I’ve had a Mastodon account since 2016, and I think I only really started to appreciate Mastodon in the last four or five months since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase and enshittification. Since then, I’ve switched from my original mastodon.social account to my personal instance/server and this has become my primary social network.
I was pretty excited when I noticed that Nilay Patel interviewed Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, in Patel’s podcast, Decoder.
Patel’s podcast is generally really interesting. I like his practical approach to interviewing CEOs and executives of the services we use. This interview was well worth listening to. Rochko stands out to me as someone who is opinionated, principled, practical, and generally the person who you’d want to have created and led a service like Mastodon.
To answer your original question on why I stuck around, I believe in the vision. I believe that Mastodon is the better way to do social media. I’ve stuck around because, well, I’m dogfooding it. I am using it. It’s my daily driver and I have a home feed that I look at every day. I share what’s happening in my life or the music I listen to on my Mastodon profile. I most enjoy Caturday, and looking through and sharing cat pictures every Saturday. So that’s why I’ve stuck around.
Eugen Rochko
Listening to Rochko reinforces Mastodon’s importance to me, and why a distributed and open social network like this is so important both today and in the foreseeable future. I recommend listening to the interview and/or reading the transcript.
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What do you think?