There's a lot of talk about the exodus from Twitter. Much of it on Twitter. But whatever you think of the drama on that short messaging social network, there's no denying that a critical mass of folks have moved to Mastodon. It may or may not ever replace Twitter or even reach near Twitter's monthly active users. But it’s causing a change in the nature of Mastodon itself. Can it survive its own attention?
JoinMastodon.org estimates monthly active users have jumped from 300,000 in October to 2.5 million in November. That's a small percentage compared to Twitter's 350+ million. But it's also a huge spike more than octupling in a month.
This causes a unique challenge, because Mastodon is not run by one company. It's a federation of servers running open source code that is administered by a German nonprofit called Mastodon gGmbH at joinmastodon.org. Most servers are run on a voluntary basis. If they take money at all it's usually through PayPal donations or a Patreon.
The Challenge
Each serve admin, sometimes working alone, is responsible for maintenance, moderation and legal compliance with things like the DMCA, GDPR, and COPA. If any individual server becomes big enough, they may become subject to Europe's Digital Service Act as well. And each server must comply with local laws in each market where it is made available. This is no different than running your own web server. There is no company shielding them.
And of course then there is the growing trend for laws to make companies responsible for what posts are allowed on their server. Server operator may be required to take active steps against harassment or discrimination. If Section 230 provisions were repealed in the US, it could force Mastodon server operators to be responsible for the content of every post on their server.
And then there's the non-legal issues. Each community will have varying levels of individual complaints about moderation decisions. And server performance and uptime need to be maintained to keep the community happy. It's common for servers to ask posters not to upload too many images or video to save on server space.
All of these problems are solvable but they take time, effort and resources . A company will usually pay people to put in that time and effort and pay for those resources. Mastodon servers are not set up to make money. They rely on volunteers and donations. That works very well in small communities. It's difficult to scale and scale is what's happening to Mastodon.
The Response
One solution would be for larger organizations to run instances of Mastodon to take in the bulk of new people, allowing the smaller servers to serve their niches better. The Mastodon organization itself does this. And now Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser, say they want to do it too at Mozilla.social starting in 2023. And Tumblr, which is dealing with its own influx of activity, has said it will add interoperability with ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon servers.
While Mozilla is a nonprofit, Tumblr is owned by a for-profit company, Automatic, the same folks who run Wordpress. And other for-profit companies are arriving on the Mastodon scene. The Guardian notes that a crypto startup called Social Coop runs a Japanese-based Mastodon Instance called Pawoo which has 800,000 users along with two others.
It's possible that the federated nature of Mastodon will naturally lead to a sort of cityscape, with some big players that make it easy for people to get onto the platform and smaller ones they can move to once they learn what they like best, or even begin their own. Techdirt's Mike Masnick thinks that Mastodon might be about to have (or needs to have) its Gmail moment. That moment when webmail went from being a slow limited product to the way most people do email.
And don't forget that ActivityPub- the protocol that makes the Mastodon Fediverse run, isn't the only one. There's also nostr and Bluesky (the one Dorsey spun out of Twitter) among others.
My Prescription
One problem with the drift of large services helping Mastodon, even as well-intentioned as Mozilla and Tumblr, is it points the service back down the road to centralization. I think one move would help Mastodon get on solid footing and avoid a lot of the problems that beset previous centralized platforms would be for users to have turnkey options to start their own Mastodon instances. A service that provides the compliance to leagal issues, maintenance and uptime support and possibly even basic moderation services while letting those who want, easily start their own instance. Basically a Wordpress for Mastodon. I mean if Tumblr is already going to support ActivityPub, why not have Automattic get in that game? I’d hope there would be multiple competitors too. hwy not a Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix of ActivityPub servers? Its’ a thought.