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Hi! Today is my first official day as the Executive Director of Mastodon, replacing @Gargron as CEO. I joined the Mastodon team more than 5 years ago, mostly working for Mastodon in the evenings on top of a 120% day job. I was the driving force behind the incorporation of the German non-profit, am a co-founder of the US 501c3 non-profit, and I have contributed to most of the fundraising success, which allowed us to expand the team.
(1/13)
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (3 Wochen her)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I’m humbled to be given this opportunity and want to tell you a bit more about myself and how I think about the future of Mastodon and the Fediverse. I have a business and finance background. I have worked for technology companies my whole career but have become increasingly tired of the extractive venture capital model of financing them, which only works for the rare outliers and seemingly never leads to the best product humans deserve.
(2/13)

Tim Chambers hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Mastodon and the Fediverse matter to me because they present a truly viable alternative to this model, by showing its users no advertisement, respecting users’ privacy, focussing on keeping users safe, and allowing them to connect to the Fediverse and beyond rather than putting them into a digital prison to extract as much metadata about them to please advertisers.
(3/13)

teilten dies erneut

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

My vision for Mastodon is a different direction than all previous attempts at social media, by focussing on community ownership, Trust & Safety features, slow user & server growth, and financial sustainability - for the non-profit project, the server administrators, the moderators, and creators in the Fediverse. I’m thrilled to have @haubles as Community Director and @renchap as Technical Director on my side in making this vision a reality.
(4/13)

teilten dies erneut

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

My personal heroes and projects I admire are @signalapp @Mer__edith @torproject @gnome @thunderbird @ryanleesipes . I’d much rather have Mastodon be inspired by the contributions of these people and projects to the FOSS and non-profit technology world than trying to rebuild early Twitter.
(5/13)

teilten dies erneut

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I have huge respect for everyone contributing to the Fediverse: the larger-than-life architects like @cwebber @evan (without whom we would literally all not be here), implementers like @dansup bringing photo & video to it, new projects like @newsmast @michael @FreddieJ @saskia @bonfire @ivan @mayel orgs like @Flipboard @mike @john @ghost @activitypub.blog @pfefferle bringing the media over to the Fediverse, and @rileytestut @altstore for trying out completely new things.
(6/13)

teilten dies erneut

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Thanks to amazing people like
@jaz @iftas @swf @mallory @bjoernsta @j12t we can see through topics larger than us related to policy, regulation, protocol development as well as how to deal with spam attacks, how to design a safer product for everyone, and how to deal with occasional interpersonal conflicts in our beautiful part of the internet.
(8/13)

Tim Chambers hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I want to send my heartfelt thanks @karienbez @alshafei for their wisdom and emotional support during this crazy journey so far, to @codinghorror @biz for your visionary strategic & financial support without which this restructuring would not have been possible, and to the team of Paul Hastings for your pro-bono legal advice.
(9/13)

Tim Chambers hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Thanks @Gargron for allowing us to do this the pure non-profit and FOSS way by saying no to earlier offers, some of which would have given you more than 10x the payout. I have been inspired by your vision about this project from the moment I met you 5+ years ago. It takes a lot of courage and greatness to let this project go. Super excited for continuing to work with you!
(10/13)

Tim Chambers hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

But Mastodon wouldn’t be where it is without so many more people than Eugen. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to work with the best team we’ve ever had. Each one of you brings so much value to the Mastodon project and I want to thank you for making our mission your day job while you could certainly earn double or triple at one of our for-profit competitors.
(11/13)

Tim Chambers hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

We’re still an absolute skeleton crew of 14 people, competing with teams sometimes 100x as large as ours. To get to our humble team size was only possible through the less than 1% community members who donate to Mastodon, a handful larger donations, & EU grants, all of which we are forever grateful for. We still have a large funding need for 2026, so please consider making a donation before the year-end if you’d like us to continue building and improving Mastodon joinmastodon.org/sponsors#dona…
(12/13)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Most importantly, thanks to everyone here, to the whole community. I promise to always put the humans here first and to keep this a safe space for you, no matter how you express yourself and where you come from. I will treat my new position with the most respect. Let’s make Mastodon and the Fediverse even more beautiful than it already is ❤
(13/13)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Thank you, welcome, and good luck! It’s going to be an uphill battle, but those are always the best at the end anyway. 🫶
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Congratulations on your new role. You really earned it. Wishing you a wonderful tenure

Do you know how much it would cost each user on Mastodon per year to support it if there was an annual fee/donation? Eg if every user donated €10 a year Mastodon could that more than cover costs?

Maybe people might be interested in an annual donation if affordable. Even if 20% donate €10 a year it might help a lot?

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

- Bravo to all of that, in 13 installments, too. Congrats on your matriculation, and let's all hope for a better platform experience every day.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

???
[EDIT: It's working again, just donated!]
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (3 Wochen her)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

One small idea for getting more donations—supporter badges: They reward donors and tell other that they can donate, too.

Another option may be Wikipedia-style donation campaigns for servers.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (3 Wochen her)
Als Antwort auf Howard Chu @ Symas

@hyc Probably a better phrasing would be to say new users come to Mastodon and the fediverse with expectations from polished products like Instagram. The teams working at Instagram are probably 100 times as large as the core team of Mastodon. We obviously stand on the shoulders of giants in form of volunteer OSS contributors. But the point still stands: New users come here with expectations from other social network apps huge dev teams have built financed by data harvesting & ads

Rocketman hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Hi Felix,
I'm hopeful about your/the board's appointment, BUT can we make something akin to a Bill of Rights for Mastodon users, so that we can create a lasting, binding, regularly reviewed structure to make sure that #enshittification doesn't gradually occur?

Having a Mastodon Bill of Rights that is durable and binding would be a GREAT selling point for Mastodon, and would help to cement the core beliefs of a healthy, durable culture for the site.
mastodon.social/@KraftTea/1155…

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I've tried it several times and gave up everytime. I'd love to have just an IBAN to send money directly.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

thank you for asking for Donations for Mastodon Development.

@digitalcourage , we have a good deal that I pay €1 per month for your hosting. Does this also include that @digitalcourage pays Mastodon devs?

How much would every user have to pay for hosting and development to make it sustainable?

I would prefer a simple model where I just pay my normal fee to my hoster and the hoster pays forward to the developers / maintainers.

I see the users and servers are currently divided into "you may donate but you can freeride" and "you must pay". I prefer a fair model where all users see the value of mastodon and thus are ok to share the cost and must pay. This distributes the cost amongst all users.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

You probably know, but team 100x size is not 100x faster or better, rather a scam of growth for the same VC. Stay small :)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I never would have guessed to say that I'm happy to be part of the 1% ;-) have been donating €30 / monthly for about 1 year or so, possibly even longer.
Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (3 Wochen her)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

@codeinabox would there be any possibility of tax deductible donations rolling out to other countries?
Als Antwort auf acb

@acb @codeinabox Yes, absolutely - in many countries it requires to incorporate with an entity in that jurisdiction, so there's a bit more setup work involved and it needs to be justified in terms of recurring admin expenses
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

@codeinabox there’s no pan-EU mechanism that would allow people in any EU nation to donate to Mastodon in a tax-deductible way?
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

kommt das Häschen vorbei und fragt: Hattu IBAN?

Konnte ich leider nicht finden und am liebsten würde ich es halten wie bei allen Spendenempfängern machen: Einmal im Jahr zur Steuererklärung wird es in ein PDF gepackt und gut. Muss das Konto halt nur massenweise Überweisungen empfangen können ohne zu viel zu kosten. Dann verdient keine Plattform und man kann den Betrag, das Intervall und die Dauer selber bestimmen.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

IIRC instagram was 13 people when facebook bought it so 14 is not skeleton (and they had tens of millions of user)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

how about stopping to increase the size of this server ?

but noo it prevent the dream of centralizing mastodon.

DO NOT DONATE TO THEM !! instead donate to the other server that struggle to grow.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (1 Woche her)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Thank you Felix, for the mention. I am so happy to see how we all trust in the steady and organical growth. The protocol is more powerful than putting people into closed clubs. I am happy to see what we all have achieved and the more I am locking forward to the future we will create.

Felix Hlatky hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I can’t believe you’re still bringing Threads in your thanks. (Also that’s a lot of CEOs there.)
Als Antwort auf ombremad

@ombremad There's an obvious limitation by character limit when creating such a post. I just happen to only know Meredith at Signal. I'd love to include all the engineers and ops people behind it but I think the way this post was phrased it's quite obvious I admire the products/projects as much as the leadership. Or where did I do wrong in your opinion?
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Would think it wasn't about you doing something specific wrong but more about the mentioning of Threads by Meta.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

I’ve already stated what you do wrong in my opinion. You seem to prefer corporate structures and so you’re naturally thanking their CEOs (even the ones that do not play nice at all with the Fediverse — I’ve already mentioned it’s distressing you’re thanking Meta, but there’s some other really bad players there… let’s not name the vaporware man). Other important players of the Fediverse are not there at all because their structure is less corporate.

And I know that’s probably not a bad thing to you. Just a huge difference in how we see things I guess.

Als Antwort auf ombremad

@ombremad Thanks for clarification. One misunderstanding potentially: I tagged the Ghost account (which is on Threads, you're right) but I did not thank Threads. The Ghost account just happens to only be there, unfortunately.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Can I make a note of how pretty much all the people you seem to want to work with and posit as heroes are white, and that one of them is notorious for lashing out doing racist and transphobic abuse? There is a lot of people here doing anti racist work and working on improving moderation and they don't even seem to be showing up on your radar. You have some work to do.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

@cwebber @evan @newsmast @michael @FreddieJ @bonfire @ivan @mayel @Flipboard @mike @john @ghost @activitypub.blog @pfefferle @rileytestut @altstore The respect is mutual ❤️

Thank you for mentioning me, it really means a lot.

I joined Mastodon in 2016 and wouldn't have started @pixelfed if it wasn't for the interest and support I found on Mastodon back in 2018.

I owe so much to you guys, and am forever your #1 fan.

Let's continue building the future together 🚀

pixelfed hat dies geteilt.

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Congratulations, Mastodon is very lucky to have you, and I look forward to this next chapter!
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

congrats!
but... instead of making a too looong rosary from toots,
consider increasing the character limit in one toot please 🤗
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Hey Baby 💋💄🍌🍆

I’m a single mom who believes in real love 💕 Click here to see

my personal side 👉 https://tinyurl.com/3pbfubpu💄🍌🍆

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

welcome to the forefront! I joined here yesterday, excited to see what the future holds.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

congrats Felix!! The fediverse is lucky to have you, excited to continue working together 🙌
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

thank you both for your service - the open social web owes you both a great debt.
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

hope you revert the decision to impose mastodon.social as default on the app, so we can finally let grow other server
Unbekannter Ursprungsbeitrag

mastodon - Link zum Originalbeitrag
Felix Hlatky
@shansterable that's the beautiful thing about the new setup we're striving for. I will only ever be able to serve Mastodon and its cause and no one else
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Sensitiver Inhalt

Dieser Beitrag wurde bearbeitet. (3 Wochen her)
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

good luck, hope this is the first day of a great future for Mastodon and the wider Fediverse 🤞🤞🤞
Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Congratulations on your new journey, Felix. You seem to be a smart, kind, and thoughtful person. That evokes a feeling of trust in me.

I love the fedi and volunteer as a moderator. I care deeply about it. So I’m keen to see how you move things forward.

Please always remember your words: “I promise to always put the humans here first and to keep this a safe space for you.” If you do that, you’ll do great.

@Gargron

Als Antwort auf Felix Hlatky

Hi Felix,
pleased to neet you, Felix.
Congrats for the promotion.
Sounds like you earned it.
Unbekannter Ursprungsbeitrag

mastodon - Link zum Originalbeitrag
Felix Hlatky
@alexanderyildiz Thanks, but we don't have a physical office :)
Unbekannter Ursprungsbeitrag

mastodon - Link zum Originalbeitrag
Felix Hlatky
@catholicus @haubles Thanks for pointing this out. Rest assured we're keenly aware of this! :)