Two Twitter founders switch to Mastodon – that’s behind it

They were part of Twitter’s three-person founding team, but now use a free and independent social media service: Evan Williams and Biz Stone have been setting up profiles on Mastodon in recent weeks, Bloomberg reports. The two tech entrepreneurs co-founded Twitter Inc. with Jack Dorsey in 2007. but are now dissatisfied with the development of the platform.

Biz Stone, 48, said:

And Evan Williams doubles after:

The fact that two of Twitter’s founders have signed up for Mastodon says something about the viability of both networks, says American journalist Kurt Wagner, who writes for Bloomberg and is considered a proven Twitter expert.

Medium announces Mastodon offensive

One of the reasons Williams and Stone joined Mastodon is because of Medium, the well-known blogging company Williams founded a decade ago and where the two sit on the board.

On Thursday, Medium announced that it had set up an online community on Mastodon. The corresponding server can be found at me.dm and will be made available to all authors later.

Tony Stubblebine, Medium’s CEO, is another former Twitter man who helped found it. He is convinced that Mastodon’s open source architecture is the future of social networking, he writes in a recent blog post. And:

From Friday, selected authors and publications active on the platform must be written to and invited to the body. A little later, all writers and subscribers were able to get on board, an additional offer is planned for the medium subscription, which itself is for a fee.

How are you?

Apparently Mozilla played a big part in the decision to run a mastodon instance with Medium. The American organization responsible for the Firefox browser and the email client Thunderbird announced at the end of 2022 that it would test a publicly accessible Mastodon instance.

With Vivaldi, the developer of the Opera browser is already running its own Mastodon instance, according to heise.de.

As Boomberg writes, Fediverse’s Mastodon service is growing because many people are dissatisfied with Twitter’s new owner: Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the social media platform at the end of October, and key stakeholders, including media professionals and advertisers, are evicting.

Medium’s director told Bloomberg that he didn’t see the Mastodon involvement as an experiment: “We think all authors should be involved”. Reason: The social media service has exceeded the critical minimum size.

And Jack Dorsey? Last year, he had high hopes for Elon Musk and publicly advocated selling Twitter to the multibillionaire.

In a December blog post, Dorsey called for “a free and open social media protocol that is not owned by a single company and that can withstand government scrutiny.

However, he does not seem to focus on Mastodon, but on an unknown protocol called Nostr, which is based on blockchain technology.

Sources

(dsc)

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