Last month I wrote about the Mastodon tech stack and today I’ll talk about the business of Mastodon: finance, marketing, legal and operations. I’m by no means an expert on any of this, but trying hard to keep in front of a news cycle that seems to get accelerated by the actions of Twitter daily. There is a lot out there to read and digest, so let’s get started.

Background

Mastodon was created by German software developer Eugen Rochko and was first released in October 2016. Five years later, Rochko incorporated Mastodon gGmbH as a German non-profit with him serving as founder and CEO. The Mastodon code is free and open-source software (FOSS) and anyone can download the software from Github and use it to run their own social media site.

There are lots of good introductory Mastodon posts, including the one by Glenn Fleishman that I linked to last month. I won’t go into the specifics of things like the fediverse and the ActivityPub protocol, but people seem to be most interested in Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (@eff@mastodon.social) has also published a nice series of posts.

As of today, the instances.social website has current stats on 18,196 instances, the largest of which is run by Mastodon gGmbH (mastodon.social). That is where I currently have my account, along with almost a million others (who have posted more than 53 million times). The Mastodon Users bot shows total Mastodon accounts recently surpassing the ten million mark (hard to tell how many active Twitter users post-Elon, but they had roughly 400 million last year).

Finance

With no ads and an aversion to commercial posts, many Mastodon instances are run by hobbyist volunteers. The time and resources to run a larger instance are not free, however, so groups often turn to crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Open Collective to help facilitate monthly or annual financial support. Mastodon.social, for example, has seven levels on Patreon for individuals ($1/month, $8, $10, $20, $40, $200) and three levels for corporate sponsorship ($100/month, $200, $500). The Patreon side currently has 9,667 patrons, raising $33,147 per month.

While all of the software components of Mastodon are free, the expenses associated with running a small instance include server, bandwidth and storage costs (plus time to learn, troubleshoot and administer your instance). There are also a growing number of service providers that offer managed Mastodon hosting for a monthly fee, some for under $10/month. The main Mastodon documentation has much more information about running your own instance here.

Marketing

Mastodon has a reputation for being hard to join, but there are many efforts to make it easier. The user base is growing, but still relatively small in the traditional social media sense. My personal experience so far has reflected both the technical focus and the smaller universe: I followed 395 various accounts on Twitter and currently follow 150 mostly technical people on Mastodon.

I never used the Twitter website and the same goes for Mastodon. I’ve been a huge fan of third party Twitter clients and was very happy to see many of those same companies jump on Mastodon client development last year. My personal favorite is Tapbots, a two-person Texas company that created the excellent Tweetbot for Twitter and now sells Ivory for Mastodon. Having (synching) clients on both iOS and macOS is key to my enjoyment of these platforms and the Tapbots crew is now taking steps to make joining Mastodon easier for everyone.

When I think about who is using Mastodon now, who should be using it and what the overall demographics look like, it reminds me of my old business school marketing classes. My Gen Z daughters don’t currently use it, very few of the non-tech communities I was a part of on Twitter use it and as I mentioned earlier, brands and other commercial users really don’t use it (and haven’t exactly been welcomed). It will be interesting to see if this platform grows to provide these other user groups with enough value to join and participate. I’d love to see more reporters, musicians, athletes, venues, artists, chefs, restaurants, government agencies and public safety organizations on Mastodon.

Corporate and brand accounts are interesting. I think there was always value in voluntarily following brands on Twitter, but I’m not sure how businesses should approach this. I’ve read some people say businesses should run their own instances and assign accounts like they assign email addresses, but I’m not convinced that is the right approach. I’m also curious to see how people use domain names for this purpose – do you use a subdomain of your brand (mastodon.7minutemiles.com) or register something new (7minutemiles.social)?

Legal

Given all of the recent uncertainty with Section 230 and the Supreme Court, it’s a wonder anyone wants to start up any social media instance these days. The threat of lawsuits is real and the legal landscape of Mastodon includes things like the rights and responsibilities of users and admins, requests from copyright holders and law enforcement, backup, recovery and security responsibilities and moderation of content. Some of these may not be critical roadblocks for small instances, but for larger organizations, it might be harder to justify the risk of entering this space.

Moderation of online content has always been a major issue. In order to be listed on the server page at joinmastodon.org, you must abide by the Mastodon Server Covenant, which has four requirements:

• Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
• Daily backups
• At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
• Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down

The EFF mentioned the Santa Clara Principles on their “don’t screw it up” post, which offers way more guidance on moderation than I ever thought possible. Someone mentioned that Mastodon is like Twitter with HOAs, as every instance administrator sets forth their moderation policies (the “house rules”) and has the ability to ban users and block access to other instances. It remains to be seen whether or not Mastodon admins abuse this power or offer better transparency, due process and accountability than the traditional social media platforms. While you can move your account from one instance to another, it’s not really an easy or complete solution right now.

Operations

In addition to all of the moderation issues mentioned above, the day-to-day operation of a Mastodon instance requires all of the skills of a traditional website: performance tuning, scaling, maintenance, backup and monitoring. Even the large, well-managed instances have been hit with outages and DDoS attacks and the security of the core Mastodon codebase is still somewhat suspect (but like all open source projects, can be reviewed and generally patched quickly).

It’s interesting to see staffing levels on even the largest instances in the Mastodon world (and how this compares to Twitter and the other platforms). There seems to be little redundancy in roles and there are many things that can go wrong (and indeed there have been some recent high profile instances that have shut down). While community support for admins exists, I haven’t seen much outside the managed hosting world in terms of formal support contracts. As user counts grow, however, I’m sure we’ll see more options develop in this space.

Summary

Personally, I love what Mastodon is becoming and how it’s filling the void left by the unfortunate direction Twitter has taken under Elon Musk. If I could make a living running an instance or helping advise others on the Mastodon universe, that would be exciting. Perhaps I will start out with a small, personal instance for our family. Or perhaps I will just try and get more friends to try it out with existing instances. But if it’s good enough for formal Apple support, hopefully Mastodon will continue to grow and be around for a long, long time…