rysiek
PSA: there is a new fedi instance called mastodon[.]tech. Confusingly, it is running Pleroma. People behind it set up a @Tech account, and reached out to me (and I can only presume others).
I told them in private what I am telling everyone in public now: I find it very sketchy, based on the interaction with that account, and on mastodon.technology-lookalike domain.
I have on good authority they are in no way affiliated with or endorsed by mastodon.technology. I will stay away from them.
Eugen Rochko
@rysiek It seems that @Tech blocked me so I’ll repeat it publicly. As I told them privately before, Mastodon is a registered trademark and permission to use it in a domain name is only given to those running Mastodon on the domain. You cannot run Pleroma and call it Mastodon. Trademarks are meant to prevent confusion and this is a clear cut case of infringement.
FediTips has moved!
Yes, agreed.
You never know who is going to be running software in (for example) 10 years time, so it makes sense to choose a name which can be transferred to a fork or other software altogether.
rysiek
@dj3ei @feditips @cuchaz @Gargron @Tech @musicmatze that's actually a valid point. And is true for all other instance software names, like Pleroma, MissKey and so on.
Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him
Hello, @feditips , maybe you want to add a note to your material: Names containing "mastodon" (or, for that matter, "mstdn" ?) are a bad idea, from a long-term perspective. These (even legally) tie you to one particular Fediverse implementation. Forever.
I'm curious to see whether you actually follow this suggestion. ??
Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him
The venerable "cool URIs don't change" https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI (by Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself) has good counsel what NOT to put into an URI. Among those:
> Software mechanisms. ... give-away "look what software we are using" bits in URIs.
There is an extra paragraph stressing this also holds for domain names.
Now "Mastodon" is a particular technology. So all customary "mastodon.*"-type hostnames are ignorant of TBL's good advise.
Jeff Martin
@Gargron @rysiek @Tech @musicmatze lol wut? This is super confusing!
Eugen Rochko
@admin @cuchaz @dj3ei @feditips @Tech @rysiek Free software licenses (which are only possible because of copyright) give rights to use code, not trademarks. Gentoo, WordPress, Discourse, BigBlueButton, Git are all open-source and/or free software projects that hold rights to their registered trademarks and provide guidelines on how they may be used. Everything that has a recognizable name used in commerce--be it non-profit commerce--is a trademark.
admin
If you were correct @Namenlosxy, than there would be no point in paying the US Trademark office to register. Eugen is German, any business name he uses there has no protection in the USA if he hadn’t registered. To quote @sarvo@novoa.nagoya’s great point, the mindset of Eugen Rochko, @Gargron, is that “Mastodon” is a brand rather than FREE open-source software. As such, everything that makes any slight “misuse” of it or that can pull users away from mastodon is harmful for his endgoal.
Eugene is no better than facebook & other corporations, since they share the same branding mindset. You will never be free if you side with either of them. And they don’t care about the Fediverse as a whole or as a network, so much they don’t even mention the broader “Fediverse” in joinmastodon, just mastodon instances and their software, while almost all other fedi software makes mention of other fedi software.
This thread exposes Eugen Rochko as being the ultimate capitalist hypocrite to everything he’s claimed to believe in about “Open-source.”
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.