Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app*, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse
I would like to know what you think of this post published here in Italian: is it exaggerated or is there a grain of truth?
Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app*, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse
Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!
One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that… it sucks!
No it’s not true, it doesn’t suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.
At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it’s a bit out of competition…
* For a few days now, however, some international newspapers, but also Italian ones (let’s call them newspapers…), have practically relaunched the same press release that praises Mammoth, the Mastodon app developed by The BLDV Inc. , the Californian start-up financed by Mozilla (and THEREFORE by Google, which now finances 90% of Mozilla)
* Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?
The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.
The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.
…
Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.
From Sarah Perez’s article published December 7 on TechCrunch
In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!
That’s how: following other people’s lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!
I won’t hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.
By the way, many of Mammoth’s features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!
Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn’t able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.
Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…
In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech
A final bitter consideration? It’s not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…
… have practically relaunched the same press release that praises Mammoth, the Mastodon app developed by The BLDV Inc. , the Californian start-up financed by Mozilla (and THEREFORE by Google, which now finances 90% of Mozilla)
Thats a pretty crazy statement. Mozilla is not a shell company for google. They have very different goals, and google pays mozilla for google search as default because otherwise, firefox users would have a different search as default, giving another search engine a serious opportunity to get big.
Mozilla funds many things, and this is just a well made open source client for mastodon. There is no secret big corp. agenda behind it because that would be crazy. Why wouldnt google develop such a thing in house and use their influence to bring users to it, and why use mozilla, the rival browser company, to do it? This is a major flaw in the article, serious enough that I cant take it seriously.
people really hate when developers are paid for their work huh
Anyone can join the Fediverse and make stuff for it. That includes google, if they feel like it.
I do not recommend that you crusade to attempt to control who does and does not belong in the Fediverse. That probably won’t accomplish anything except increasing your own blood pressure and making a lot of people block you.
@Candelestine @enzoesco no crusade. Just some concern about the tendency towards centralization
Funded by Google but not available on Android?
welcome to the end of the world!
Assuming that the translation is accurate, the whole thing is so absurdly exaggerated that I wonder if it’s meant to serve as advertising for the thing it purports itself to be attacking.
I was assuming they meant the end of the fediverse world, but yeah it’s quite grandiose.
deleted by creator
I didn’t even know Mammoth existed until I saw this post
Big overreaction. Even if all of this is as problematic as you say, which is unlikely, it’s far from significant compared to any of the other problems facing the fediverse.
Mammoth can’t take away the open source software or the ability of instances to pick which they network with.
Bigger problems? That everyone wants an app for a basic social media platform. That the fediverse has significant usability issues that will prevent it from attracting users from the “evil” platforms. That users here have a weird tendency to get rather obsessed with purity and gate keeping and worked up with social media drama while losing sight of bigger goals. That the financial sustainability of this whole place is more fragile than people want to think about.
@maegul I agree with you. My post (which was published here by my own will and without me even being quoted) was rather looking at the fact that centralized solutions are also succeeding in the fediverse. And I don’t like this very much
I’m not sure Mammoth really counts as a centralised service. Not that much anyway. I feel like the only thing that makes what they’re making seem centralised is that their system is tied to their own instance. Otherwise, they’re generating and providing feeds and providing an app, all for those interested.
With their own instance though, things get a little more interesting. And though their instance is not large at all, if there are any problems there I think it comes down to the weird centralisation of instances themselves. The architecture of the fediverse relies on instances and requires that users are bound to them. This is a form of centralisation from a user perspective. And it’s central to the fediverse to the point where any form of innovation on the fediverse will often require an accompanying instance.
There’s an interesting conversation to be had about making the Fediverse more user friendly at the cost of increased centralization and non-standard extensions. It’s really difficult to focus on the message you’re trying to convey when you have five other alarmist topics crammed into the post.
Mozilla’s conflict of interest taking money from one of the largest internet advertisers and browser manufacturers was widely discussed during their recent anti-trust trial. It’s not super constructive to flatten the whole conversation to Mammoth being “Google Funded”.
I don’t agree with all of your conclusions here, but I think it is important to note another problem:
Mammoth’s AGPL 3.0 license is currently incompatible with Apple’s AppStore because Apple imposes restrictions which are explicitly forbidden by GPLv3 (specifically, the paragraphs in the license about “installation information”).
So, while the source code is released under this license, the binaries that Mammoth distributes via Apple are not under a free software license at all. Recipients of the source code are allowed to distribute it (and their own modified versions) under GPLv3 only, which means not on Apple’s App Store (which is the only place most iOS users get software).
This may be an oversight, or may be intentional. Other projects like Signal messenger have for years been using the GPLv3-iOS incompatibility to appear to be free software while actually maintaining a monopoly on the right to distribute binaries to iPhone users.
See NextCloud’s COPYING.iOS for an example of how to release an iOS app under GPLv3 in a way that does not restrict that right to a single entity.
No it’s not true, it doesn’t suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot,
I’m missing something here. What does Mastodon have to do with ergonomics?
This is grossly dramatized.
Embrace. The big corporate giant dips its toe into an existing project.
Extend. The corp adds features to their app, improving on the community’s apps features. Somewhere along the line, a previously open source project will become proprietary and closed. People begin to prefer the proprietary option for the added features.
Extinguish. The proprietary app cuts out the original community (defederation) when a critical mass of users is reached. People use the proprietary app instead of the open and free app, because of the features, but also because many of the people they want to follow are now segmented from them. The original open system dies out from lack of use.
Enshittification follows.
Look, all I know is that they’re both great bands, and I’m sick of the endless debate about them
@enzoesco @aral @Gargron @pluralistic @fediverse@lemmy.ml @fediverse@a.gup.pe but holy shit! next time you quote one of my posts, remember to mention me!
