On community governance for Mastodon
I’m proud to have once again played a role in pushing Mastodon and the social web forward as a contributor to Mastodon’s outreach team. Today, Mastodon announced a transition to community ownership in a post called, “The people should own the town square.”
The current social web landscape is one of trade-offs. Ultimately, I believe that with this transition, Mastodon and the Fediverse are best positioned to protect individual privacy and freedom. With community ownership, Mastodon will be free from the influence of billionaires or any one person. Mastodon’s structural transition to community ownership will also ensure that its technical priorities reflect the needs of all its users.
Humanity’s social spaces must be resistant to billionaire control and surveillance. The architecture of the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse means that no single person or company can control or surveil the entire social network at once. There is no firehose in the Fediverse, i.e. the single gateway through which every AT Protocol broadcast, every post on Bluesky, flows. What’s more, I believe Mastodon is more than just another social media platform; it’s a way to build local, self-governing communities online. The platform’s preference for local governance means that people can build and protect their community however they choose, with no single, central control.
The stakes are dire if Mastodon and the Fediverse do not succeed. Most social media is not built in the human interest, and our digital social spaces are under attack: see Meta’s recent moderation changes and the end of net neutrality in the US, paving the way for corporations to control who can connect to what online apps and websites, and how well those apps and websites will load for people. Meanwhile, billionaires play games with media of all kinds—social, news, public knowledge—eroding our trust in the institutions, online connections, and digital public goods that bring us together as a species.
I’m proud to support Mastodon financially and through my volunteer contributions. Please consider donating. Every donation Mastodon receives is put back into enriching the Mastodon software ecosystem and community. Only with your support can Mastodon and the Fediverse remain free and accessible to everyone.
It will take all of us working together to build resilient, governable, open and safe digital spaces.