 'Empty Deal' That Fails on Forests, Finance, and Fossil Fuels | Common Dreams
“COP30 provides a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks—they lie with the people and movements leading the way toward a just, equitable, fossil-free future,” one campaigner said.
Climate Talks End With 'Empty Deal' That Fails on Forests, Finance, and Fossil Fuels
"COP30 provides a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks—they lie with the people and movements leading the way toward a just, equitable, fossil-free future," one campaigner said.oliviarosane (Common Dreams)
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Industrial manufacturing is declining in Europe for sure, but not because of complying to climate policies, as you claimed. Industrial production is falling in most European Union countries, largely due to a lack of competitiveness with China and the US.
Also, the article you linked about the EU loosing manufacturing jobs does not back your claim. On the contrary it says: The move to a sustainable economy is an opportunity to turn the situation around. Towards the end, it also mentions that the EU should make sure that industry jobs are not lost and that Europe's industrial sectors and their workers are fundamental to delivering the climate solutions Europe needs, which are very different things to what you said.
The great decline of European industry
Industrial production is falling in most European Union countries, largely due to a lack of competitiveness with China and the US. The recent Draghi report has urged for significant investment to prevent the economy from 'stalling.'Bastien Bonnefous (Le Monde)
largely due to a lack of competitiveness with China and the US
Where does the lack of competitiveness come from?
The move to a sustainable economy is an opportunity (...)should make sure that industry jobs are not lost and that Europe's industrial sectors and their workers are fundamental to delivering the climate solutions Europe needs, which are very different things to what you said
It's been decades now of supposed opportunity, could and should, of storytelling, hypotheticals and promises, as in your references.
The results are in, the promises turned out false. EU has the most expensive energy of the world, is losing industry faster than ever, there is no novel "green industry". People are looking at reality instead of the fantasy could/should stories.
EU's agenda on climate change is being ignored for valid reasons. We're an unreliable partner in accelerating economical, industrial and thus geopolitical decline.
If we want to convince others on the necessary climate change mitigation methods, we'll have to have something to offer.
We'll have to implement the mitigation methods in a way that shows they're a benefit. So others will want to copy. So far that hasn't happened. We've shown the opposite.
Compromises, voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal
Compromises, voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal
A deal is welcome after talks nearly collapsed but the final agreement contains small steps rather than leapsDamian Carrington (The Guardian)
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Fury as ‘Shamefully Weak’ COP30 Draft Drops [almost] All Mention of Fossil Fuels
Fury as 'Shamefully Weak' COP30 Draft Drops All Mention of Fossil Fuels
"We can’t have a deal that fails to deliver what science and the law require on finance, fossil fuels, or forests and call that progress."jake-johnson (Common Dreams)
Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily
Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily
: Then shalt thee change the setting three times, no more!Richard Speed (The Register)
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[Solved]How do I join a community that my instance doesn't "see" yet?
Edit2: Solved per wjs018's comment
Specifically !12ozmouse@adultswim.fan. I can tell the instance is federated because !adultswim@adultswim.fan shows up.
On Lemmy I'd run into this issue, and usually could use the community search and try searching in a few different formats to get it to show up eventually, but I wasn't able to get that to work here. I tried searching the link above, as well as the link without the !, the display name, and the full URL (adultswim.fan/c/12ozmouse), but these didn't work.
Is there any trick to doing this?
Edit: I was able to resolve my issue by making this post, because the link that appeared let me join. But I'd still like to know a general solution that doesn't involve finding or making a post with the link (the post preview didn't turn it into a link so I had to actually make the post for it to work).
Actually no. I just had a look through the code and we have some pretty descriptive error messages depending on how it is failing:
- There is a message that will pop up if the instance is blocked (doesn't look like it is for piefed.zip)
- There is a message that will pop up if the community is banned
- There is a message that will pop up if the instance doesn't allow NSFW communities (looks like piefed.zip does)
- There is a message that will pop up if the admin has restricted users from adding new communities
- Finally, there is a message if the community name is formatted incorrectly
@demigodrick@piefed.zip might be able to help you better as your local admin.
The GOP’s War on Naturalized Citizens’ Right to Vote
In 2025, the Trump administration and GOP officials in key states have viciously targeted the voting rights of naturalized citizens with new access barriers, selective surveillance and intimidatory rhetoric — signaling that the full promises of citizenship, for many, remain unattainable.
The GOP’s War on Naturalized Citizens’ Right to Vote - Democracy Docket
The Trump administration and GOP officials in key states have viciously targeted the voting rights of naturalized citizens with new access barriers, selective surveillance and intimidatory rhetoric — signaling that the full promises of citizenship fo…Democracy Docket
‘Now is the hour’: Australian Labor urged to speed up fossil fuel phase-out to justify Cop30 pledge
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/30560540
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‘Now is the hour’: Labor urged to speed up fossil fuel phase-out to justify Cop30 pledge
Despite Australia signing the Belém declaration, Albanese rejected suggestion Labor shouldn’t develop new gas fieldsAdam Morton (The Guardian)
Why do we need to offset other countries coal use? They're the ones buying it and burning it, not us.
In particular Indonesia:
Yet Indonesia added 1.9 GW of coal capacity in 2024, the third most in the world, behind China and India. Some 80% of this new capacity came from so-called captive coal plants, built specifically to serve industrial estates processing nickel, cobalt and aluminum for the booming electric vehicle market.
news.mongabay.com/2025/04/indo…
How ironic.
Thanks for making Queensland look good I guess? Even our worst state is still doing better than them.
app.electricitymaps.com/map/zo…
Indonesia defies global coal retreat with captive plant boom
JAKARTA — As much of the world shutters coal power plants and shelves new proposals, Indonesia is bucking the trend — adding the third-highest volume of coal capacity globally in 2024, driven largely by the need to power a growing fleet of metal smel…Hans Nicholas Jong (Conservation news)
Australia is among only 24 countries that will meet next April for a conference co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands to work on plans for a complete fossil fuel phase-out. Other participating countries include Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, Panama, Spain, Slovenia, Vanuatu and Tuvalu.
It is these countries that are leading the way in the fight for a better climate.
The two largest economies and historical emitters, the US and China, were as conspicuous in their lack of impact during the COP30 as they were before. U.S. President Donald Trump declined to send representatives as the Washington exits from global climate accords.
And China has once again proven to focus more on its own interests in trade rather than stepping into a stronger leadership role in fighting climate change while it's energy consumption continues to rise at a staggering rate. The country accounts for one third of the of the world's total energy consumption, compared to a fifth 15 years ago, and is responsible for 90% of the increase in these emissions since 2015. China is portraying itself as a leader in climate policy, but when it's leader Xi Jinping announced a decrease of over 7% by 2035 a few weeks ago, he carefully avoided specifying a baseline.
Researchers think that China’s NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) falls short to limit global warming to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and striving to stay below 1.5 °C. As Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst who has tracked China’s emissions trends for more than a decade, said in Nature, “Anything less than 20% is definitely not aligned with 2 degrees. Similarly, anything less than 30% is definitely not aligned with 1.5 degrees."
Myllyvirta also says that China's announced emissions cuts — as 7–10% of an undefined amount, rather than specifying a year as the basis for calculation – leaves the door open for short-term emissions increases.
The different pathways for China to achieve carbon neutrality between 2030 and 2060 could result in different amounts of cumulative emissions, says Myllyvirta. “What matters for the climate is the total amount of GHGs emitted into the atmosphere over time,” he says, adding that this is why cutting emissions fast early on is important.
So we should not criticize Australia here, but rather China, the U.S., Russia, and Russia as it is them that opposed to phase out fossil fuels.
China pledges to cut emissions by 2035: what does that mean for the climate?
The country’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases will largely determine the world’s emissions trajectory, researchers say.You, Xiaoying
Australia joins the group of these 24 countries, and they didn't lobby against phasing out fossil fuels - unlike Russia, China, India, the U.S.. Saudi Arabia, and some other oil producing countries.
Australia's reliance on coal-fired power drops to record low in early 2025, the country pledged to end coal consumption by 2038 or earlier (no, that may be not enough, too, but China, India, Russia & Co are not even close to this, and they do nothing that it gets better).
COP-tastrophe: How the COP of Implementation, Truth, Forests, and Indigenous Peoples Failed on All Counts
COP-tastrophe: How the COP of Implementation, Truth, Forests, and Indigenous Peoples Failed on All Counts
COP30 began full of promise but ended as yet another reminder that the mechanism for global climate governance is broken.Drilled
... late in the second week Colombia upstaged their hosts when it announced the creation of an initiative whereby a group of countries would meet to plan the phase out of fossil fuels. The 24-country bloc will meet next April in Santa Marta for a conference co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. Other participating countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, Panama, Spain, Slovenia, Vanuatu and Tuvalu.
So basically it is Latin America, Europe, and Island Nations that take serious action to phase out fossil fuels.
The world's two largest polluters - China and the U.S. - as well as Russia and some oil-producing countries in the Middle East are doing business as usual.
I mean all those who have said that China is leading in the fight against climate change shall now be silent. If you read the reports on the COP it is obvious that Beijing is interested in money and in money only.
The BBC wrote on Beijing;s pavillon at the COP 30 in Brazil that China ramps up charm offensive with extra pandas:
Was it the many copies of Xi Jinping’s speeches on sale? Or the ubiquitous cuddly pandas?Perhaps it was the much-needed fans here for the heat and humidity outside. Whatever the reason, China’s pavilion here proved a huge draw, with long queues forming of people keen to get their hands on Chinese tat.
The pandas definitely seem to be part of the charm offensive from the world’s biggest emitter of planet-warming carbon.
Many expected China to take a bigger leadership role – but the world’s dominant producer of renewable technology has a different view.
China was content to sit quietly and support others who want to slow down the transition away from fossil fuels like India and Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s biggest coal producer after all.
Despite their current power and size, it seems to still suit China to play the role of the developing country that it was when the UN climate body was formed back in 1992. With extra pandas!
No agreement reached on new pledges to cut fossil fuels at COP30 in Brazil
"We know some of you had greater ambitions," says COP30's president after negotiations among nearly 200 countries ran over time.BBC News
Lemurs in Madagascar Face an Unexpected Killer
Thousands of the endangered primates end up on the dinner plates of people in the upper rung of the country’s society who have money to spare.
Stopping the Greatest Threat to the Amazon, One Fire at a Time
After four decades of research, a scientist returns to the Amazon in an effort to change the behavior that has lead to years of environmental crisis.
COP30 Backpedals on Climate Action | Offering no new plans to cut fossil fuels, the UN’s climate conference failed to produce a roadmap to stop global warming.
COP30 Backpedals on Climate Action - Inside Climate News
BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 confere…Inside Climate News
Cop30’s watered-down agreements will do little for an ecosystem at tipping point
Delegates made minimal headway on timetable for replacing oil and gas or on firm commitments to reducing carbon emissions
U.N. climate talks fizzle out 10 years after Paris accord
Nearly 200 countries at the U.N. climate summit reached a deal that didn’t include a road map to curtail use of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.
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Oil Producers, but Maybe Not the Planet, Get a Win as Climate Talks End
The final agreement, with no direct mention of the fossil fuels dangerously heating Earth, was a victory for countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, diplomats said.
End of fossil fuel era inches closer as Cop30 deal agreed after bitter standoff
End of fossil fuel era inches closer as Cop30 deal agreed after bitter standoff
Wealthy countries should triple funds for countries to tackle climate impacts, but deforestation and critical minerals blocked from final dealFiona Harvey (The Guardian)
Countries agreed to talk about talking about a plan for a fossil fuels phase out. Which is more than has happened before.
Its nowhere near where things need to be.
Thanks for the laugh!
But are you sure they haven't just agreed to talk about talking about talking about a concept of a plan?
Global Climate Deal Closes In on Effort to Curb Fossil Fuels
Global Climate Deal Closes In on Effort to Curb Fossil Fuels
An international climate deal emerged Saturday meant to spur more concrete plans to transition away from fossil fuels, winning grudging acceptance from nations that insisted on stronger ambition in the fight against global warming.John Ainger (Bloomberg)
Climate disaster is not ambiance | Especially not for an illicit affair with a politician who helped a climate-denying administration come to power.
Climate disaster is not ambiance
Especially not for an illicit affair with a politician who helped a climate-denying administration come to power.Emily Atkin (HEATED)
So the American elite are really speedrunning the whole Ancien Regime France thing.
Somehow they seem unaware of how that story ends.
Cop30 live: rumours of deal as delegates prepare for final plenary
Fury, confusion and gratitude as climate deal reached in Belém – as it happened
After a series of all-night meetings and fears the summit could collapse, an agreement has been gavelled through at Cop30Graham Readfearn (The Guardian)
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In One Week, Trump Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy
The Trump administration this week moved to weaken the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, two bedrock laws, among other deregulatory moves.
Rising planetary risks after missed decade of action
Commentary: rising planetary risks after missed decade of action
22.11.2025 - A new commentary led by Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), concludes that the world has missed an important decade needed to keep the Earth system within its safe operating space.Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Trump cites ‘emergency’ to keep Michigan coal plant online into winter
The Energy Department’s orders to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running are driving up costs and pollution. States and advocates are challenging the move in court.
Trump cites ‘emergency’ to keep Michigan coal plant online into winter
The Energy Department’s orders to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running are driving up costs and pollution. States and advocates are challenging the move…Canary Media
Well the reality answer is rules don't exist anymore and they are just doing whatever the fuck they want.
The flimsy reasoning they're using likely has to do with Michigan being a part of the Eastern Interconnection power grid, so what they do with their energy production affects a lot more states than just Michigan, so it makes sense for it to be Federally controlled. Only Texas has their own, independent, power grid.
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Von der Leyen demonstrate how to quickly lose credibility on protecting the environment.
Soon she'll tell she wants to fight forest fires without reducing the amount of gas being poured on forests by arsonists.
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New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption
New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption
The program aims to use federal funds awarded under the Biden administration to deploy more than 500,000 heat pumps in the chilly region over the next few…Canary Media
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Distributors will receive incentives for selling heat pumps. They will keep a small percentage of the money for themselves and pass most of the savings on to the contractors buying the equipment. The contractors, in turn, will pass the lower price on to the customers.
Hah. As if.
If they were really serious about it, they’d make it so that air conditioners must be reversible under code. The BOM isn’t that significant and Midea is making them dirt cheap now.
This is why I find it hilarious that suddenly people are talking about heat pumps so much. They're not a new technology by any means.
The only reason your current air conditioner doesn't run in reverse (a heat pump) is because they wanted to save $10 in materials, and charge $1000 or more for one that does.
If by recently, you mean decades. Cold climate heat pumps have been able to handle temps down to -30F for quite a while.
The recent difference is just that they're now being advertised, have articles being written about them, and most importantly... government subsidies to upgrade.
No, there’s a lot bigger difference than that. I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump. Unlike an air conditioner, it’s designed to operate continuously with a variable speed compressor and cooling fan. It’s easily capable of running for days on end during the coldest times of the year (well below freezing). It’s also capable of defrosting itself which is critical for winter operation because it’s literally cooling the air around itself way below freezing.
My previous air conditioner could not run for long cycles like that without the compressor shutting down as a protective measure. It had no ability to defrost itself and its vertical fan orientation allowed it to fill up with snow and ice during the winter, clearly making it totally inoperable until spring when the weather was warm enough to defrost it and dry it out.
You say this as if things like variable speed compressors, multiple compressor stages, and designs other than the generic mostly empty box with an open vertical fan on top don't exist for air conditioners as well.
Your previous air conditioner was designed for its intended purpose. Based on your description it almost certainly didn't have the hardware to function as a heat pump, so being inoperable during a snowy winter wasn't an issue, given it's designed use. On the other end, it was the house I'm in has had three air conditioning units over its lifetime. None of them were an open vertical design like that, and I'm in AZ where snow is irrelevant.
You're talking about equipment designed for the intended use case of cold weather that takes environmental aspects like snow accumulation into account for its design instead of ignoring it, and acting like that is some sort of new technology. It's just better designed and not just the cheapest shit they can get people to buy. Whoever bought an exposed air conditioning unit like that in an area with regular snow was an idiot that clearly did zero research.
Can we handle the truth on climate?
Based on the updated national climate pledges submitted ahead of COP30, it is clear that our politicians are still not showing the genuine leadership needed to transition rapidly away from fossil fuels, which are responsible for close to 90 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
I recommend reading the article rather than trying for a quick answer off the top of your head.
Can we handle the truth on climate?
As the latest round of United Nations climate talks were under way at COP30 in Brazil, the Liberal Party finally caved in to the pressure of climate change deniers in the National Party, reminding us that the climate wars are well and truly alive and…Joëlle Gergis (The Saturday Paper)
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I recommend reading the article rather than trying for a quick answer off the top of your head.
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Be Like Clippy
Be Like Clippy
Join the Be Like Clippy movement to make technology more user-friendly and transparent. Including a list of custom clippy profile picturesbe-clippy.com
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Why China Can’t Sort Out Its Property Market Mess
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42696039
Web archive linkOnce one of the country’s biggest growth drivers, China’s property market has been in a downward spiral for four years with no signs of abating. Real estate values continue to plummet, households in financial distress are being forced to sell properties, and apartment developers that racked up enormous debt on speculative projects are on the brink of collapse.
There was some optimism that government measures to end the crisis had been working to reinvigorate the market, but in March, government-linked developer China Vanke Co. reported a record 49.5 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) annual loss for 2024, showing just how deep the problems run. Then in August, property giant China Evergrande Group delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange — making the shares effectively worthless — marking a grim milestone for the nation’s property sector.
China is now considering further measures to revive its struggling property sector, particularly after new and resale homes recorded their steepest price declines in at least a year in October. The slump has heightened concerns that further weakening could destabilize the country’s financial system.
...
Evergrande’s downfall is by far the biggest in a crisis that dragged down China’s economic growth and led to a record number of distressed builders.
Founded in 1996 by Hui Ka Yan, Evergrande’s rapid expansion was from the outset fueled by heavy borrowing. It became the most indebted borrower among its peers, with total liabilities reaching about $360 billion at the end of 2021. For a time it was the country’s biggest developer by contracted sales and was worth more than $50 billion in 2017 at its peak. Founder and chairman Hui became Asia’s second-richest person. Over the years the company also invested in the electric vehicle industry and bought a local football club....
How did some Chinese developers get into this mess?
In 1998, China created a nationwide housing market after tightly restricting private sales for decades. Back then, only a third of its people lived in towns and cities. That’s risen to two-thirds, with the urban population expanding by 480 million. The exodus from the countryside represented a vast commercial opportunity for construction firms and developers.
Money flooded into real estate as the emerging middle class leapt upon what was one of the few safe investments available, pushing home prices up sixfold over the 15 years ending in 2022. Local and regional authorities, which rely on sales of public land for a chunk of their revenue, encouraged the development boom. At its peak, the sector directly and indirectly accounted for about a quarter of domestic output and almost 80% of household assets. Estimates vary, but counting new and existing homes, plus inventory, the sector was worth about $52 trillion in 2019 — about twice the size of the US real estate market.
The property craze was powered by debt as builders rushed to satisfy expected future demand. The boom encouraged speculative buying, with new homes pre-sold by developers who turned increasingly to foreign investors for funds. Opaque liabilities made it hard to assess credit risks. The speculation led to astronomical prices, with homes in boom cities such as Shenzhen becoming less affordable relative to local incomes than those in London or New York. In response, the government moved in 2020 to reduce the risk of a bubble and temper the inequality that unaffordable housing can create.
Anxious to rein in the industry’s debts and fearful that serial defaults could ravage China’s financial system, officials began to squeeze new financing for developers and asked banks to slow the pace of mortgage lending. The government imposed stringent rules on debt ratios and cash holdings for developers that were called the “three red lines” by state-run media. The measures sparked a cash crunch for developers that was exacerbated by the impact of aggressive measures to contain Covid-19, such as the suspension of construction sites.
Many developers were unable to adhere to the new rules as their finances were already stretched. In 2021, Evergrande defaulted on more than $300 billion, triggering the beginning of China’s property crisis. Two more property giants defaulted — Sunac China Holdings Ltd in 2022 and Country Garden Holdings Co. in 2023.
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With household debt at a high of 145% of disposable income per capita at the end of 2023, homeowners are increasingly under financial pressure. The country’s residential mortgage delinquency ratio – which tracks overdue mortgage payments – jumped to the highest in four years as of late 2023. Some homeowners are being forced to sell their properties at a discounted rate, which is only exacerbating the problem.
...
Chinese banks’ bad debt — loans they no longer expect to recover — hit a record 3.5 trillion yuan ($492 billion) at the end of September. Fitch Ratings has warned the situation could deteriorate further in 2026 as households struggle to repay mortgages and other loans.
A prolonged property slump could also deepen deflationary pressures. Former finance minister Lou Jiwei recently warned that households’ worsening outlook — driven by falling home values — will affect consumption levels and intensify price declines.
According to economists at Morgan Stanley and Beijing-based think tank CF40, the property sector’s drag on inflation could even be greater than official data suggest. They argue that the methodology used to determine China’s official Consumer Price Index understates falling rents, and, by extension, the broader deflationary impact.
adhocfungus likes this.
They tried to overturn the 2020 US election. Now, they hold power in Trump’s Washington
Those who tried to overturn the 2020 election now occupy key federal roles, shaping rules and sowing doubt for 2026
The people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have more power than ever – and they plan to use it.
Bolstered by the president, they have prominent roles in key parts of the federal government. Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who helped advance Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, now leads the civil rights division of the justice department. An election denier, Heather Honey, now serves as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department of homeland security. Kurt Olsen, an attorney involved in the “stop the steal” movement, is now a special government employee investigating the 2020 election.
A movement that once pressured elected officials to bend to its whims is now part of the government.
House Republican Troy Nehls will not seek re-election in 2026
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, announced Saturday that he would not seek re-election next year.
Nehls, a close ally of Donald Trump who co-sponsored legislation that proposed putting the president on the $100 bill and renaming Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump, said he came to his decision after consulting his family during the Thanksgiving holiday — and that he intends to “focus on my family and return home after this Congress.”
Nehls’ announcement adds to uncertainty for House Republicans. Their majority — 219 to 213 — will shrink after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., resigns effective early January, and after a number of other Republicans retire or seek other office.
RRF Caserta Sport. Calcio serie C. Casertana Cavese 3 a 1
Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse
Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse
Eugen Roshko, creator of Mastodon
I’ve been enamored with the idea of controlling my social presence ever since Diaspora launched in 2010. Diaspora, like many other decentralized solutions that fizzled out, was trying to solve the problems of closed social platforms: no interoperability, no real control over your feed, no data privacy, no way to opt out of ads, and no way to move your profile somewhere else.While I put up with what I thought was my best choice at the time, which was a pre-Musk Twitter, a web developer named Eugen Rochko was busy building what would eventually become my primary social network, a platform called Mastodon.
I joined Mastodon in 2022 and created a single-user instance at henshaw.social, which I host on Masto Host. I was attracted by the ability to 100% control my social presence using my own domain while also following and engaging with people on countless other Mastodon servers and other fediverse platforms that support the ActivityPub protocol.
Mastodon profile page on a single-person instance hosted at henshaw.social
After altogether quitting centralized social networks (except LinkedIn), I can honestly say I love using Mastodon. I follow interesting people, my mental health is much better without X and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and the absence of performative posts is refreshing. I follow and engage with whom I want, easily block bots, spammers, and annoying people, don’t care about my follower count, and enjoy an algorithm-free feed without ads or people posting things for disingenuous reasons. So, it caught my attention when the news came out that the creator of Mastodon was stepping down as CEO and transferring his ownership of the trademark and other assets to the non-profit.I had communicated with Rochko via Mastodon over the years, but I had never had a face-to-face conversation with him. I thought he would be the perfect person to restart the Coywolf podcast, especially given the significant changes underway with Mastodon. But mainly, I just wanted to learn more about Eugen. What did he do before Mastodon? What has it been like running Mastodon? And what does he plan to do next?
Eugen Rochko interview highlights
📝 Editor’s Note
The conversations below have been edited for brevity and clarity, but the original, unedited versions can be heard in the full audio interview or read in the transcript.
- Why Threads interoperability with Mastodon fell flat
- What it will take to get people to switch to the fediverse (open social web)
- Why Rochko views Mastodon as a “social network” instead of a “social media platform”
- Why Mastodon chose ActivityPub and whether or not it will ever merge with ATProto
Why Threads interoperability with Mastodon fell flat
Jon Henshaw: I got pretty excited when Zuckerberg and Meta were being serious about integrating ActivityPub into Threads. And a lot of people I knew were just like, “It’s not going to happen,” and “They’re going to screw it up,” but I thought it was going to be for real this time. And The Verge had a couple of good interviews that convinced me they were committed to it. However, while I saw some really nice updates come through, I also saw some that weren’t so great. It felt like they were making poor choices, likely because of their legal department.Eugen Rochko: That’s exactly how I would put it. It’s like Cambridge Analytica burned them, and they didn’t want a repeat. And that really limited what they could do. I obviously cannot speak for them. I haven’t spoken to anyone from their side for a long time now. But from our discussions when they were launching it, they asked questions about implementation details and how to do different things. It turned out they couldn’t do things because of their legal department, which was highly disappointing. I think the product they launched was promising, but it didn’t deliver to the very end. The whole concept of having federation behind an additional opt-in that people are not even aware of is not helpful, and there are a couple of details that are designed so carefully that it’s almost alienating, like how the pop-up appears every 30 days, asking users if they still want to continue fediverse sharing. As if it’s like, “my god, like I didn’t know, stop that.”
“Continue sharing to the fediverse?” popup on Threads
JH: It’s a joke and terrible. It sounds like it started pretty well. The people were in the right place as far as hearts, minds, and whatever their original intentions were. It even sounds, from some of The Verge interviews with Mark, like the intentions were genuine and that they wanted to create interoperability. But it all kind of ground to a halt because of legal concerns.ER: So it’s far from perfect, but at the same time, I do see people on Threads in my home feed, which is a huge win. That would not have been possible otherwise. And I think it enhances the experience. Some people might disagree because it’s still associated with Meta and don’t want to see anything from Threads. But for someone who cares about staying in touch with more mainstream people, creators, and so on, it can be an enriching experience rather than a negative one.
JH: I totally agree. I was going to say, we definitely know there are plenty of outspoken people and those who manage instances that consider Threads an insta-block. But for others like us, I appreciate that we can follow people on Threads to stay informed. Even with the most basic ActivityPub integration, I can at least follow them, and they might even know I engaged with their post, even though it’s still constrained. There are still plenty of good people on Threads I want to hear from.
Later in the interview, Eugen expanded more on why Threads may have stopped working on fediverse-related features.
ER: I think what happened is that the engineers who were working on Threads were excited to do something decentralized and participate in the Fediverse. And before it launched, they felt like, on an organizational level, they needed to promise something different to Twitter, some more freedom to creators to move around, to have this decentralization that would basically provide a layer of security against things happening on Twitter for them to gain market share. But as it turned out, once they launched, they still got a lot of users, and their priorities quickly shifted. So instead of focusing on missing fediverse features, it became, “We need to build an NBA score widget into the sidebar,” or something like that. And I think that the only way to put this back on their roadmap is for more companies, platforms, and communities to make the fediverse a bigger part of their strategy, which will push them to refocus on it.
What it will take to get people to switch to the fediverse (open social web)
JH: What do you think it will take to get more people to see the fediverse as a better solution? Mastodon is my social network now. I don’t use anything else because I don’t want an algorithm showing me what it thinks I should see, rather than what I want to see. I follow people for a reason. I turn on notifications for people for a reason. I prefer to experience social media that way, rather than every time I come here, it’s just like, “Oh my god, it’s always the same people and the same topics,” which is a bubble, and I don’t want to be part of it. There are other things, too, like the lack of advertising, which is fantastic.A big one is the ability to control my social presence. I’m one of those nutty people who runs a single-person instance. I love the idea of having henshaw.social, and controlling every aspect of my social presence. I love it for brands, whether they’re nonprofit, for-profit, or whatever. I even run an instance for the Coywolf brand at coywolf.social. You get to control everything. It drives me nuts that more people don’t see that.
I know the general answer to why people aren’t there: their audience isn’t. And for many companies, they can’t advertise, and I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take in society, with technology, something political, or whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?
ER: Good question. I’ve been saying this for a long time: if everybody were using smoke signals, we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been that way.
It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, “We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.” While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which, by the way, is an absolutely god-awful platform.
The most basic answer to the question is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you, and that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. I think there are promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software. And I think as more people and organizations realize this, the easier it becomes to convince others to join and use Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.
JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.
ER: It’s a long road because it’s always been about education. Back in 2016, when Mastodon launched, the marketing strategy was constantly explaining to people that Twitter was bad because of how it was structured. The message was: “This is how it works. We have a different structure, and it works differently. Therefore, it will not suffer the same fate.” Mastodon provides an alternative that will not follow the same path. And it’s always been about convincing people of this.
Why Rochko views Mastodon as a “social network” instead of a “social media platform”
ER: I’ve historically overused the phrase social media platform to describe Mastodon, but I think it’s more true that what we’re building is a social network. I think there is a difference in those terms because media is something you consume passively. It’s TV, it’s radio, it’s just reading stuff. Network is you networking with people, you talking with them. And I think that has always been a part of how we think of Mastodon and how we’re building it.In terms of how we speak about it, we haven’t always done that because one of the complexities of doing this is that people care a lot about the words and definitions you use. So when you say, “Mastodon is a social network,” some people would respond, “Mastodon is part of the fediverse, which is the network. So how can you say that Mastodon is a network?” That’s why we’ve been avoiding saying network and trying to be more like a media platform. But I feel we should pivot more toward the term social network.
JH: I think of that concept, as it relates to Mastodon, as more positive and healthy engagement versus everything else being a place where people broadcast and are performative. And that’s probably one of the things I should have mentioned when I was talking about what I like about Mastodon. It’s a respite from the other networks, and I feel like everywhere else is about being performative. I don’t feel that pressure on Mastodon. On Mastodon, I’m just having fun, and I’m engaging with people who interest me.
ER: I think Mastodon and the fediverse are part of the old internet that was more about communicating with each other and having fun, and less about passive consumption and just essentially watching TV, which is what TikTok is, except worse. And I think that part of this is that Mastodon and the fediverse will never pay people to create content for it? Like, you can make money off of being on it by being an artist and offering commissions, or by selling artworks, and you post about it and direct people to your website, but it’s not Mastodon that’s paying you. We’re not paying you to create content. We’re not paying you to get more views and then paying you based on the number of views you get, which is what’s been implemented on almost every other platform. On Twitter (X), you get money for views. On TikTok, you get money for views. So basically, you end up being almost like a TV channel for a TV network, except it’s a hustle, because you don’t have a contract. You’re just trying to make something and see what sticks.
JH: Again, it’s performative. Paying you is just another way to push you to be performative.
ER: Yeah, but the big question is that obviously the market for passive consumption is much bigger than the market for active participation, which I think is some of the explanation for why the numbers have turned out the way they have over the years, because the internet has moved to the passive consumption model.
I personally think Mastodon should stick with an active participation model rather than try to appeal to a passive consumption audience. You can still argue that a passive model would bring in more users and make it easier, because it’s just like turning the TV on and your brain off, but it wouldn’t be the platform we know today. It would be a different platform then. And I think there is still space on the internet for a platform like Mastodon.
JH: I think you could even make an argument that at some point, you could have more real people engaging, creating, and sharing on Mastodon than many of the other networks. I read all the time about a huge percentage of “users” being bots, whether to cause trouble or whatever, but that’s not necessarily what we would consider genuine, active human engagement.
Why Mastodon chose ActivityPub and whether or not it will ever merge with ATProto
JH: From all the decentralized protocols and solutions you were looking at, what made you choose ActivityPub for Mastodon?ER: There was heavy campaigning from people who were working on ActivityPub to make me implement it in Mastodon. I remember GitHub issues being opened and messages being sent. And to be fair, when I started looking into it, I realized that it was more well-rounded than what we were using at the time. There were a lot of shortcomings. As I mentioned before, it was based on the idea of public feeds with extra information on top, but essentially amounted to little more than an RSS feed for a website. There were components for interactivity, and it used a lot of the features that supported Mastodon’s functionality to deliver the user experience it needed. And ActivityPub promised that basically all of that would be baked in from the very beginning, and would be a cleaner, all-encompassing solution, rather than having a mix of XML and different protocols. ActivityPub just felt cleaner and was more future-proofed. It was well thought out, and the fact that W3C was developing it convinced me this is the real deal.
JH: Do you foresee a future where we’ll have ActivityPub 2.0 that addresses concerns people have had about it, like efficiency, scalability, and other issues? Or do you see ActivityPub potentially merging with ATProto or something similar?
ER: I don’t see that happening. I don’t think there’s much to merge. I think ATProto, as far as protocols go, is very opinionated about how things work, and there’s not much room to make it work differently. But ActivityPub is very flexible. And since we implemented it in 2018, there’s been a lot of work on defining how things are done, because ActivityPub is essentially a language. Or rather, it’s a vocabulary, and what developers and the federalists have been doing is defining grammar. Like, how do you say thing A and how do you say thing B, and understand each other?
Some of the most basic stuff is baked in, straightforward, and easy to do. But when you want to do something more advanced, like when you need some agreement, and you can use the same vocabulary, but you have different grammar, you can’t understand each other. So, different platforms have been collaborating to create fediverse extension proposals that define how different functionality is to be understood within the protocol. And there is now quite a big collection of these, and Mastodon itself has worked on a couple, most recently the quote post thing, where we’ve proposed allowing quotes to include consent from the author of the original post to be published. And what I see is that the protocol is evolving this way. So it’s not verbatim the same protocol as in 2018, but on a more official level, it still is. So, I don’t think there’s going to be an ActivityPub 2.0, or rather, I wouldn’t want it to be a 2.0. I think that would be a bad idea. I think a continuation and progressive evolution of the protocol is going to happen, is happening, and is a good thing. But a clean break would at this point no longer be a good thing.
Listen to the full interview
Read the audio transcript
Jon Henshaw: I’m here with the creator of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, and I’m excited to finally meet you.Eugen Rochko …and I’m excited to talk to you in person. Well, not in person, but you know what I mean.
JH: It’s more in person than it’s ever been. Yeah. As opposed to the random Mastodon post. Yeah. So it’s neat to see somebody from afar and just get to to know them a little bit. So one of the one of the reasons I really wanted to reach out to you was just the announcement that that you were leaving Mastodon, at least in your current capacity. I know you’re still gonna be an advisor, but I felt that personally because I had a software company for about 10 years and it was the greatest feeling ever to finally like be able to leave that, you know, because I was ready to leave it for years, but couldn’t.
Are you feeling sort of a similar relief of like, even though you’ve loved it and you made it and stuff to be able to move on to something new?
ER: Yeah, I mean, I’d say it’s like a mixed bag of feelings because there is definitely an element of relief. A relief that I’ve only felt in a similar way when I went on my honeymoon with my wife. And for the first time, Mastodon had a DevOps engineer and some other people to actually run it and handle all the tasks while I was gone.
Like that was the relief I felt back then. It’s like, oh, finally, I don’t have to do everything. I can just forget about it for a while. And I’m feeling a similar relief now, which is, finally, after 10 long years, this is kind of not my problem anymore.
JH: That is a really good feeling to go on vacation, in your case you’re honeymoon, and to know that there’s somebody there who can actually fix something or deal with something while you’re gone. You can actually just relax for like the first.
ER: Yeah, yeah. That’s been one of the hardest parts, I think, is because a long time I’ve been doing this alone. I started working on Mastodon in 2016, and it wasn’t until 2023 that we officially had a second hire, I think.
It’s not that, I mean, it has to be specified that alone, by alone, I mean like working on it full-time or like even being on the team officially, because there’s been people who freelanced for me before that. And obviously there’s a lot of contributors from the community to the open source software of Mastodon, but 2023 was the first time that we had somebody to handle the tasks of running Mastodon social and handling maintenance of the repository without me and so on and so forth. And since then I’ve only delegated more and more tasks. Now there’s a lot of people working for Mastodon, I have to add an asterisk by a lot. I mean like about 10 or so. I don’t mean like, you know, because in the software world, a lot can mean a lot. Mastodon is still a very, very small organization in the scheme of things, but compared to 2016, it’s 10 times larger.
JH: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I want to get more into some Mastodon related questions, but I’m always interested in more of the career origin story. And so I kind of want to start at the beginning of your career and just ask you what got you into coding? Like what drew you to it? How did you sort of start?
ER: Gosh, okay, that’s going way back. Well, I think my first coding attempts were I wanted to make a video game. I was a child. It was before I moved to Germany, so it was before I was 12. I don’t know, could have been 10. I think I had bootleg copies of some game maker software. Obviously I of course had some 3D modeling software as well as I was, know, born in Russia. It was the peak of the bootleg industry over there. To buy some software, you would go to the market and you would just buy like a CD with a hundred different pieces of software for, I don’t know, the equivalent of probably one dollar. And it came with a key gen included and sometimes it didn’t even need a keygen, dependent on the software and how secure it was originally. But yeah, so I had access to 3D modeling software and some game making programs. I don’t remember which anymore. There was different game makers at the time. And I remember just messing around trying to make something.
I think the peak of what I achieved back then was having like a shiny ball sphere move around through terrain in three dimensions and that was about it. Like my first attempts I remember some programming that I didn’t really understand back then was like piecing together documentation and just literally like a monkey and a typewriter type thing until something works.
JH: Trial and error, figuring it out until something.
ER: Exactly. And then it wasn’t until a couple years later after I moved to Germany where I got into making websites and it was because I was… Well, I wanted to make a fan site for a cartoon that I was watching at the time. Avatar the Last Airbender, one of the best cartoons out there. So I was like… It was at the time that I think the second or third season were just coming out and there was a lot of online discussions about it and I was reading all of these fan sites and I wanted to be part of it. So I was coding my own as well.
It was like my first foray into HTML and then eventually upgrading to PHP and trying to build more fun features into the site, like having a forum and stuff like that. And that was all very extremely basic. And I think I probably was like 13 or 14 at the time and I was putting this on like some free hosting platform under a fake name and so on.
I remember being very afraid that somebody would find out that I put like a fake name on the free hosting website and somebody would come and get me.
JH: That’s hilarious. Nobody, nobody can know you though. So I’m, picking up a theme of what I would call autodidact, which is teach yourself how to do these things. It sounds like obviously you you’re learning from other people’s documentation or videos or whatever it might be, but like, it sounds like as you went along, you wanted to do something and you figured it out. Like you just trial and error. Like I said, banging on the keyboard, like a monkey, which we’ve all done.
ER: Yeah, I kind of started my career in software development before I even went to Uni because I was obviously the fan sites that was early work and then eventually I moved on to making WordPress themes and plugins and eventually eventually moving on to Ruby and starting to to do more complex applications and I remember already starting to like freelance to try to make some money on the side and save up. And then…
JH: Are you 18 yet? Are you 18 yet? Are we talking like you’re still 15 or something?
ER: I’m trying to remember. I don’t remember when I started freelancing for sure. I think that my very first small clients were before I was 18. But probably the more serious projects were after I graduated high school. But I went to Uni basically already knowing that I kind of have the skills to make money with this career. But wanting to get a degree to satisfy my parents and have some kind of some kind of safety net. Also because I knew that in Germany it at least from what I heard at the time it didn’t matter so much what you could do as what kind of degree you had to get a job so I kind of like I needed it. My attitude to Uni was like I feel like I don’t really need this but I’m gonna do it just to have a check mark but then, in hindsight, after going to Uni and studying computer science, I mean, I only have a bachelor of science. I didn’t go all the way to masters, but it was very useful, and it was stuff that I learned that I did not expect. And I think it’s helped me along the way. I think it’s important knowledge.
JH: So you weren’t completely bored out of your mind, at least in the first year or two of classes?
ER: I can’t promise that. I have to admit, if we’re doing confessions, I spent most of my university just kind of doing random stuff on my laptop and not listening.
JH: Because you already knew how to do it, right? It’s all basic computer science.
ER: Yeah, but I did, I did fail a couple of exams a couple of times too. So it wasn’t like, you know, it wasn’t just breezing through, it was difficult. And the degree was, was difficult for everybody actually. Like the first, the first year there was so many people, there were so many people in those classes, they were full. And then as you went to second and third year of this degree, you just go into these more advanced classes, it would be like less than 10 people sitting in the room.
JH: Oh yeah, that’s small. So then you kind of kept doing stuff, it sounds like on the side or as a consultant, you got your degree and then looking at your LinkedIn, it looks like you had a handful of regular jobs at companies or something like that.
ER: I was freelancing but that was basically all during university. I don’t know how they’re chronological on on linkedin specifically but most of them were kind of ongoing on and off for you know during university and funnily enough Mastodon was one of the things I was also doing in university to not pay attention to class.
JH: Okay, that’s kind of the timeframe is 2016.
ER: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think if I remember looking up the first commit in the GitHub repositories from March 2016 and then it wasn’t public on Hacker News until I think September 2016. that was the time that was being developed for the first time.
JH: When I think of something like Mastodon, it’s like audacious, you know, it’s sort of like, I’m going to make a thing to compete against the big ones, the Twitter at the time and so on.
What was sort of like going through your mind at the time that this is going to be sort of a fun project. Maybe somebody will use it or you’re like, or was it on the further extreme of just like, I’m going to create the alternative that everybody switches to, you know, in this federated type of approach.
ER: I mean, I guess the big secret is that I didn’t think that it would be competing with Twitter and do all of that ambitious stuff. I just wanted to work on a fun project and I wanted to have an alternative to a website that I didn’t like anymore. And to be fair, I did research. How could I make this better for other people as well? I remember interviewing some people on forums and stuff, like what do you wish was different about Twitter, and trying to build it around those expectations. It was also the kind of the post-Gamergate period on Twitter. So like a lot of people were traumatized by how that platform was, and how many alt-right and Nazi people were active on it. And so that influenced a lot in how the initial mass was being developed because I was trying to make it like, how do we prevent this? How do we make this safer?
JH: Was the Fediverse component always a part of it or did that come later?
ER: No, absolutely, yeah. Because my first contact with the Fediverse was actually not building Mastodon, but using a platform called GNU Social. And my first ideas were to build a Tweet Deck equivalent for GNU Social. And it wasn’t until I started working on it and wanted to start looking up the documentation for the Social API that realized that it would actually be simpler to try and make a start from a blank slate than try to fit my expectations onto a somewhat antiquated piece of software by that time.
JH: Was there a solution prior to ActivityPub? Because I think I read somewhere that ActivityPub was added later.
ER: True. the first platform, actually you know what I’m not going to make the statement the first federated platform because I don’t know, technically email is federated. The first social federated platform, social media-like federated platform that I know of was Identica founded by even in 2010 I think around that time.
I remember I might have used it or I might have at least seen it at the time because I had friends who were programmers who were very into this federation idea.
But I wasn’t super heavily aware of it or interested. I was just kind of aware that it’s there. There were more interesting things happening. I think Google Wave something was the first experiment. First experiment, I remember people creating links and then having a shared workspace. Everyone was typing at the same time. It was revolutionary at the time.
JH: Now it’s another dead Google product.
ER: Yes, among thousands. But yeah, so I was kind of aware that this kind of space existed when I started looking for it again in 2016.
By the time that I came back to GNU Social, the ecosystem and the protocol was called OStatus. I don’t know if it was originally called that or if it kind of transitioned to being that over between 2010 and 2016. It’s possible it was OStatus from the very beginning. I know that it was never a completed standard. It was always basically what’s called a draft. So it was a collection of different component protocols, but also some of them were in draft stage, some were actual standards like Webfinger. And basically that’s how this whole thing worked. It was centered around the concept of feeds, kind of like RSS feeds, but they were using Atom with some extensions, some of the activity streams extensions that are kind of the same as what we’re using in ActivityPub. It was like the predecessor for basically telling in more detail, like what is this activity? What is it doing? What is the metadata for like attached images and whatnot? And so obviously I was never and have never been a protocol designer. So I just, you know, researched how did GNU Social do it, what’s this protocol, how do you implement it, and I tried to do the same with Mastodon. There were other examples. GNU Social itself was open source, so could always look up how did they do this, how did they do that, but there were a couple other Fediverse projects that I was able to look up to solve.
JH: I think there was Diaspora back then and some other things.
ER: Diaspora was there, but Diaspora, to be fair, was not part of the Fediverse. They had their own. They were also federated social media platform, but they had their own protocol that was Diaspora specific. And I never, I remember being interested in it. And I think a couple of years earlier than that, when they had their Kickstarter.
JH: (18:17.006)You’re saying to Diaspora is sort of like its own non-federated protocol. I was gonna ask you, do you remember TentIO?
ER: Yes, yes, I do remember.
JH: Was that also sort of like not federated?
ER: Just a correction, I did not say Diaspora was not federated, because I think it was. It was just not, it was not using the same protocol as everything else that I was using. And I think the same is true for TentIO. I think it was its own project that was like trying to do it in a new way. And I don’t know much else beyond that. I remember looking at their website. I don’t remember what it said.
JH: I just remember thinking Diaspora hadn’t really worked out that well. and TentIO just really intrigued me. I was like, this is going to finally be it. Like, this will be the one, that’s going to work. And, and I was, I had my own service. I was going to call it camp out cause it was called tent. You know, it was very clever. That was a joke. And then it just like went away and I was so frustrated. It’s like watching these different attempts sort of happen. and then came along ActivityPub and then came along Mastodon. I meant Mastodon came in and then ActivityPub. What about ActivityPub from all the protocols and solutions you were looking out there got you to be like, I’m going to commit to this. Like, this is going to be the protocol that’s going to be used for Mastodon moving forward.
ER: Well, there was heavy campaigning from people who were working on ActivityPub to make me implement it in Mastodon. I remember GitHub issues being opened and messages being sent. And to be fair, when I started looking into it, I realized that it was more well-rounded than what we using at the time. There were a lot of shortcomings. As I mentioned before, was based around the idea of public feeds with extra information on top, but essentially not much more than having an RSS feed for a website. And there were components for interactivity. Obviously, it was using something called Salmon to send replies back to people. But a lot of the stuff that supported Mastodon’s functionality to actually get get the user experience to be what it needed to be was, let’s say creative, applications of that protocol or stretching it to its limit. And ActivityPub promised to basically all of that has been baked in from the very beginning. And it would just be a cleaner, all-encompassing solution, rather than having this mix of XML and different protocols and it just felt cleaner and like it was more future-proof, like it was actually thought out and of course the fact that it was being developed by W3C convinced me as well because like okay this is the real deal.
JH: Standards-based. Do you foresee a future where we’ll call it ActivityPub 2.0, whatever, you we want to call it. But just a future where that protocol kind of addresses concerns people have had about it, concerns around like efficiency or scalability and that type of thing. Or do you see ActivityPub potentially kind of merging with something like an ATProto or something like.
ER: I don’t see that happening. I don’t think that there’s a lot there to merge, if I’m honest. think that ATPoto is very, as far as protocols go, it’s very opinionated about how things work and there’s not a lot of room for making it work differently. But ActivityPub, on the other hand, is very flexible and over the past, how many years since it’s been since 2017 when we first started discussing it. think in Mastodon was implemented in 2018. I remember the big launch. There’s been a lot of work on defining how things are done because essentially what ActivityPub is, it’s kind of a language. It’s a, or rather it’s a vocabulary and what developers and the federalists have been doing is defining grammar. Like how do you say thing A and how do you say thing B and understand each other? Some of that is baked in. So some of the most basic stuff is baked in and very straightforward and easy to do. But when you want to do something more advanced, you need some kind of agreement because you can use the same vocabulary, but if you have different grammar, it can basically, it doesn’t help you understand each other. So different platforms have been collaborating to create Fediverse extension protocols or proposals, sorry, proposals, not protocols, to define how different functionality is actually to be understood within the protocol. And there is now quite big collection of these and, and Mastodon itself has worked on a couple, most recently the quote post thing, where we’ve worked on a proposal that would allow quotes to include consent from the author of the original post to be published. And what I see is that the protocol is evolving this way. So it’s not, it’s not, verbatim the same protocol that it was in 2018 but also on a more official level it still is, right. So, I don’t think there’s going to be an ActivityPub 2.0 or rather I yeah I would I wouldn’t want it to be a 2.0 I think that would be a bad idea I think a continuation and progressive evolution of the protocol is going to happen is happening and is a good thing. But a clean break would at this point no longer be a good thing. It’s kind of like, I mean, why did Blizzard turn Overwatch into Overwatch 2, right? What was the point of that? It became kind of a worse game.
JH: It’s interesting because, one of the things I heard was with quote posts, which is something I wrote about because I was pretty excited about it. I wrote about that on Coywolf because I really liked sort of the controls that were baked in for the user from a safety perspective. What I pick up on is I feel like Mastodon is in a position to help push the protocol to a better place. So if I heard you correctly, the way quote posts were done in Mastodon helped create sort of a proposal for how that could be, the rules around that could be handled in the protocol. And either they’re already done the same way, or if ActivityPub adopts that, then the people working on Mastodon today would would tweak the code to work with whatever changes remain to ActivityPub.
ER: Mostly right.
JH: It doesn’t have to be completely right. Cause I’m not saying I know exactly everything I know what I’m talking about. So, okay.
I got pretty excited when, Zuckerberg and Meta were actually being serious about integrating ActivityPub into threads. And a lot of people I knew were just like, it’s not going to happen. They’re going to screw it up. They’re going to like, you know, whatever. like, no, I think, I think it’s for real this time. And The Verge had a couple of good interviews, you know, where it’s like, no, I think they’re really committed to it. And, we had some really nice updates that came through. I didn’t like them all. It felt like they were making really poor choices because of maybe their legal department, you know, where they’re making it so convoluted.
ER: That’s exactly how I would put it. It’s like they’ve been burned by Cambridge Analytica and they didn’t want to repeat of that. And that really limited what they were able to do and what they are able to do. I obviously cannot speak for them. I haven’t heard, I haven’t spoken to anyone from their side for a long time now. But from our discussions when they were launching it and they were asking questions about implemention details and how to do this, how to do that and us asking them like what will you be able to do? Just a lot of it is like we can’t do that because of legal which ended up being extremely disappointing from my perspective because I think the product that they launched is just it’s the promise is there but it really does not deliver to the very end because this the whole concept of federation is behind an additional opt-in that people are not even aware about is not helpful and there are a couple of details about that like like designed so carefully that it’s almost alienating like how the pop-up appears like 30 days every 30 days asking if you still want to continue fediverse sharing as if it’s like, my god, like I didn’t know, stop it, you know, like.
JH: It’s a joke. I mean, it is terrible what it ended up becoming. And it sounds like it started off pretty good. The people were in the right place as far as like hearts, minds, whatever, whatever their intentions were. It even sounds like from some of The Verge interview stuff with Mark that that was, you know, genuine intention to do these things to create interoperability. But it all kind of ground to a halt because of legal concerns is what it sounds like.
ER: So it’s far from perfect, but at the same time I do see, you know, people on threads in my home feed or master, which is already a huge win. I mean, that would not have been possible otherwise. And I think it enhances the experience. Some people might disagree because like, people using Threads. I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to know about them, but you know, for somebody who cares a little bit about, you know, being in touch with some more mainstream people, creators and so on, it can be an enhancing experience rather than a negative one.
JH: I totally agree. I was going to say, we definitely, more you than me know there are plenty of outspoken people and plenty of people who manage instances that are like, Threads is an insta-block. But for others, which it sounds like you and I are kind of similar. I appreciate it at the very least to be able to follow some people to be informed where I wouldn’t otherwise if they didn’t have even the most basic of ActivityPub type of integration, where I could at least follow or they might even know I had some interaction, even though it’s very limited because of the way they have it locked down. I really like it. Like I, there are still good, there are plenty of good people on Threads, that I want to hear from. I want to know when they post something. Sometimes it’s even a brand, but you know, usually it’s a person, a journalist, whatever it might be, that that’s what they’ve chosen and that’s fine, that’s their choice.
What do you think it will take to get more people. I know this is not first time you’ve been asked this question to get more people to be like, this is a better solution. From my perspective, Mastodon is my social network now. I don’t really use anything else. and, and that’s because I don’t want some algorithm showing me what it wants to show me versus like what I actually want to see. Like I follow people for a reason. I turn on notifications for people for a reason. Like I want to experience social in that way versus like every time I come there, it’s just like, oh my God, it’s always the same people that they want me to see their post and always the same topics that they’re trying to get me to see, which is a bubble or whatever I don’t want to be a part of.
There’s also other things, know, it’s the lack of advertising is kind of fantastic. There’s so much about it, controlling my social presence. I run, I’m one of those nutty people who runs a single person instance because I love it. I love the idea that I have henshaw.social and I control every aspect of my social presence. I love it for brands. know, a brand can be a nonprofit, or-profit, whatever. I love it for brands, which I’m running for Coywolf at coywolf.social. And it’s like, you control everything. It drives me nuts that more people don’t see that. And I know the answer, I know the general answer, which is, people aren’t there, my audience isn’t there, or it’s whatever it might be. Or, for lot of companies, it’s like, can’t advertise, you know what I mean? I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take, I don’t know, in society, with technology, something happening, something political, whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?
ER: Good question. I mean, I feel like your question evolved a little bit since you started asking it because I think originally I understood it as like what does Mastodon need to do for more platforms like threads to start thinking seriously about implementing ActivityPub. The answer to which would be it has to grow because I think what happened is that obviously the engineers who were working on Threads were excited to do something decentralized and participate in the Fediverse. And before it launched, they felt like on an organizational level, they felt like they needed to promise something different to Twitter, some more freedom to creators to move around, to have this decentralization that would basically provide a layer of security against things happening that have happened on Twitter for them to gain market share. But as it turned out, once they launched, they got a lot of users regardless and their priorities quickly shifted. So instead of, there are features missing in our Fediverse integration, it became, we need to build like an NBA score widget into the sidebar or something, you know? And I think that the only way around that to put this back on their roadmap and on more companies and platforms and communities roadmap is for the Fediverse to become a bigger component in the market, to have a bigger market share because it’s all about people. I’ve been saying this for a long time, but if everybody was using smoke signals, then we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been this way. And sometimes it can be bit misleading because you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community and then the conversations become like, we definitely need feature X. This is what’s stopping us from growing. This is what’s stopping other people from using the platform. And sometimes in individual cases, it’s true, but the sad reality is that any kind of flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which is absolutely god-awful platform.
JH: Well, with your answer, you talked about that it likely will take these other platforms having better integration with the vocabulary, the way that ActivityPub works so that like Mastodon could talk to them. I was kind of was going two different directions. I think the one that I was really thinking about was people moving over to Mastodon in a similar way, and for those listening, I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but in a similar way to WordPress, know, where, WordPress just kind of became the de facto CMS because you know, people would, again, would argue maybe not today, but leading up to today, it was so easy to install. There’s so many benefits to it. It’s has a huge developer community. you know, so to the point that in 2025, over 50% are using it.
ER: To answer your more broad question, which is what will it take in society for people to switch to the Fediverse in large? I think the answer is there. The most basic answer is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you. And that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. And I think there is promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if those people are living in Europe or Asia or any other place on earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is that you can have a social media platform that is in your country, that is local to you, that is not subject to whatever is happening in the US. Or for any matter, not subject to any third party that is doing whatever, even us, people developing the software. And I think as more people and more organizations are realizing this, the easier it becomes to convince people to join Mastodon and start using Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.
JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.
ER: It’s a, it’s a long road. It’s a long road because it’s kind of, it’s always been about education. Back in 2016, when it launched the, if I may do air quotes, the marketing strategy for Mastodon has always been explaining to people Twitter is bad because this is how it’s structured. This is how it works. We have a different structure. It works differently. Therefore, it will not suffer the same fate. It provides an alternative that will not follow the same path. And it’s always been about convincing people of this.
JH: That’s great. I think the last part of that that I want to ask you is, does there still need to be certain features that are typical? And I don’t know if that means adding some type of quasi algorithm or adding or whatever it might be. And I know that you’re working on packs, you know, so it makes it really easy for people to instantly follow people with similar interests, which is you know, that’s one of reasons why I use social media is because I want to interact with people with similar interests. And so do you think it’ll likely take adding some of those features and things that you’re seeing success for as long as it fits within the paradigm of what you want it to be. Meaning like at this point, even as I stated earlier, you know, we don’t want it to be algorithm driven and stuff, but…
ER: I think as before the answer to this is a couple different angles. There’s never just a singular answer to these questions because it’s quite a complicated area.
So first packs, we’re actually calling them collections now internally and probably publicly as well. But I do think that one of the things that has always been hindering Mastodon adoption is discovery and onboarding. So on a platform like Twitter or Facebook, where you just have a single website and a database with everything that’s in it, a person joining, you just show them whatever is interesting to them.
You you have all the data, have all the users, search works as expected. It’s the most simple thing to do. On a decentralized platform like Mastodon, there’s kind of no guarantee that whatever the user is interested in is already in your database, and there’s an element of you would browse around other websites to find this content and then subscribe to it. But obviously this is not, this hasn’t stood the test of time and the skillset of an average internet user, people have lost the ability to browse websites. So now everything is a lot more like you never have to leave your interface on Mastodon and you never have to like venture out. I guess unless somebody sends you like a specific link through an instant messenger. So solving the discovery problem, helping people get started with here’s the people I may want to see from is going to be very helpful in that regard. So I think that is the big hope around collections and I think it is going to be helpful. That being said, it’s always there’s pros and cons and collections may also be, when working on this feature, we’ve heard feedback from Bluesky developers who worked on their starter packs feature of how this feature was abused on Bluesky, how it was misused to basically you would create a list of like interesting people and like most of them would be, you know, what the user wants to see. But then you would include like one or two accounts. They’re just like extra and it would just accrue followers and become like a big influencer account or a spam vector or something like that. And so we’re obviously thinking about how can you prevent that? How can you avoid that? But on some level, having a feature like this, there’s always going to be some kind of risk with that. Any kind of publicity always brings with it a risk of it being misused in some way. So, I mean, it’s all going to be tightly integrated with the report feature and all sorts of things, but yeah.
JH: It’s funny you say that because I’ve been doing SEO for like forever. And of course SEO has a pretty bad connotation to a lot of people because there’s a lot of people in SEO who have done a lot of bad things. And it just made me sort of laugh when you’re describing it. It’s like, yeah, I know plenty of people who would do that. I know plenty of opportunists who would be like, yeah, that’s my vector.
ER: Yeah.
JH: But what you did describe, I feel is consistent with the way Mastodon has been built to this day, which I think was also described in the new quote feature, which is everything that, does get added has a lot of thought behind it. And, and I think care and, and I really like hearing that whatever collections ends up being will be the better version than what was, say, launched on a different platform.
ER: I’ve historically abused the phrase social media platform to describe Mastodon, but I think it’s more true that what we’re building is a social network. And I think that there is a difference in those two terms because if you think about it, media is something you consume passively. It’s TV, it’s radio, it’s, you know, just reading stuff. Network is you’re networking with people, you’re talking to them. And I think that has always been a part of how we think of Mastodon and how we’re building Mastodon to allow that. But obviously in terms of like how we speak about it, we haven’t always done that because there’s one of the complexities of doing this is that people care a lot about the words that you use and the definitions that you use. So when you would say, Mastodon is a social network, they would be like, well, Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, which is the network. So how can you say that Mastodon is a network? That’s why we’ve been kind of avoiding saying network and trying to be more like media platform, social media platform. But, you know, that’s, I feel like we should pivot more to the other one.
JH: I think of it as positive or healthy engagement versus everything else being a place where people broadcast, where people are performative. And that’s probably that’s one of things that I should have included when I was talking about things I like to mess about Mastodon is it is a respite from the other networks and that I feel like every other place is about being performative. And I don’t feel that pressure on Mastodon. On Mastodon, I’m just like having fun and I’m engaging with people that interest me.
ER: I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is part of the old internet that was more about, you know, communicating with each other, having fun, and less about passive consumption and just essentially watching TV, which is what TikTok is, except worse. And I think that part of this is that Mastodon and the Fediverse will never pay people to create content for it? Like you can make money off of being on it by, you know, you’re an artist and you offer commissions or you sell artworks and you post about it on Mastodon, you direct people to your websites, but it’s not Mastodon who’s paying you. We’re not paying you to create content. We’re not paying you to get more views and pay you based on the amount of views that you get, which is what’s been implemented in almost every other platform, I believe. On Twitter, you get money for views. On TikTok, you get money for views. So basically you end up being almost like a TV channel for a TV network, except it’s a hustle, because you don’t have a contract. You’re just trying to make something and see what sticks.
JH: Again, it’s performative. It’s performative. Again, that’s just another thing to push you to be performative.
ER: Yeah, but the big question is that obviously the market for passive consumption is much bigger than the market for active participation, which I think is some of the explanation for why the numbers have turned out this way over the years, because the internet has moved to the passive consumption model.
I personally think that Mastodon should stick with active participation model and not try to appeal to the passive consumption audience as much as you could argue that it would bring more users in, make it easier because obviously it’s easier to just turn on the TV and your brain off, but it wouldn’t be the platform that we know today. It would be a different platform then. And I think there is still space on the internet for having a platform like what Mastodon is.
JH: I think you could even make an argument that at some point you could actually have more real people engaging, creating, sharing on something like Mastodon than maybe some of the other networks. I read all the time about a huge percentage are probably just bots, a huge percentage are just there, whether it be to cause trouble or whatever, but it’s not necessarily what we would consider to be genuine engagement.
Alright, you you have been really generous with your time. I have one last question. And that is, what are you going do next? mean, I know you’re still an advisory role. I know you’re not disappearing from Mastodon, but I also know that you’re going to do something next. Like you’re like, this is good, I’ll continue to help, but like I need to move on with my life and do something, maybe something different. What is that?
ER: That’s a good question. As you pointed out, I still have a role at Mastodon. I’m now an executive strategy and product advisor, which is very long title that I haven’t seen anywhere else before, but I guess it fits. I’m basically coaching and advising the new leadership team. I have a lot of knowledge, historic and current, about the Fediverse, the key players, the community and my task is to transfer that knowledge into the new generation of leadership at Mastodon. But also it is to provide a voice during product decisions. So I no longer have the authority to say, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. But I still get to say, I think that this or that is a bad idea and have my opinion heard. And of course I’m still in charge of the merch, which is actually something that’s been bringing a lot of joy to me.
JH: Jon shows Eugen the Mastodon plushie on camera.
ER: That’s lovely to see. That is lovely to see. It always brings a lot of joy.
As I’ve mentioned in my announcement, I’ve been feeling burned out for a couple of years now, since 2022. The collapse of Twitter as a platform has been a good thing for Mastodon in all things, but it’s also put this intense spotlight on my work and put so much responsibility on my shoulders. And growing the organization, having more people has pushed me kind of far out of my comfort zone. And working on merch and the plushies and so on has been like almost like a little vacation within my work. And just because it’s such a physical component that, you know, unlike all of the code that we’re writing that is just somewhere in the ether, it’s a physical product that you can touch and you can squish. And I love the community aspect of it because I follow the Plushodon hashtag and I ask people to, you know, post under it when they get their plushie or some other merch items and I just love seeing people like unpack the toy and play with the toy and like the the situations and scenes that they put it because it’s basically like a character and it gets to participate in all these different scenarios in the world, like sometimes it goes to the polls to vote and sometimes it’s sitting somewhere playing with a cat and some you know and it’s just it’s it’s it’s very delightful thing.
JH: So it’s funny you say that because when I had my company, my very favorite thing was creating the swag and the t-shirts and in my business partner, we used to do these poker tournaments at a conference, the annual conference we would have. And that was the only thing he enjoyed doing like out of the entire year. Out of everything we did in the business, we had to do, is the only thing he actually like enjoyed in life, was creating this special coin, which was just for the event. Everything else he was miserable. But that was the one time where he was happy and had a smile on his face because that was like the thing that brought him joy and everything else was like, I hate this. So I think that’s, you know, as far as you enjoying that, I think a lot of people can relate.
Thank you so much for spending this time. It was really fascinating to me you. I learned a lot. Right now I’m just really thinking about your answer about what’s going to make the biggest change is going to be educating the market. And now that’s where my head is.
Yeah, well, I’m happy to be of service.
Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3
Meta CEO Mark Zuckeberg sits down with Decoder guest host Alex Heath for a rare interview on the future of AI, his feud with Elon Musk, and all the Quest 3 news out of Meta Connect.Alex Heath (The Verge)
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However, while I saw some really nice updates come through, I also saw some that weren’t so great. It felt like they were making poor choices, likely because of their legal department.Eugen Rochko: That’s exactly how I would put it. It’s like Cambridge Analytica burned them, and they didn’t want a repeat. And that really limited what they could do.
The tone of how they speak about Meta and Threads bothers me. It was incredibly obvious why it failed.
Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans
Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans
Bird flu viruses are a particular threat to humans because they can replicate at temperatures higher than a typical fever, one of the body's ways of stopping viruses in their tracks, according to new research led by the universities of Cambridge…University of Cambridge (Medical Xpress)
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Recommendations for digitalizing old photo prints? and slides?
I found some old photo albums and slides (mostly dating back to '80) and I'm considering digitalizing some of them.
How would you proceed in my shoes?
I have a decent mirrorless camera (plus minimal editing skills) and an office scanner, but I'm open to buy extra equipment. I'm also open to sending the lot to some third party studio that specializes in the task, but if possible (and if it's not much more costly) I would prefer to DYI and process the photos/slides as I review them.
DeepSeek's Strong Comeback: Open-Sourcing an IMO Gold Medal-Level Math Model
DeepSeek's Strong Comeback: Open-Sourcing an IMO Gold Medal-Level Math Model
DeepSeek Unveils the Path of Self - Verified Mathematical Reasoningeu.36kr.com
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aarch0x40
in reply to silence7 • • •