With Twitter in disarray since the world’s richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralized, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users.
“The bird is free,” tweeted Tesla mogul Elon Musk when he completed his $44-billion acquisition of Twitter. But many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world’s “town square” being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.
For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures.
But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority — a company — Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation.
People swap posts and links with others on their own server — or Mastodon “instance” — and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers across the growing network.
The fruit of six years’ work by Eugen Rochko, a young German programmer, Mastodon was born of his desire to create a public sphere that was beyond the control of a single entity. That work is starting to pay off.
“We’ve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Rochko tooted — Mastodon’s version of tweeting — on Monday. “That’s pretty cool.”
That is still tiny compared with his established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had seen an advertisement as of the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users as of the third quarter.
Growing fast
But the jump in Mastodon users in a matter of days has still been startling.
“I’ve gotten more new followers on Mastodon in the last week than I have in the previous five years,” Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote last week.
Before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on Oct. 27, Mastodon’s growth averaged 60-80 new users an hour, according to the widely cited Mastodon Users account. It showed 3,568 new registrations in one hour on Monday morning.
Elon Musk begins plan to cut half Twitter’s global workforce
Newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk has begun pushing forward with his plan to cut as much as half of the company’s global workforce, beginning with widespread layoffs at the social media company on Friday.
Rochko started Mastodon in 2017, when rumours were spreading that PayPal founder and Musk ally Peter Thiel wanted to buy Twitter.
“A right-wing billionaire was going to buy a de facto public utility that isn’t public,” Rochko told Reuters earlier this year. “It’s really important to have this global communications platform where you can learn what’s happening in the world and chat to your friends. Why is that controlled by one company?”
There is no shortage of other social networks ready to welcome any Twitter exodus, from Bytedance’s Tiktok to Discord, a chat app now popular far beyond its original constituency of gamers.
Mastodon’s advocates say its decentralized approach makes it fundamentally different: rather than go to Twitter’s centrally provided service, every user can choose their own provider, or even run their own Mastodon instance, much as users can email from Gmail or an employer-provided account or run their own email server.
Eugen Rochko founded Mastodon in 2017, and the network has grown steadily over the years before seeing exponential growth in recent weeks. (cbc)
No single company or person, can impose their will on the whole system or shut it all down. If an extremist voice emerged with their own server, the advocates say, it would be easy enough for other servers to cut ties with it, leaving it to talk to its own shrinking band of followers and users.
The federated approach has downsides: it is harder to find people to follow in Mastodon’s anarchic sprawl than on the neatly ordered town square that centrally administered Twitter or Facebook can offer.
But its growing group of supporters say those are outweighed by the advantages of its architecture.
Privacy is valued
Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a shoestring crowdfunded budget topped up with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators.
Germany’s data protection commissioner is waging a campaign to get government bodies to close their Facebook pages, since, he says, there is no way of hosting a page there that conforms to European privacy laws.
Authorities should move to the federal government’s own Mastodon instance, he says. The European Commission also maintains a server for EU bodies to toot from.
“No exclusive information should be sent over a legally questionable platform,” data commissioner Ulrich Kelber said earlier this year.
While Mastodon is busier than ever before, it still has few of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know comic Jan Boehmermann — Germany’s answer to John Oliver — outside his country, but more names are arriving daily.
For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in a small town in eastern Germany for a modest monthly salary of about $2,400 US, the work continues.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
