How Mastodon is evolving amid the Twitter exodus

Twitter is in crisis these days. Under new owner Elon Musk, the service has lost more than half of its staff to layoffs and resignations, made erratic changes to its product and platform strategies and faced reports of its plight. financial.

This disruption, in true tech industry fashion, has led to the emergence of a plethora of alternatives, some still sprouting and others fully formed and awaiting their moment in the spotlight.< /p>

Among them, one of the leaders that has emerged is Mastodon - a network built on the ActivityPub protocol that runs servers itself and allows others to join and/or establish their own servers to chat and see the content of others.< /p>

Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon - and currently the only full-time employee - said in an interview with TechCrunch that the service has grown very quickly and now has 2.5 million monthly active users. on no less than 8,600 different servers. Mastodon operates a few directly, and the largest of these, mastodon.social, has 881,000 registered users, with 210,000 active.

Rochko has shut down Mastodon's servers for new registrations. It's a decision he described as a "victimless decision" because there are so many other places to register an account and still interact with the larger Mastodon universe. Nevertheless, this decision has created a curious shortage/demand situation: people and organizations have contacted Rochko to ask him for access to obtain accounts on his servers anyway.

"The main reason why registration is closed right now is just that it's a big burden for DevOps to scale beyond the number of users [we have now]," said he declared. "I don't mean, 'oh, the software isn't good enough to scale' or anything. That's not really the reason, it's just a matter of not having a DevOps employee dedicated right now. I can't handle all that organizational stuff and stuff. It's just easier to close registrations and make sure people who are already there have a good quality of service, instead of allow more people to sign up and then it slows down. And then I have to stay up, sleepless nights fixing things.

"The decentralized nature and the fact that there are many other servers to choose from to sign up to means it's kind of a victimless decision to make."

Now Rochko is looking towards the next steps of his operation.

Mastodon, as it currently exists, is a non-profit organization, largely funded by a Patreon account that Rochko set up and which currently brings in $31,000 a month - a figure he says, " increased significantly over the past month…from $7,000."

Mastodon will remain nonprofit, Rochko said, but he envisions what he describes as a split model, "like Mozilla's, where the nonprofit will continue to work on the main product, which will remain open source, non-profit and so on, and we might start a side business for profit for software as a service, first to provide Mastodon hosting to those who want it.

The goal, he said, is "a sustainable and fair business...we would only do the hosting and the server would be completely under your control. And obviously we would allow you to take your data and move them to your own hosting provider in the future, or migrate from another hosting provider, etc.

Unlike the approach taken by WordPress, there are no plans to integrate advertisements as part of the hosted service, he said. It's a position that seems to stem from his own feelings about them, but he doesn't completely dismiss them.

“You have to consider the unifying nature of the network,” he said. “Anyone could develop another platform, using the same ActivityPub protocol [that Mastodon does], but with completely different software, with different expectations and different functionalities. , they could, in theory.

"The question is only as a user, would you go to a service that offers advertisements, and to make those advertisements effective, the service keeps track of your interests and location? Or would you go are you just in another that doesn't have one? We Mastodon are not interested in ad business and implementing ads in our code. But as I said, it's free and open source, so anyone can modify it. They would do so at their own risk, with different business models."

As for those Mastodon server operators, he said, he leaves the door open to them, but ironically prefers something not unlike what Musk launched for Twitter himself.

"I think I see a method in some kind of framework for building interoperable social media networks; you could think of an individual server as a separate social network, like Tumblr or Instagram," he said. "With interoperability built in from the outset, I think...