Hereās what it will take to get to 20 million.
Let me start by saying that Iām a relative newcomer to the Fediverse, as you can see on my profile. Many people (and institutions, NGOs, governments, and more) have been thinking about the spaceāand the technologies underpinning itāfor much longer than I have. Most of what Iāll be doing here is pointing to and surfacing their fantastic work.
What I know really well is community and communal effort. Through my work managing Fastlyās open source program, Fast Forward, I spend most of my time learning about and supporting some of the world's most successful and long-standing communities. They work together, often across time zones and languages, sometimes with no incentive besides their passion and determination to improve the world or solve problems.
The Mastodon and Fediverse community is incredible. (Iāve tipped my hat to Mastodon's community before.) I mean the people who gather in these spaces to talk, share, laugh, and learn together, and of course, those who build and run the servers, platforms, and software we use to navigate the Fediverse.
But open source technologies and communities fragment. Theyāre supposed to. Itās the direct result of the freedom open source represents. Someone decides they donāt like the direction of a project, so they fork it and set off in a different direction. Itās wonderful, but fragmentation is a pitfall too. It can hamper progress and reduce impact.
The technology and protocols of the Fediverse are decentralized ā our efforts to build and improve them donāt have to be.
As the community and user base continue to grow, we must be deliberate in staying organized and working together. We need to share ideas, solutions, and resources. Not to stave off fragmentation completely but to use resources efficiently and to make our work better. There are brilliant minds in this community and many passionate people who want to fix existing technical and policy issues. If we work together, we can solve them.
Now to cover what needs to be improved and fixed.
A few days ago, I posted on Mastodon asking my friends there to share what they thought needed to improve to grow the Fediverse. It was a great thread; I have really smart friends! Before I get into their thoughts and share some of my own, I want to address a comment I got a couple of times because itās a valid point, and I want to be clear about my intentions.
I donāt have an agenda here except to be helpful however I can. My agenda is not growth for growthās sake. I donāt think thatās good or desirable. Iām excited by the idea of more people finding the community and kindness I've found on the Fediverse too. (I havenāt felt so at home in an online space since I got my start in community posting on the old Ctrl+Alt+Del webcomic forums.) I think the community-first and welcoming nature of the Fediverse can be maintained, even at a greater scale, if growth occurs thoughtfully and intentionally.
To me, thatās why we need to make changes and improve ā to build systems and spaces that are safe, trustworthy, and delightful by default, so scale isnāt scary.
Hereās what my fellow fediversizens (letās workshop thatā¦) thought about growing the Fediverse, along with some of my thoughts and links to great work that is in process, and tangential or related work that could inform the Fediverseās future.
Think beyond Mastodon
Rather fitting this was shared by someone posting on Pleroma šā itās so true! Mastodon is the most popular software for navigating the Fediverse, but itās not the only one, and itās not based on the only federated web protocol (ActivityPub) either. You can check out some of the other software and platforms on Fediverse.party. (And if you donāt know how the Fediverse works, you can learn about it on JoinFediverse.wiki, or check out this post from our company blog (thereās info about really neat projects being forked and built on top of Mastodon itself in there, too).
Actually, one of my favorite things about the Fediverse (did you know RSS & email are part of the Fediverse too?) is Webmentions. You can see it in action over on the Open Source Initiativeās blog, Voices of Open Source, here.
Verification
I think this is crucial for the Fediverse to become a ātrusted news sourceā in the same way Twitter was, or for journalists, politicians, and other people in the public eye to feel safe on it. They need to be able to prove that they are who they say they are, to give their followers reassurance that theyāre authentic, and to disavow impersonators. And whatās more, we all need to trust that system for it to work.
Iām unaware of any work being done specifically in this space for the Fediverse (if you are, Iād love to hear about it!). My teammate Keith Kurson told me about a new project happening in California right now called the Digital Identity Project. Thereās a broader effort, supported by many key players in the tech space, ID2020, to promote the use of digital IDs too. For those who want their Fediverse identity to be tied to their IRL identity, linking their digital ID could be an option. But this option might be years out before itās feasible to implement. What can be done now?
Community Moderation
The moderation issue is crucial to any public digital and social space. And the capacity for the community to moderate must keep pace with the size of the community. My mind immediately goes to Facebookās (now Metaās) failure to moderate their communities at scale. In some countries, they donāt have enough, if any, human moderators that speak the local language or understand local customs or idioms. We canāt let that happen here.
Iām really excited to learn more about what Jaz is working on. (Reach out if youāre interested too ā and letās support the work as we can!) Education for moderators and instance admins will be crucial. A wonderful aspect of the Fediverse is that moderation scales alongside the community because each instance admin takes on the responsibility of moderating their community. And users can switch instances if the moderation policies donāt suit them.(That being said, I know the recent explosive user growth of users has been challenging for many admins. If you can, donate to your instance or volunteer as a mod!)
And I wanted to mention Izzieās comment here because itās a key failure of Metaās scaling too fast without intention. We canāt trust AI (yet, if ever) to do this work for us. AI reflects the dataset it was trained on, and therefore our systemic and societal biases. We must have human controls for moderation that are based in local communities and have knowledge of local languages, customs, and events.
Trust and Community
It will be interesting to see how local and national governments, educational institutions, NGOs, and companies continue to show up in the Fediverse. Many examples of those types of organizations are already spinning up Mastodon instances. I will list them here (let me know if I missed any!)
- The German federal government: https://social.bund.de/about
- The European Union: https://social.network.europa.eu/about
- The City of Amsterdam: https://social.amsterdam.nl/about
- SURF, the Dutch IT cooperative for education and research: https://social.edu.nl/@SURF
- Internet Archive: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive
- Mozilla: https://mastodon.social/@mozilla
- Medium: https://me.dm/@medium
- Flipboard: https://flipboard.social/@Flipboard
- Vivaldi: https://social.vivaldi.net/about
The presence of governments and such organizations on Mastodon further legitimize the platform. They represent a trusted communication channel for their citizens, constituents, and fans by linking their web and social presence. And they help build trust in representatives of those institutions by tying the individualās Mastodon presence to the organizationās instance.
Whatās more, these instances serve as community gathering points. Iām imagining a future where city governments (or beyond!) could offer community groups, in addition to civil services, a profile on their instance so that the instanceās local timeline becomes a gathering place for the community to share resources, events, and more ā a true, digital town square.
Discoverability & Growth
I heard from several people that theyāre having difficulty finding people and content that interests them. And some people theyād really like to see on the Fediverse arenāt there yet. As Danilo points out further down in the thread, there are some growth-hack tactics that could be used to help bring entire communities over to the space. āIf you want specialized groups to stick it helps to give them a shared onboarding experience, I think. Then they know theyāre in it with other people, they can compare notes, etc.ā (Itās been really cool to see some communities migrate en masse, like infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io.)
I think one answer to getting people and communities to join is simply the passing of time. As the platform grows and stabilizes, more people will join. In the meantime, there are things we can do to make the Fediverse even more welcoming and help keep people coming back. If you see someone whoās just joined or is confused, say hi and offer your help! It only takes a moment and it just might make their day. š
Here are resources or tips I keep suggesting when I do so:
- I think Fedi.Tips is the best crash course out there, and you can follow them here: @feditips@mstdn.social
- Follow, and use, hashtags for content thatās relevant to your interests.
- Go check out the blogs of your friends, favorite news sources, etc. Maybe theyāre already here!
- If your local timeline isnāt interesting to you, find a different one and migrate. There are instructions to do so on Mastodonās site. Joinmastodon.org has a directory too, and fedi.garden keeps track of well-moderated instances.
- Ask your friends who they follow, and boost people and content you find that you like.
Itās a fraught issue due to privacy concerns, but search is one way we could address the discoverability issue. My colleague Anil Dash wrote a blog post about how we could build a search that the Fediverse would welcome. Thereās an existing opt-in search option called Tootfinder.ch too.
Features
There are features that are missing that will make people feel more comfortable, and help give them a more delightful experience. BatManitou covers two Iāve heard frequently from many people: quote posts and secure messaging. There are inelegant workarounds for now (like linking to the post you're commenting on in a new post, and moving private messages to an encrypted platform.)
On the other hand, the fact these features aren't included, or the way they are presented (like with private messaging), are deliberate choices. And to me, they are wise ones. I don't want the Fediverse, or my home on Mastodon, to become a place where dunking on people is systemically and technically incentivized or encouraged. And the way private messaging is presented serves to remind you that your messages are not encrypted. Platforms don't need to do or be everything to everyone, which is what makes the Fediverse great. Mastodon may not have quote posts, but there is a protocol for it in ActivityPub! Which Pleroma and Misskey have implemented.
Beyond functionality features like the ones above, there are so many great and fun things being built for the Fediverse. Shameless plug because I'm on the Glitch team, but there are a lot of things being built on Glitch.com that are very useful and delightful. You can check out a round-up here.
Iāve probably missed some areas we could grow and improve here ā what do you think?
By the way, in this post, Iāve focused mainly on the more user-oriented priorities and growth opportunities for the Fediverse. In a future post, Iām planning to address some priorities that we need to address further down the stack, like DDoS mitigation and resource pooling with an eye towards sustainability, and reducing strain and stress for instance admins and their servers. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that!
Finally, Iām really excited to be participating in FediForum March 29-30, where weāll discuss all of these topics and more. Hopefully, Iāll see you there!
Chat me know in the comments here or message me on Fedi: fosstodon.org/@haubles
Top comments (3)
The term that I've seen catch on is "fedizen"!
Oh that is much better! xD ty
@haubles thanks for the article a lot of great resources linked!
I've personally had the same issue and I've built fedidevs.com to try to help solve it. Let me know if you find it useful or have ideas on how to improve it (also let me know if you think it's inappropriate to pitch my project here, I'll remove this comment if that's the case!)