On the surface, everything looks and feels mostly the same, with the developers working to polish the harsh edges. As you continue to toot and scroll, you’ll notice wonderful little improvements and quality-of-life tweaks.
Great breakdown of the updates coming today to Mastodon.
Mammoth, a new app for Mastodon, launched in the iOS App Store this past week and something about it hasn’t been sitting right with me.
Until recently, the team working on the project was noted within the app itself as a single person: Shihab Mehboob, creator of Aviary for Twitter and Mast, another Mastodon app. While working on Mammoth, Shihab asked people to consider donating to him to support development which, given that he appeared to be the only one working on it, made sense.
Close to the end of 2022, Shihab launched an instance for new Mammoth users, moth.social, and new members of the team began to announce their involvement, including developers, community managers, and more, without any mention of investors.
Then, on February 23rd, the day before Mammoth’s public launch, they shared the following information in a blog post:
Mammoth and moth.social are built by a small team. We’re all-in on open source and the fediverse, and we’re also a startup, with support from Mozilla, Marc Benioff, Long Journey Ventures and others.
To be clear, I’m not concerned about apps that are backed by VC funding as long as they’re transparent about it. What concerns me is that the creator (maybe?) and lead developer of Mammoth did not disclose his relationship with investors, potential or secured, while requesting donations from users.
It’s dishonest and beyond disappointing.
Mastodon has potential. It can be easy to use and there are clearly a lot of people trying it right now. But its weaknesses are glaring. It’s more project than product. Unless someone buys the code off Rochko today and consolidates this mess ASAP, it can’t survive.
Lance Ulanoff, Mashable
This article is from 2017 and has aged like a piece of fruit.
There’s a lot to unpack here but, most importantly, the article is riddled with inaccuracies and misunderstandings about how Mastodon and the network of instances actually work. It’s no wonder he had so much trouble.
Hilariously, he’s since decided to give Mastodon another shot.
I think my favourite thing about Mastodon right now is the number of people making cool shit for it. I just found phanpy.social, joined the beta for Mastoot, and have been test driving the iOS betas for both Mammoth and Ivory.