@tchambers Things that also come 2026 thanks to #NLnet:

#WordPress users will be able to create polls for the Fediverse.

WordPress in combination with #GatherPress will offer federated RSVP for events.

Interoperability of Events will improve, e.g. Mobilizon will be able to receive events from other applications.

#Lauti, an event management tool for medium sized communities, will join the Fediverse.

@linos These are all bringing such value to the Fediverse… #NLnet has been such a positive catalyst for the open social web.

@tchambers Things that also come 2026 thanks to #NLnet:

#WordPress users will be able to create polls for the Fediverse.

WordPress in combination with #GatherPress will offer federated RSVP for events.

Interoperability of Events will improve, e.g. Mobilizon will be able to receive events from other applications.

#Lauti, an event management tool for medium sized communities, will join the Fediverse.

I've just pushed Tor integration in Libervia (first step of the NLnet metadata reduction and serverless grant).

https://nlnet.nl/project/ServerlessXMPP/

This has been done thanks to the work of @meejah on `txtorcon` and of course of @torproject and the support of @nlnet and @NGIZero .

A thought for Lunar who is mentioned in the documentation of txtorcon (for doing the Debian package) and who passed away last year.

#tor #XMPP #Libervia #txtorcon #nlnet #ngi

I'm making big progress on the #tauri version of #deltachat_desktop

So far it only takes 38 mb 📦 (78mb installed) in package size instead of the 150mb 📦(323mb installed) of the Delta Chat Desktop #electron version.

I'll keep you updated in this thread.

Thanks to #nlnet & #ngi0_entrust for funding this project: https://nlnet.nl/project/DeltaTauri/.

#deltachat #deltatauri

I've just pushed Tor integration in Libervia (first step of the NLnet metadata reduction and serverless grant).

https://nlnet.nl/project/ServerlessXMPP/

This has been done thanks to the work of @meejah on `txtorcon` and of course of @torproject and the support of @nlnet and @NGIZero .

A thought for Lunar who is mentioned in the documentation of txtorcon (for doing the Debian package) and who passed away last year.

#tor #XMPP #Libervia #txtorcon #nlnet #ngi

Commit 13: Gestern gab's die Implementierung, heute das Protokoll. Genauer gesagt, die #ActivityPub Erweiterung:

@forgefed

Das ganze hat ein #nlnet Funding und bringt #Fediverse und #git deutlich näher zusammen. Während wir also beim #wartenauf39c3 sind. Könnten wir uns doch mal überlegen ob, wie, wo, wann, warum wir uns da einbringen, hier das Spec-Repo:

https://y.lab.nrw/jek25-13

\__
#jek25 #cccRegio #OpenSource #FOSS #adventskalender #39c3 #forgejo #codeberg @nlnet

Fediverse Report – #146

The main news in the world of social networking was regarding the DSA’s decision to level a 120M EUR fine at X. Mastodon wrote a blog post in response, saying how the event indicated that the world needs social sovereignty. Meanwhile, I wrote an analysis of how the European Union actually thinks about digital communications, how their words don’t align with their actions. But also, how a potential move of the EC to put their social media on a sovereign fediverse server also represents a loss of power: from a position of regulating the entire network to a position of one-among-equal participants.

https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/

The News

PeerTube released version 8 with “a redesigned video player, an improved experience for importing videos and the ability to share channel management with other accounts” as the headline features.

Multiple users can now edit a single channel, handling uploads, deletions, and channel settings without granting full administrative access. This feature ties in with PeerTube’s focus on institutions and organisations who are running their own video server, and that have multiple staff members to manage the video content of a single account.

The update also includes a redesigned video player called Lucide, with simplified controls and finer iconography, with the previous theme still being available. Video import functionality now allows manual retry of failed imports, with automatic retry built into channel synchronisation workflows.

Framasoft framed the release as part of a year focused on institutional adoption, supported by NLnet funding. This strategic positioning fits for PeerTube: competing directly with platforms like YouTube is extremely difficult, and requires support for creators to make money. Creators are also strongly incentivised to focus reach as much as possible. PeerTube’s integration with the fediverse promises technical support that could in a hypothetical future support further reach, but in practice this cannot remotely compete with YouTube. For institutions these demands have less of a priority, while at the same time, data control and showing videos without advertisements are much more important. This fits well with what PeerTube has to offer, and their feature prioritisation reflects this.

Regarding the mobile app for PeerTube, Framasoft says that they are working “to finalize the features promised during the crowdfunding campaign , including background video playback, live streaming, and TV apps. If all goes well, background video playback should be available in early 2026 !”

For 2026 they will be working on improving the experience for newcomers, making it easier to find their first PeerTube platform. This project is still in the planning phase, but there is a lot of potential here, as it is currently also still quite daunting for people who are familiar with decentralised platforms and the fediverse to find your way around the PeerTube network.

Framasoft is also hosting their annual fundraiser for the organisation, which builds a variety of open software projects beyond just PeerTube, and they are aiming to raise 250k EUR to finance the non-profit organisation for 2026.

Bonfire has crossed their goal for their crowdfunding campaign, raising 30k for maintainance and support for the software. The next goal for Bonfire is for adding Group support, and in a blog post they explain why this matters. Bonfire frames groups as a way to build communities, and the software in itself is big on building online communities, so this fits well together. They position groups as different from forums, explaining: “Groups in Bonfire are inspired by the best of forums (community-run with clear topics and findable archives) while being portable and interconnected across the fediverse from the start.”

One thing worth addressing is that Bonfire struggles to explain what their platform is exactly. They lean heavily into the ‘we’re a different kind of software’, but this does lead to people to not fully understand what it is however. I pointed this out a few weeks ago, where I wrote that “without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.”

I saw another comment on PieFed raise the same point of confusing again, so I think it’s worth addressing, where the user squirrel said: “I see Bonfire mentioned a lot on the fediverse report and elsewhere, but I still don’t understand what it is. I went to their website and it’s a wall of text that sounds like marketing. I don’t see a demo or a flagship instance.”

So to keep things simple: Bonfire is a software similar to Mastodon, Misskey or Akkoma, that allows for microblogging just like you would on the Mastodon server mastodon.social or the Misskey server misskey.io. Each of these microblogging platforms already have different features from each other, and the distinguishing feature for Bonfire Social is that it has a concept called circles (similar to the old Google+), allowing you to define a preset group of accounts (a circle) that your message gets send to.

The second different thing about Bonfire is that the software design is highly modular, which allows servers admins to install extensions that make each Bonfire server more unique. The best example of this is an extension that allows for integration with various Academic institutes such as DOI, allowing people to better integrate and comment on academic papers.

The Bonfire team focuses heavily in their communications on this modular extensibility part, which is why the marketing can sound quite confusing to people who are not intimately familiar with Bonfire already. But for regular fediverse people it is as simple as: Bonfire is another fediverse server software in the list of Mastodon, Misskey, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Friendica and more. Each software does mostly comparable things (microblogging) but gives their own interpretation to it and adds additional features.

PieFed is working on two major features for their upcoming 1.4 release, a Stack Overflow-like answering system, and turning remote fediverse links into local links. The answering system gives the post author the ability to select a reply as the answer to the post. This feature will only be available to communities who have turned it on, as this question-answer approach will not fit with every community. As for federation, if this answer is viewed on Lemmy, it will simply be displayed as a normal post and comments, without the additional question and answer highlighting features.

Turning remote fediverse links into local links remains one of the fediverse’s pain points. As PieFed creator Rimu describes: “One of the long-standing issues we have in/on the fediverse is that when I have a link in my post that goes to another post on my instance, people on other instances will click that link and be taken to MY instance, where they can’t comment, don’t have an account, aren’t logged in, etc and they will try to log in using their login credentials for their home instance then wonder why it doesn’t work.” In the upcoming PieFed version, “links like that will automatically be converted to link to the local copy of the post, where ‘local’ is whatever is local for the reader.”

Nodes on a Web: The Fediverse in/for Public Institutions is a new fediverse unconference that will be held in 19/20 March 2026, Amsterdam: “Our goal is to unite individuals involved in these initiatives and the wider Fediverse developer community. We want to share insights and ideas on how the Fediverse can thrive for public institutions in the long term.” The conference is organised by the SABOA Foundation (FediVariety) with support from the Dutch Government (CIO-Rijk) and the City of Amsterdam.

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits, for November 2025
• Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote about their 2025 year with the fediverse.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-146/

Commit 13: Gestern gab's die Implementierung, heute das Protokoll. Genauer gesagt, die #ActivityPub Erweiterung:

@forgefed

Das ganze hat ein #nlnet Funding und bringt #Fediverse und #git deutlich näher zusammen. Während wir also beim #wartenauf39c3 sind. Könnten wir uns doch mal überlegen ob, wie, wo, wann, warum wir uns da einbringen, hier das Spec-Repo:

https://y.lab.nrw/jek25-13

\__
#jek25 #cccRegio #OpenSource #FOSS #adventskalender #39c3 #forgejo #codeberg @nlnet

NLnet on the use of GenAI for their funded programs. 🙌👏

https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/

#nlnet

Fediverse Report – #146

The main news in the world of social networking was regarding the DSA’s decision to level a 120M EUR fine at X. Mastodon wrote a blog post in response, saying how the event indicated that the world needs social sovereignty. Meanwhile, I wrote an analysis of how the European Union actually thinks about digital communications, how their words don’t align with their actions. But also, how a potential move of the EC to put their social media on a sovereign fediverse server also represents a loss of power: from a position of regulating the entire network to a position of one-among-equal participants.

https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/

The News

PeerTube released version 8 with “a redesigned video player, an improved experience for importing videos and the ability to share channel management with other accounts” as the headline features.

Multiple users can now edit a single channel, handling uploads, deletions, and channel settings without granting full administrative access. This feature ties in with PeerTube’s focus on institutions and organisations who are running their own video server, and that have multiple staff members to manage the video content of a single account.

The update also includes a redesigned video player called Lucide, with simplified controls and finer iconography, with the previous theme still being available. Video import functionality now allows manual retry of failed imports, with automatic retry built into channel synchronisation workflows.

Framasoft framed the release as part of a year focused on institutional adoption, supported by NLnet funding. This strategic positioning fits for PeerTube: competing directly with platforms like YouTube is extremely difficult, and requires support for creators to make money. Creators are also strongly incentivised to focus reach as much as possible. PeerTube’s integration with the fediverse promises technical support that could in a hypothetical future support further reach, but in practice this cannot remotely compete with YouTube. For institutions these demands have less of a priority, while at the same time, data control and showing videos without advertisements are much more important. This fits well with what PeerTube has to offer, and their feature prioritisation reflects this.

Regarding the mobile app for PeerTube, Framasoft says that they are working “to finalize the features promised during the crowdfunding campaign , including background video playback, live streaming, and TV apps. If all goes well, background video playback should be available in early 2026 !”

For 2026 they will be working on improving the experience for newcomers, making it easier to find their first PeerTube platform. This project is still in the planning phase, but there is a lot of potential here, as it is currently also still quite daunting for people who are familiar with decentralised platforms and the fediverse to find your way around the PeerTube network.

Framasoft is also hosting their annual fundraiser for the organisation, which builds a variety of open software projects beyond just PeerTube, and they are aiming to raise 250k EUR to finance the non-profit organisation for 2026.

Bonfire has crossed their goal for their crowdfunding campaign, raising 30k for maintainance and support for the software. The next goal for Bonfire is for adding Group support, and in a blog post they explain why this matters. Bonfire frames groups as a way to build communities, and the software in itself is big on building online communities, so this fits well together. They position groups as different from forums, explaining: “Groups in Bonfire are inspired by the best of forums (community-run with clear topics and findable archives) while being portable and interconnected across the fediverse from the start.”

One thing worth addressing is that Bonfire struggles to explain what their platform is exactly. They lean heavily into the ‘we’re a different kind of software’, but this does lead to people to not fully understand what it is however. I pointed this out a few weeks ago, where I wrote that “without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.”

I saw another comment on PieFed raise the same point of confusing again, so I think it’s worth addressing, where the user squirrel said: “I see Bonfire mentioned a lot on the fediverse report and elsewhere, but I still don’t understand what it is. I went to their website and it’s a wall of text that sounds like marketing. I don’t see a demo or a flagship instance.”

So to keep things simple: Bonfire is a software similar to Mastodon, Misskey or Akkoma, that allows for microblogging just like you would on the Mastodon server mastodon.social or the Misskey server misskey.io. Each of these microblogging platforms already have different features from each other, and the distinguishing feature for Bonfire Social is that it has a concept called circles (similar to the old Google+), allowing you to define a preset group of accounts (a circle) that your message gets send to.

The second different thing about Bonfire is that the software design is highly modular, which allows servers admins to install extensions that make each Bonfire server more unique. The best example of this is an extension that allows for integration with various Academic institutes such as DOI, allowing people to better integrate and comment on academic papers.

The Bonfire team focuses heavily in their communications on this modular extensibility part, which is why the marketing can sound quite confusing to people who are not intimately familiar with Bonfire already. But for regular fediverse people it is as simple as: Bonfire is another fediverse server software in the list of Mastodon, Misskey, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Friendica and more. Each software does mostly comparable things (microblogging) but gives their own interpretation to it and adds additional features.

PieFed is working on two major features for their upcoming 1.4 release, a Stack Overflow-like answering system, and turning remote fediverse links into local links. The answering system gives the post author the ability to select a reply as the answer to the post. This feature will only be available to communities who have turned it on, as this question-answer approach will not fit with every community. As for federation, if this answer is viewed on Lemmy, it will simply be displayed as a normal post and comments, without the additional question and answer highlighting features.

Turning remote fediverse links into local links remains one of the fediverse’s pain points. As PieFed creator Rimu describes: “One of the long-standing issues we have in/on the fediverse is that when I have a link in my post that goes to another post on my instance, people on other instances will click that link and be taken to MY instance, where they can’t comment, don’t have an account, aren’t logged in, etc and they will try to log in using their login credentials for their home instance then wonder why it doesn’t work.” In the upcoming PieFed version, “links like that will automatically be converted to link to the local copy of the post, where ‘local’ is whatever is local for the reader.”

Nodes on a Web: The Fediverse in/for Public Institutions is a new fediverse unconference that will be held in 19/20 March 2026, Amsterdam: “Our goal is to unite individuals involved in these initiatives and the wider Fediverse developer community. We want to share insights and ideas on how the Fediverse can thrive for public institutions in the long term.” The conference is organised by the SABOA Foundation (FediVariety) with support from the Dutch Government (CIO-Rijk) and the City of Amsterdam.

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits, for November 2025
• Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote about their 2025 year with the fediverse.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-146/

#NLnet published their policy on so-called "ai" in projects they sponsor, and while it's a fucking bummer to see them say "We are not against GenAI", they are at least requiring grantees to disclose use of so-called "ai", including requiring a list of prompts used for so-called "substantive" use thereof:

https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/

As always, #GoToSocial in particular explicitly forbids would-be contributors to the code or docs from using "ai" tools in contributions. Our considered stance remains "fuck 'AI' all the way to hell".

#NLnet published their policy on so-called "ai" in projects they sponsor, and while it's a fucking bummer to see them say "We are not against GenAI", they are at least requiring grantees to disclose use of so-called "ai", including requiring a list of prompts used for so-called "substantive" use thereof:

https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/

As always, #GoToSocial in particular explicitly forbids would-be contributors to the code or docs from using "ai" tools in contributions. Our considered stance remains "fuck 'AI' all the way to hell".

NLnet on the use of GenAI for their funded programs. 🙌👏

https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/

#nlnet

Fediverse Report – #144

The News

The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.

WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.

Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.

I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.

FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
• The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
• Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
• Mastodon has some new merch in store.
• Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
• A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
• Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
• Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/fediverse-report-144/

Fediverse Report – #144

The News

The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.

WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.

Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.

I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.

FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
• The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
• Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
• Mastodon has some new merch in store.
• Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
• A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
• Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
• Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/fediverse-report-144/

Fediverse Report – #143

I’ve just gotten back from the Eurosky conference in Berlin this week, and it was great to meet so many people working on the open social web. As a reflection on that, I wrote here about building on open protocols creates new challenges for governance. This week’s fediverse news ties right in to that. I’m still tired from all the talking and writing, so next week I’ll catch up to the rest of this week’s news again.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko steps down

Mastodon’s long-time CEO and founder Eugen Rochko stepping down, after the organisation had announced back in January 2025 that the organisation would be transitioning both its legal and organisational structure. Now, the leadership team of Mastodon consists of:

• Felix Hlatky as Executive Director. Hlatky has been working on Mastodon for over 5 years, initially in the evenings alongside a full-time job, and was the driving force behind incorporating the German non-profit. He has been working for Mastodon on the fundraising and financial side, and was the CFO for Mastodon before now becoming the Executive Director. Mastodon says his priorities are on making server operations more efficient, growing the Mastodon team, and keeping the organisation financially sustainable.
• Hannah Aubry as Community Director. Aubry joined the Board of Directors of Mastodon in early 2025, and the switch in organisational structure now puts her in the Community Director role full time. Aubry will be involved with growing the Mastodon community and overseeing the trust and safety programmes.
• Renaud Chaput as Technical Director. Chaput has been the CTO over the last few years, and he has grown the engineering team to 9 people in that period.

Eugen Rochko stays within the extended leadership team as Strategy & Product Advisor, together with Andy Piper as Head of Communications, and Philip as Chief of Staff. Rochko says the restructuring was prompted by the stress of leading a social media project, and that he feels that he does not “have the right personality for it”. He describes that these negative interactions chip away at you, ranging from being compared to the tech billionaires but with none of the money or resources, to the challenging interactions with the user base. A particularly difficult interaction with a user last summer was the catalyst for stepping back. Rochko acknowledges that ‘there are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities,’ and the restructuring provides better guardrails to ensure Mastodon stays true to its values. Rochko is staying involved because of his passion for the project, calling the fediverse ‘an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape’ and saying Mastodon is ‘our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses.

Mastodon is also transitioning into a Belgium non-profit entity as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. The current Mastodon organisation is in Germany as the Mastodon gGmbH entity. This organisation automatically become a for-profit organisation after its charitable status were stripped away. The new Belgium entity (an AISLB) allows Mastodon to become a non-profit organisation again. The organisation does not know yet when exactly the transfer to this new Belgium entity will happen. Meanwhile, Mastodon will also continue to operate an US-based 501(c)(3), as a “strategic overlay and fundraising hub”.

Another important change is that the Mastodon organisation now owns the Mastodon brand and assets, which used to be owned by Rochko. The organisation has attracted various larger donations, with Mastodon listing Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark. These donations are partially used to fund acquisition of the Mastodon brand and assets from Rochko. Rochko is receiving a one-time compensation of EUR 1M for transferring the Mastodon brand trademark and assets to the organisation, which also compensates him for 10 years of work on the project at a below-market rate. Hlatky noted that Rochko turned down earlier acquisition offers worth more than 10 times this amount to keep Mastodon as a non-profit and open-source project. Mastodon says that individual community donations, which amounted to EUR 337k over the last 12 months, have not been used for this compensation.

When Rochko reflects on his legacy, he writes:

As for what the legacy of my run will be, I find hard to answer. For one, I think it is not up for me to judge. On the other hand, it is as much about what didn’t happen as it is about what did. I’ve always thought that one of the most important responsibilities I had was to say “no”. It is not a popular thing to do, nor is it a fun thing to do, but being pulled into too many different directions at once can spell disaster for any project. I’d like to think I avoided some trouble by being careful. But I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity.

A few observations on this transition:

The sheer grit and determination by Rochko to start the project a decade ago, and continue working and growing the project and organisation on such limited resources in extremely impressive. Daring to let go of the ownership of a project as a founder that has become integral and integrated with who you are is super hard, and I respect for Rochko for being able to say “I need to step back”. He’s clearly aware of the risks of founders not doing this properly, saying that there “are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities”.

Rochko does not mention the drastic change in late 2022, where, due to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon (and Rochko) got put in the global spotlight as the alternative to Twitter. This event drastically changed the course of the open social web, and many people joined Mastodon with the vision that it could replace Twitter. That vision did not come to pass. Hlatky’s vision is also not one of rapidly replacing X, instead describing the goal as “slow user & server growth”. The open question remains if that vision, of Mastodon becoming the main replacement for Twitter, could have actually unfolded, and if the momentum of late 2022 and early 2023 could have resulted in Mastodon becoming a main player in the space. While there are clearly many factors that contributed to this, as the leader of the biggest fediverse platform during that crucial period, it would be interesting to hear Rochko’s perspective on this. Could different decisions by Mastodon about onboarding, moderation, or discovery have capitalised on that momentum?

I find it striking that Rochko describes his own role and responsibility as mainly to say “no”, listing it as one of his most important responsibilities. He also sees one of the main risks to the project as being “pulled into too many different directions at once”. Mastodon does have a reputation for being difficult to get contributions (code or otherwise) accepted, and the reason for that is clearly on display when the CEO describes his role as saying “no”.

This approach points to a fundamental tension in Mastodon that Rochko was never able to fully resolve: is Mastodon a single network that is installed on many servers, or is it many community places connected with each other, some of which run the Mastodon software? While Mastodon’s vision and communications often advertise the ‘many independent communities’ part, in practice the software trended more in the direction of being a single platform.

Rochko’s insistence on maintaining a single coherent vision for Mastodon conflicts with the idea of giving digital communities independence where they have control over the rules of their community. If communities are supposed to be independent, they need to be able to set their own rules. But if protocol software embodies community rules, and that software is controlled by someone with a tendency to say “no” to changes, then communities struggle to be truly independent places. This feeds into what I wrote the other day on how protocol architecture is the same as institutional rules.

Mastodon’s vision is one of community ownership, and grassroots efforts that depends on the community to be sustainable. But relying on donations also show how this funding model introduces fragility and dependency: A single donation by the Atwood family is nearly 7 times as large as all the individual donations for the last year combined. This imbalance has real consequences. The €1M compensation for Rochko’s assets and 10 years of work is fair, but paying it from community donations was clearly not feasible, either financially or politically. Instead, the ownership transition depended on a few large donors willing to contribute sums far beyond what the community could provide. It also leads to the question: why the Mastodon assets were owned by Rochko, and not by the Mastodon organisation in the first place? Hlatky’s vision for Mastodon is to work on financial sustainability, but there is a tension here: if major organisational changes require large donors rather than community funding, is Mastodon truly community-owned?

I’ll be talking with Hlatky soon to explore his vision in more depth, so expect a follow-up on that. For now, I want to acknowledge what Rochko accomplished, building and maintaining Mastodon for a decade. He kept it non-profit and open-source despite offers that would have made him much wealthier. His impact on the broader ecosystem, on proving that alternatives to corporate social media are possible, and on building a community and network that has clear power to sustain itself in the long run, shouldn’t be understated, even as the project now moves into new hands.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-143/