Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99
A major news for governance this week on the open social web, with Mastodon shaking up their organisational structure and more.
The News
Mastodon published plans for their new governance structure, with control of Mastodon moving to a new non-profit organisation, and moving ownership away from CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon will set up a new top-level non-profit organisation. This new organisation will become owner of various Mastodon related assets, including names and copyrights. These assets are currently still held by Eugen Rochko, and Mastodon says that this is not the intent of Mastodon. Rochko and the Mastodon organisation believe that “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
Rochko has been a major driving force in growing Mastodon into the platform and product that it is today. While his singular ownership in his name of Mastodon does not fit with the current state of the platform, it is indicative of the outsized influence and impact his work has had over the years. In a thread, Rochko also explains his own perspective, writing about how Mastodon has become tightly integrated with his own identity. He also says that the last two years have taken a toll on him, both mentally and physically. Stepping away from a leadership position that has become so tightly integrated with a sense of self is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and Rochko deserves recognition for both his work, and knowing when to take a step back. Rochko will focus on his original passion of product strategy for Mastodon.
Even for the Mastodon organisation, there are still multiple unknowns, and the organisation is still in the process of figuring it all out. The short summary of what the organisation of Mastodon will look like: There will be a new top-level organisation for Mastodon. This will be a non-profit organisation that is based in Europe. Mastodon does not know yet which European country. The organisation will be led by a new CEO. The new CEO has already been picked, but Mastodon is waiting for a few final practical details before they will be announced. Under this top-level organisation will be 2 other organisations, the US-based Mastodon non-profit and the current Mastodon GmbH organisation. For the US-based Mastodon non-profit nothing will change, this organisation is mainly for fundraising purposes. The current Mastodon GmbH organisation has become a for-profit organisation due to unclear German bureaucracy. This organisation will involve itself with the daily operations, both of running the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers as well as development of Mastodon software.
404 Media reported this week that Meta is blocking links to Pixelfed on their apps, after various fediverse users reported that links on Meta platforms to their Pixelfed account immediately got taken down as spam. Meta later admitted to Engadget that “removing the posts was a mistake and that they’d be reinstated.” Meta’s actions have been beneficial for Pixelfed, which has been at the centre of a news cycle. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault said that the pixelfed.social was seeing “unprecedented levels of traffic“, and according to fedidb.org (also created by Supernault) monthly active users for Pixelfed jumped from 20k in December to 27k as of right now. Supernault also reports that pixelfed.social had 11k people joining in the last 24 hours, which also is validated by fedidb.org. I’m not clear on what the correct statistics are here, but a sudden jump in interest after all the media attention is clearly happening. Pixelfed also got the official apps finally out of testing and available in the Android Play Store and iOS App Store. The move has been announced and teased for a long time, and the app has been available in testing for a while.
Meta and Zuckerberg decided this week to go fully mask-off, making significant changes to their platforms and rules around hate speech. Most notably are the rules around hate speech, where Meta is now explicitly allowing hate speech against various minorities. The move sparked a wide backlash, and various Mastodon servers who previously federated with Threads decided to cut defederate from Threads. Notable examples include Hachyderm and mstdn.social. Other servers such as mastodon.social and indieweb.social condemned the move by Meta, but refrained from defederating from Threads.
The Analysis
In last week’s email introduction I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance of both the fediverse as well as the ATmosphere. This week’s news regarding Mastodon is a great step in the right direction. Mastodon has clear ambitions and values about decentralisation, and having a self-styled dictator-for-life who runs the software just does not fit at all with the stated values. The Mastodon Operations organisation now being a for-profit organisation is also interesting. While this happened outside of the control of Mastodon GmbH as a result of opaque Germany bureaucracy, I think it is potentially a good thing. Running a social media server with 250k monthly active users costs real money. Having servers be financially sustainable is an integral part of having fair and equitable social media platforms. So far, the fediverse has struggled making this happen on a donations model.
It is the next moves that are the real important ones: what form of governance will the non-profit holding organisation take? Will it allow for real community ownership, as implied by the title of the blog? Who will be the new CEO? What new sets of strategic priorities for Mastodon will be set? Many things are still up in the air, even for the people at Mastodon itself, and those aspects will be where we will see the most impactful changes. Still, this is a great step in the right direction.
I do find the contrast between the moves that Rochko has made and how Supernault approaches Pixelfed and Loops notable. Rochko has been aware of the downsides of his model of governance for Mastodon, and has made the necessary changes, while Supernault seems determined to go at it alone. Supernault has a wild number of projects on his plate: building the Pixelfed platform as well as mobile apps, as well as video platform Loops with it’s mobile apps, running the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art server, running fedidb.org and more. It is incredibly impressive what Supernault has managed to build, all by himself in his spare time. Supernault has high ambitions, explicitly positioning his platforms as competitors to Instagram and TikTok. But as the looming TikTok ban in the US shows: one of the most important aspects of social media platforms these days is how they are governed, and by whom. Having a single developer governing the development of two different types of platforms, as well as their flagship servers, seems like a form of governance that is not particularly sustainable.
Rochko shared some more statistics about the connection between Threads and mastodon.social in a conversation on the Mastodon Discord, writing: “For some context, 81,745 people follow at least one Threads account from their mastodon.social account (and we are aware of 25,042 Threads account that federate), with some of the most followed accounts being MKBDH, Barack Obama, and Nilay Patel.” He also noted that only 811 Threads accounts follow at least one mastodon.social account. These statistics only represent mastodon.social, not the entire fediverse. But considering mastodon.social is by far the largest server and many other servers do not federate with Threads at all, it does provide a good indication of the actual usage of Threads. Hachyderm also shared some statistics on the connection between Threads and Hachyderm: “There were 2033 unique Hachyderm accounts following 919 unique Threads accounts and 26 unique Threads accounts following 22 unique Hachyderm accounts.”
Last month I wrote an article ‘Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?’, going through the various reasons for Meta to add federation to Threads. I did not have a clear single answer to that question. The data above provides at least an indication that users are also not clear on why Threads should have fediverse interoperability. It turns out that in practice, marginally few people are interested in the two-way connection between Threads and the rest of the fediverse.
In conversations last week regarding whether or not servers should defederate from Threads, one argument that got brought up repeatedly that connecting with Threads allows people to migrate away from Threads to Mastodon, while still keeping connections with people on Threads. Seeing the statistics on how few people actually use the Threads fediverse connections this argument rings hollow to me.
The Links
The 5th edition of online unconference FediForum will take place on April 1st and 2nd this year.
Threads is slowly making their fediverse integration available for a small number of EU users.
Castopod has made a demo server available where people can test out the fediverse podcasting platform.
PeerTube is slowly making more servers available in their official apps, being careful to comply with app store regulations.
Hachyderm shares their monthly operations costs breakdown.
Biweekly Lemmy development update.
Ghost’s update on implementing ActivityPub and reflection on their work in 2024.
Piefed held a community vote for their roadmap for 2025.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-99/
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