MastodonHello! We're the team that builds and supports Mastodon, alongside the community. Today, we wanted to share an update on our organisation. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/evolving-the-team/
bazkie 👩🏼💻 bitplanes 🎵@Mastodon I'm not happy about hiring people who work/worked for Amazon, Google etc..
@bazkie we appreciate the hesitation about those organisations, but we're hiring individuals and their experience, rather than the company they worked for in previous lives. There's a strong value alignment amongst the people in the team.
@Mastodon yeah.. I'm sure people who work for Amazon and Google have a strong value alignment..
maybe not with OUR values, but hey, they have some tech experience! 🤡
Ozzelot 
berry@mwyalchen @ozzelot @Mastodon I guess I have very little trust left in people.. maybe you are right and I'm being too harsh.
I think it's something very important in these times, to have a "clean" social network, away from corpo influence, so it's a very touchy subject to me 😅
it doesn't help that I kinda get corporate vibes from that whole mastodon organization thing, and it's based in the US, so yeah I'm touchy af lol.. and the board members are all these bigwigs from massive projects/companies.. some political operators no doubt.. I don't like that kind of power hierarchy stuff in my fediverse..
why have this official organization behind it in the first place..
@bazkie @ozzelot @Mastodon I feel you. I think the important thing is that Mastodon *is* open and federated. What are they going to do, shove ads and AI in everything and sell our data? Somebody will just fork the code and people will make their own better fediverse which will be larger than the shit one. There's no herding these cats.
@mwyalchen @ozzelot @Mastodon well, I am scared they will for example introduce algorithms, very slowly, small enough so that no fork really gains attraction.. (I think that already started, doesn't fedi now have some introductory algo thing for new people to find contacts? not sure)
or do other stuff that "drives engagement" because that's the thing.. people 'like that' tend to have that as a goal, as well as other cancerous stuff as 'growth' etc..
they rarely do it because they want to offer a fun platform for people to mingle. and that may seep through into the code in small, insidious ways, over time.
forking might not 100% help since it's a network, and it's very connected. for example, a lot of toxic/spam stuff coming from mastodon.social, but it's too big to defederate from for most. (luckily, a lot of instances did defederate from threads)
anyway, I'll stop ranting. I'm just not so positive as you about the future with people like this "in charge".
@bazkie @ozzelot @Mastodon idk, I think a full fork would be easy if enough people supported it. Make a small change at the network level and suddenly the old servers can't even find you. It wouldn't be tidy, it wouldn't come without losses, but it is possible.
I think we just have too great a weight here of people who don't like algorithms etc and won't be taken in by "fun" or corporatisation. Isn't that why most of us are here in the first place?
But we'll see. Bad things will probably continue to happen, but open systems are resilient.