(I read it the same way, too.)
(¹I personally have a browser override for HN's tiny font choice; I thought that 12pt was the universally agreed upon "base text" point size, and "10pt" was "small text", but HN's "normal" is 9pt.)
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...
@ 4% that's €40k/year
more than what most regular people have
Also where do you get from that you can't retire with €1M. It seems very feasible as long as you keep a frugal lifestyle.
> We want to thank the generous individual donors that participated in our fundraising drive. We put individual donations entirely towards Mastodon’s operations (primarily, paying our full-time employees to improve Mastodon), which totalled EUR 337k over the past 12 months (September 2024 - September 2025).
From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Where I live (not expensive like SV), they recommend $90K+ to "live comfortably".
A 1 bedroom apartment is $19K/year. Insurance rates vary widely, but premium + deductible - you may want to assume $10K/year. So you're already at $30K without eating, Internet, utility bills and transportation.
I'm sure one could live off of that 1M if fairly frugal, but it's not what most people want.
Now I believe he is in Europe so different rules apply, but they have similar things there). I don't know the rules in his country (or even his country), some are more friendly than others, but still the money won't go as far when you retire before the system wants you to.
3% of a million is only 30k per year. A frugal person can live on that little - but it will be hard. You can make more than that working at McDonald's near me, and nobody would claim that is a living wage.
Now if you want to retire you don't need your nest egg to last forever, only until you die. You can thus withdraw a bit more than 3%, but I'm not sure how much. (and you may have other pension plans to work with). Still if you withdraw 100k/year from this million you will run out of money in less than 20 years (with 12 being realistic) 100k per year is not a great income for a programmer.
Hey, good for you. But 30000 per year is a very good salary in countries such as Spain, where the median is almost half that.
> For our team, a vital aspect of getting this restructuring right was making sure that Eugen was compensated fairly for Mastodon’s brand trademark, assets, and the 10 years he spent building Mastodon into what it is today (while taking less than a fair market salary). Based on replacement costs, Eugen’s time and effort, and the fair market value of the Mastodon brand, its associated properties, and the social network, we settled on a one-time compensation of EUR 1M.
I really hope he's able to find success and better work-life balance in his future endeavours
He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all.
The W3C was its own thing.
Keep in mind that every for-profit publicly-owned corporation has many shareholders, as well as a board of directors, which is, gasp, a committee!
At some point, you do have people that need to step back. If you turn it over to another single person, they could pivot and "ruin" the product. By turning it over to a committee, hopefully, any ruinous ideas get overruled. At least in theory
How to break up your girlfriend: "I've been thinking about the future... you're not in it.".
This seems like an extreme view to me. It's not so bad
Fedi is never going to be consistent, but it's also always going to be accessible to everyone. And therefore truly by the people for the people.
It sounds like anyone that runs a moderately sized open source project.
More money would solve most of these issues.
Our rule was that anyone who wanted to moderate “too much” was effectively not allowed to do so.
The catch being finding those who would help out and moderate effectively was not easy. And even then you were cycling through them regularly as inevitably if they cared enough they also cared enough that they stepped down.
I do wonder though if you have people doing it for the money, would that help or hinder?
It’s telling that people like this who use “capitalism” as a pejorative never have any compelling alternative to offer beyond “let experts in the state micromanage everyone and everything”.
He literally built something that doesn't involve experts, or the state, or micromanaging anyone or anything.
Is this a new talking point you just learned about?
But why would not point out what is wrong with the current system in the meantime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Advance_of_pe...
https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
The Future Is Ours to Build – Together
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...
Mastodon: Building for the Long Term
Without linking to the posts, Rochko also mentioned that “a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer” led him to realize it was time to “step back and find a healthier relationship with the project.” It also drove the decision to restructure Mastodon.
Then again, Mastadon is basically social media for people who can't handle normal social media, so I guess some elevated sensitivity goes with the territory.
Now he's not there to block progress [0], can we remove Mastodon's intentional DDoS please and just include the link preview in the toot. Add a disclaimer on the UI saying "link preview comes from toot" if it makes you happy. Then Mastodon can be a good web citizen and not a force for evil.
It's only been an open problem for 7 years. Nothing in the grand scheme of things.
[0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486#issuecommen...
Disclaimer: I don't have any additional context.
Meanwhile, Bluesky implemented QTs in a perfect way: you can detach your post from quotes or prevent quoting entirely if you want, but the feature is there.
There's a nuanced technical discussion about the merits of adding this to Mastodon and whether the effort would really be worth it. Eugen made some reasonable points against it.
But instead of engaging with the discussion in good faith, people like you automatically assume the worst intentions and claim Eugen personally is "blocking progress" like there's some grand conspiracy (Instead of the much more boring reality of limited dev time and having to prioritize things).
I don't know there's an assumption involved. I think for many people, it gives them the opportunity to act out on anger, shame, and other emotions they've internalized. They smell 'blood in the water' and know they can get away with it.
(if you do apply deductions then this matters)
Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.
Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.
The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).
I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.
Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.
0: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...
1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545
2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165
3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349
4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...
Somewhere, HN moderators talk about this concept: Bad behavior is a cancer and spreads through the community.
I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing.
I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.
JadoJodo•1h ago
Conscat•33m ago
shakna•21m ago
Or the Twitter fight where he encouraged people to DOS the rival.
Or the account takeover CVE and repercussions.