Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko leads a ‘hero’s journey’ to create a better social media experience for us all. But how will Threads entering the Fediverse change the landscape?
It’s been a momentous time for the Fediverse. New versions of Mammoth and Ivory launched. WordPress and Tumblr reaffirmed their commitment to integrating ActivityPub. And then both Threads and Flipboard rolled out their plans to federate.
What does this all mean for the Fediverse? How will moderation work as the Fediverse grows in leaps and bounds? Who will be next to federate?
Mastodon’s founder and CEO Eugen Rochko goes deep with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue for a sprawling conversation that looks back on Mastodon’s epic year, dissects the moment we’re in today, and ponders a future filled with big changes and new ideas.
More urgently, if you’re following what’s happening with Threads, it is essential listening for understanding Meta’s strategy and how the Fediverse is responding.
Highlights from this conversation include:
0:51 Looking back on Mastodon’s epic year
3:22 Small team, big goals
4:55 The arrival of Threads/Meta: pro or con?
9:01 The way Mastodon/Fediverse is architected to provide a better social media experience
11:24 The “big win” of Meta adopting an open standard
12:10 The game-changing paradigm shift in how social media works
17:30 Why Meta is committing to Threads — a significant moment for the social web
18:10 Mastodon community’s reaction to Threads’ entry
19:24 Preemptively building walls to block Threads: self-defeating?
21:10 Tools and advice for instance owners on interoperating with Threads
26:09 Gaining momentum: who will federate next?
28:34 Bluesky
30:00 ActivityPub: the beauty of a generic protocol
38:24 User experiences in the Fediverse
41:06 “Embrace, extend, extinguish” and the XMPP comparison
50:28 Funding Mastodon through Patreon donations
53:10 U.S. nonprofit version of Mastodon and grant applications
54:23 On outside contributions to Mastodon’s code base
57:42 Hopes and dreams for the future
💰Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
🔎 You can follow Eugen on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@Gargron
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at https://flipboard.social/@mike, or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at https://flipboard.social/@mike@flipboard.com
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
The last week has been momentous for the Fediverse new versions of Mammoth and Ivory launched. WordPress and Tumblr reaffirmed their commitment to integrating ActivityPub. And then both Threads and Flipboard rolled out their plans to federate.
What does all this mean for the Fediverse? How will moderation work as the Fediverse grows in leaps and bounds? Who will be next to federate?
Today Mike's talking to Eugen Rochko, the founder and CEO of Mastodon, to find out.
Mike McCue:
Eugene Rochko. Welcome to Dot Social. It's great to have you here. It's good to be here. It has been an absolutely epic year for you. And for Mastodon. It's incredible to see all the things that have happened in just the last 12 months. What are your, what are your thoughts when you look back on this year? What are the big observations you've had?
Eugen Rochko:
Well, objectively speaking, yes, it does feel like a great year. So much stuff happen, the growth of the platform from I mean, technically, that happened like in December and November previous year, but from like 200,000 active users to 1.6 million. Like that is like a figure that's four times, five times I don't know, the size. And we've achieved some level of mainstream awareness.
Our official apps were on App Store top lists for for a while. We've, we've had so many downloads on the App Store's and of course, the buy in from from, from Flipboard, from medium from Mozilla. That has been amazing. And I mean, not not, not the least amazing thing was that we apparently made enough of a splash that even a large platform, like Meta has decided that they want to play kind of by our rules and integrate with with the protocol that we've been evangelizing.
Mike McCue:
Did you ever think that would happen?
Eugen Rochko:
I know, I never, I never thought that it would happen. I thought we would basically create kind of an island off of social media, but I never thought that the major players would cooperate in any way. From from, from an objective standpoint, it does when you list all of these things. Mastodon has achieved a lot.
But on a personal level, when I think about it, I'm like, there's like a million other things that we need to do. And it never feels like Like you've reached any milestone, because if as long as you as soon as you reach a milestone, you think about all the other things that need to be done. And it's kind of a never ending battle. Yeah, it is. It's truly remarkable what you have managed to achieve, especially with such a small team. I mean, how big is your team right now? Yeah, I think most people are unaware that there's like 1.5 engineers working on the actual core product. And I'm the inadequate five. Yeah, I'm the point five, because I have to do the CEO stuff as well.
Yeah. So yeah, so if you were being serious, like two people have one of which is me working on the core product. We have one DevOps engineer. We have two people working on the iOS app, and one person working on the Android app. And that's kind of it for the engineering side. And then we have an external agency that does design for us. And that translates into like one designer, who's mostly been working on the mobile apps, but lately has been also getting into our web presence. So we're kind of improving our web design as well. With with Sam and yeah, then there's a couple of people for project management and like CFO and recently starting CTO as well, but that's it. That's like, I don't know, like a dozen people or so overall.
Mike McCue:
Okay, so let's talk about the Mastodon in the room. The arrival of Meta. Now, something that I think you and yeah, obviously many others never really thought would actually happen seems like it's actually happening. First of all, from your vantage point, do you view this as a good thing or a bad thing? A mix? What? What's your take on this?
Eugen Rochko:
Let me mean, I definitely have mixed feelings about it right, because I'm not a fan of Meta by any means. I haven't had a Meta property account since probably 2018, or something like that. And the last one to go was WhatsApp. I deleted my Facebook account Long, long ago, and I've never used Instagram in the first place.
I actually have to have a very nuanced position on this, because I would not necessarily recommend anyone to go on Threads and have a Threads account. But I think that Threads joining the Fediverse is a great thing. Because basically, it means that anyone who's using Mastodon has access to the 100 million users that Threads managed to acquire since since they launched, and they managed to acquire it because it's basically the Instagram database, right? So you have this massive user base that is very, very mainstream. And it used to be locked in in a commercial silo. And suddenly, it's being opened up. And we can benefit from their network effects to convince people to switch to Mastodon, right? I'm still like, a little skeptical, like, Is this really happening? But they did just launch a test run of Federation on some of their engineers accounts on Threads. And I was able to follow Adam Mosseri, and a couple others, and their posts appear in my home feed on mastodon. And, you know, it's it's such a huge deal, because when people choose which account what social network to make an account on, it's not just about which features the platform has, in fact, it's very little about that. And it's more about who else is on the platform? Who can I access? And what what kind of audience will I have? What kind of reach? I mean, it depends on the person, there are people who go and look for basically a close knit group or community, and they don't really care, like if there's lots of lots of people using the service or not. But for a lot of more mainstream people, for artists, musicians. It's really important, like what kind of what's the limit on the amount of people I can reach. And for people who are less into like specific hobbies, it's also important to just be able to follow more like mainstream accounts, like, famous comedian from TV or like a big musician, or like, President Biden, for President Biden. Exactly. And so like, at the moment in the status quo, it's like, okay, so there's Threads, and it has 100 million active users. And then there's Mastodon that has like, somewhere up to 2 million active users. And basically, that unless you are really motivated by being conscious of your privacy, and not wanting to see ads, and just wondering have a free and open and decentralized platform, the 100 million over weighs the 2 million, right? But with this, you we can basically pitch and say, Okay, you can come and Mastodon you can, your privacy can be respected, we're not going to track you, you're not going to see any ads. And you're going to be able to access all of the people that you wanted to connect with on Threads as well at the same time. And that makes it such an easier pitch for Mastodon, I believe.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I've heard a lot of people on Mastodon, I'm very concerned that just the simple entry of Meta net fact that there's even an instance here just is going to, you know, create all sorts of privacy issues right out of the gate. I think people have very well placed concerns on this front. They've they they've been on the receiving end of abuse from people on other social platforms, not just Meta, but Twitter and others. And so they look at Mastodon as like a safe place to be and more tight knit community. And then you also have people who are very worried about the surveillance capitalism model and, you know, people's data being used in ways that they don't approve of. So what you know, when you look at how Mastodon and the broader Fattah versus architected and now they're rival of Threads. Do you Do you see how what do you save folks who say well, now I'm worried that like, just because Threads is here, my A data is going to be, you know, taken from me, and I'm going to have all these same problems that I did on these other platforms.
Eugen Rochko:
Right. So it's a mix between the way we build these platforms, it kind of understands that all the other parties that are going to connect to are not necessarily going to be well behaved, right? There is kind of understanding that you have to have precautions against malicious actors in the network. It because you know, it is a decentralized network, that means you don't know who you're connecting with, you don't know who else is on the other end. So it has to be designed right way where you're only exposing what you mean to expose and not more than that you don't trust third parties. And there is a lot of ways that Mastodon is designed for this already. And of course, the other part is just Yeah, Mastodon is a platform for broadcasting to the public. Mostly, there's, you know, there's features like posting only to your followers. But that's not the primary intended use, right? It's about just blasting out your thoughts into the world. And so of course, you can't really predict who's going to see what you're posting. And I think we built this on the foundation of an open protocol. And it would be kind of ridiculous to say, Okay, it's open. But actually, we don't want people to adopt it and use it. Right. Right.
Mike McCue:
So it typically it would be hypocritical, it
Eugen Rochko:
would be yes. And I would say that a large player like Meta adopting our open web standard, that is backed by the W3C is a big win, right? It's, yeah, that's what we've been fighting for. That's what we've been advocating for, at least I have right from the very beginning, my vision for Mastodon was that eventually we would have a social web back then I didn't call it that. That's something that that's a phrase that you coined for me and social web. But I like it, I like it a lot more than Fediverse that we're going to have social web that is basically interoperable, right, that we would have all these different providers mastered on being one of them, and that you would not be locked in into any particular one. And, you know, I would have been happy if prior to its acquisition, Twitter was also going to join this this network, and I am still hopeful that Tumblr will. And I think that that is the future, because why should we have all these different accounts and have, like, all these different experiences that are required to connect with different people, when we could have just one account and connect with everyone who uses different services, just from from one account, I think that that is the superior experience. And, and that's just from from, like a personal convenience standpoint. And then, of course, the other standpoint is, if you have this interoperable network, without login, it's a lot easier for people to switch from one provider to the other, which means there is a more level playing field for for competition, and for avoiding bad practices, right? Because right now, if a social media company is starting to exploit and abuse you, but they have a moat of a giant user base and network effects that come with it, you're basically stuck, you have to put up with it. Because there's, there's no choice. I mean, you could abandon all of the people, you know, all of the accounts you're interested in, and join a different social media platform. But you're making a sacrifice, and a lot of people are not willing to do that. Whereas if you were in this ideal world scenario where everything was interoperable, you just switch providers and you connect with all the same people that are there. Right. And yeah, I think that that's a game changer, because it also means that all these platforms in this interoperable network, realize, okay, we can't go too far. Otherwise, we're going to lose our users really, really easily. Because basically, it means people can switch from Meta from from Threads to Mastodon or to another federated network, and without losing any of their connections. And that is just amazing. And I mean, I have some people kind of argue with me and say, like, well, is Threads going to have like the migrate your account feature like Mastodon does? And if not, like, what's, what's the value? But honestly, that that feature is just like one tiny layer of convenience. It's It's really a moot point when you can just the main thing is, who can who can you connect to? And if you can just switch and connect all the same people, it doesn't matter if it's automated or not. That's just the level of convenience. So even if they never integrate, like an official move your accounts feature like Mastodon does, it doesn't matter, because it's still just a completely game changing difference that you can connect to the people on threats. without, without being on threats, right. Yeah. Well,
Mike McCue:
you know, I think all of this speaks to the fact that you you've managed to achieve a paradigm shift and how social media works. That is inescapable. A lot of creators, a lot of publishers, a lot of individuals who spent years building up their following on Twitter, their followership basically realized that that followership did not belong to them. And it didn't even matter, because when Ilan took over Twitter, he rewrote the algorithms so that he was up at the top of the for you feed, whether you followed him or not, and, and all these other people who had, you know, a million followers, they're there, the chances of their posts even being seen in this new for you, algorithm became significantly lower. And their posts would be seen, as, you know, right next to, you know, Nazi posts. It's incredible. And I think a lot of people realize this is really bad, this is really broken. And so now, that's not everybody. I mean, most users don't even tweet or post and they don't care so much about who's following them. And they're mostly consuming, right, it's probably a 9010 kind of situation. For those 10%. They deeply appreciate, I think, the values and principles that you built Mastodon around the ability to own the followership the ability to, you know, take that with you that that's yours, that investment that your audience is your audience. And, and being able to bring that audience with you to any other platform that you choose to use, and it might not be that you're moving to a different platform, it might just be that you're using another platform for a different purpose, a different use case. And, and a different dimension of you as a creator. So this is like, I think this is like an incredible achievement. Um, and and I think that's why Meta is doing this, because in order to compete with Twitter, you the ultimate sort of way to do that is to get those 10% of people who really care about this stuff, to realize that they are going to come to an open platform, they're not going to be trapped again, they're not going to have the same movie play out at Twitter, or at on Threads as played out on Twitter. At least that's, that's what Meta is, is committing to. And, and that's why this is all happening. So it is it is it really quite a I think, significant moment for the for the social web and, and interoperability.
Eugen Rochko:
Yeah, yeah. And I think I think that, for most people, they see it as a positive thing. There is, of course, Mastodon community is can be complicated sometimes and has here. It's a community that is very enthusiastic about the platform they're on, which is a good thing. But which can kind of result in behaviors that are a little bit out of line. And there's this, this is a controversial topic, on Masteral itself, because there are camps in Mastodon that think that it's all about basically, rejecting big tech at any opportunity, even if it's basically self defeating, which it is in this case, well,
Mike McCue:
and the beauty of the way you've set things up with Mastodon and the broader Fediverse model is people can decide to be their own, you know, connection of servers. That's their choice. Right. They don't have to federate with Threads if they don't want to. That is That is their choice. That's the beauty of the of the situation. I think that like the thing that I've been a little concerned about is people preemptively building walls in the Fediverse, you know, yeah. Which to me, it's sort of the exact opposite of what this is all about. What's your take on that? Do you feel like that's, that's, you know, a good thing or a problematic thing? What do you say to folks when they say that they're going to just block Threads right out of the gate?
Eugen Rochko:
Right. So preemptively, I'll start with saying that I agree with you that that the wonderful thing is that people have this ability to make this decision. for themselves and to make a choice, and I stand by their ability to do so basically, however, I think that it is basically the freedom to make a mistake in this particular case, because basically, you're making a preemptive choice to disconnect a lot of people from potentially connecting with people they want to connect with. And I've already seen examples of prominent accounts on Mastodon, who discovered that the server they're on is decided has decided to preemptively block Threads, and they're the ones who want to connect with with with people from Threads. And so they have to start thinking about, Okay, I'm gonna move to provider that's a little more reasonable on this topic. And
Mike McCue:
some people I've even noticed, say, Well, maybe I'll just create an account on Threads then. Right,
Eugen Rochko:
exactly. And that is the that is the other side of the coin. That's the way in which it is self defeating. Because people will want to connect with people on Threads that's just unavoidable, because there's 100 million of them there. And that's just I think that's just the act of user number, right,
Mike McCue:
that there's, there's more that are there because it is the basically the Instagram database. If you're an instance owner, and you don't preemptively block Threads, what are the tools that they have to try to make sure that some of the fears that people have which I think, again, are well placed fears right, don't materialize?
Eugen Rochko:
That's a great question. Because I think that a lot of people have just simple misconceptions about how any of this is going to work. And I tried addressing them in a blog post that we did back in July, called what you need to know about threats. And so I think a lot of people believe that if thread starts federating, you're basically going to have millions of posts millions of accounts, flooding your server. And if the moderation on Threads is not going to be perfect, basically, you're going to be overwhelmed by this flood of bad behavior, right. But that's not how Federation actually works on Mastodon, you start receiving posts when you follow an account. So if you don't follow anyone from Threads, you're never going to see a post from Threads unless it's, you know, boosted by somebody who you do follow. Which means that it's actually very manageable to guard yourself against anything bad that might come out of Threads, right? If there is an account on Threads, that is to is performing harassment, or spam, or transphobia. masternode allows you to moderate remote accounts, just like you do with local accounts, like you can just suspend the remote account. And that's it, that's the only account from the domain that is suspended and everybody else can still be accessed and interacted with. And that is the gradual approach that we on Mehsana social have been primarily taking since the inception. Like we don't lock entire servers until it's clear that actually that is absolutely necessary, because it's overwhelmingly bad actors. Or, you know, typically, it's either of two things, either it's, you know, if it's a kind of a general purpose server that is maybe moderated imperfectly, we tend to just okay, we're going to moderate these accounts ourselves. But we're going to ensure that our users can connect to your users as much as possible like that we don't want to create an interference to people's communications, right? That's the main objective. But then, of course, if they're if it's a server that's basically run by, like, by by Nazi or like, it's exclusively for Nazis and has like, you know, a Nazi slogan in its domain I've ever heard of them. Yeah, of course, it's like blocked button, right. And so I feel like the majority of people on Threads are just going to be normal people, and not going to be breaking our rules in any way. And then for those that do, we're just going to suspend them individually, right? We're just going to block them individually.
Mike McCue:
And that seems like a really fair and reasonable approach. And, of course, coming back to, you know, the instance that you're on if you're if you're, if you really just simply do not want to see any buddy from Threads, you certainly could join an instance that that is their explicit purpose is to like create an environment free of anybody from Threads. And then to your point, sorry,
Eugen Rochko:
Mike, you actually kind of don't even have to do that because Mastodon provides you the tools to just hide everything from Threads.net. As a user on your own, you can block entire demands. As a user, it doesn't have quite the same effects that a moderator level block does. But for most intents and purposes when You block a domain as a user, you will not be getting any followers from that domain, which means your posts will not be automatically distributed there. In fact, you will also if you have any followers from a domain that will be removed, so that your future posts don't travel to that server. And you're not going to see it anywhere in the interface. It's like a mute. So it's like a combination of block followers and mute.
Mike McCue:
That is a really good point, I'm glad you raised that you it's within everybody's control individually, to decide how much or little of Threads they want to see in their timeline, who they follow who they block on an individual basis, or you can block the entire domain. And that's the beauty of the architecture here. So yeah, these preemptive wall things, I think, are more self defeating than they are helpful. And enabling the Fediverse to have its own sort of defense mechanisms tested and strengthened through this is a very positive development, because it won't just be Threads federating, right, there are a lot of other services that will federate. Obviously, Flipboard, were very well wrong. On that front, will will have probably a quarter of a million curators and publishers all available, federated, you know, on a two way basis it by the end of January or so, there's, of course, we know, folks that Tumblr are looking at this, it does seem, you know, Matt seems very serious about ultimately integrating activity pub into their back end. And, and I think because of what Meta has done to sort of raise this whole concept of Federation to another level of awareness, I think there's going to be a lot more companies that will federate anyone who has a layer of any kind, why would you build your own social network, right? Why wouldn't you just connect with this federated network?
Eugen Rochko:
Exactly, is the momentum. And that's another point of why this is just a positive development for for for mastering for the social web, because Meta has a lot of momentum on on two different fronts. One, it's just, it's a huge name, right? It's Facebook, its Instagram. Everybody knows them, the pool they have as a company is huge. And then, of course, that just the roll user numbers 100 million users, I think that it might convince companies that we're on on the edge about this, like Tumblr, although Tumblr was was very positive McMullen was very positive about this. Probably a year ago, we haven't really seen any real development and there was a, there was a post about one by one of their engineers basically saying it was put in the backburner internally, which I don't know if anything changed since then. But that has punished potentially, their situation, basically convinced those companies that yeah, actually, this is the way forward. You're no longer just connecting to the 2 million people who are using Mastodon, you're also connecting 200 million people who are using Threads, and 2 million who are using mastodon. And, of course, the ideal scenario for me would be if this meant that also blue sky decided, okay, maybe we're not going to do our own custom written protocol anymore. Maybe we're just going to implement activity pub, because that's something that I was advocating for since the inception of blue sky back when it was, you know, a big chatroom of different decentralized social media developers just arguing which particle is the best? I was gonna I was I was arguing activity, pub is the best please use it. We were actually a protocol. We're using a protocol that is designed by the W three C by an actual Standards Authority on the web.
Mike McCue:
Right. And it has massive adoption, right? Blue Sky has some good ideas, I think, you know, they've they brought some good ideas into the mix, but it's not federated. And it's still just their own protocol. And it's totally proprietary at the moment.
Eugen Rochko:
It's still just their own node, basically just one node. And gay. There's a custom written protocol. And it's a little rough, if I'm honest, like that the way that they've decided to do certain things is not to my taste personally, but also in a more general sense. I feel like it's a what do you call it not invented here, syndrome where you basically kind of feels like some things were done their own way just for the sake of it, where it could have just been done an activity but that was always my take, like all these ideas. In different takes like about whether you should be able to take your account with you migrate to a different server. It's all accomplishable. In activity pub, because it's a very extensible protocol. It's a very generic protocol on purpose to allow all sorts of different social media experiences to interoperate. The variety of services on the social web that users activity today is also amazing. I mean, so on one hand, you have mastered on doing the techspace microblogging, and I say techspace, but we also have polls and pictures and videos and everything that you would expect. And then you've got like photo centric pixel fed. And then you've got like, microblogging platforms like write.as, or write freely, where you have like, just just blogging and you know, kind of like medium. And then you know, we're going to have Flipboard, obviously, which is, you know, a curation platform where you kind of create these magazines, and you share like content and links and everything. And then of course, there's Lemmy and Kaban, which are like more Reddit, like where you, you have these communities that share links, and they all intersect on certain features. But then they also have the diversity of they go in different directions in the user experience, and in the features that provide, they're not all one to one interoperable because it doesn't necessarily make sense to have something in Mastodon that works like something in Reddit, but inter intersects on things on in ways that are most practical. Like if there is a you know, if there is a user on Lemmie, you can subscribe to that user from Mastodon and when they submit links, like they do on Reddit, you can sort of you get a feed of their submissions. And, you know, isn't that just amazing? And it just proves that how extensible, this this this protocol is, and then how, what, what you can do with it, and, and I mean, yeah, there's just going back to my point that you can build anything you want on top of activity, pub, and you can definitely, you know, extend it and make it better. And if there's something missing, the way that the Blue Sky Protocol is built, the 80 protocol will probably be a little bit jarring to the people who use it when they realize how it is built. Because everything in that protocol is public. Even the people you block is public, because everything every user account is basically a public git like repository. There is like a Merkle tree of all the posts that you've made. And so there's there's there's nothing like when in Mastodon, you can make a post that is visible only to your followers? Well, you know, ultimately, the
Mike McCue:
protocol things will will sort themselves out, you know, the different kinds of features and capabilities. I think that thing that is happening here is so much bigger than any one protocol. It is it is, as you said, it's amazing that there are all these different developers and applications of all different types. They're not just Twitter clones, they're like all these different kinds of social experiences that people are innovating and experimenting with now built on activity pub, that are starting to federate and interact with each other. And then there are existing services that have been proprietary and their own walled gardens that are now starting to federate with activity pub, there's a namespace that's developing, there's a set of norms that are starting to develop Threads is creating a sort of the acid test for how moderation is going to work in a decentralized world. But I think what's happening is the the power of that network is going to grow, you know, exponentially. There's the Metcalf, the famous Metcalf law around the power of network effects. You know, it is true that when a person joins a network, that network just becomes more valuable for everyone else on that network. What's really amazing is that what you have here is not just people joining, you have applications joining, you have entirely new use cases, using the same network. And that's really how why I think of this as the social web, because that's exactly what happened with the web. You had. AOL is the dominant model for how people were online, totally proprietary, completely walled garden. They controlled all the innovation of how like a travel service would work. They, they wrote all of that. And if you wanted, if you were a travel company, you had to go do a business development deal with AOL to be online. The web changed all that. And at first, I remember people being confused about the web, like why would I? Why would I join the internet? Like I get everything I need on AOL? It's confusing. I have to pick a service provider and then I have to figure out a browser to use Why would I do that? But then you had these amazing websites that came out. That never would have happened. And with AOL, you had Amazon, you know, you had amazing travel companies kayak, and, you know, Airbnb and all these things that just were never even thought about at AOL. Right. And never would have happened had it not been for that open standard. Because we all share the HTTP is an imperfect protocol. You know, it's not perfect, it doesn't cover everything. But what it did enable was absolutely breathtaking. And, and I see that same movie playing out here with social media, and so and the social layer of the web.
Eugen Rochko:
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you, no, there is no protocol that is absolutely perfect. When, when something is used so widely, and by so many different people, people are going to find flaws, they're going to find something that is not ideal. But the value that the protocol provides is just huge, it's over outweighs any kind of individual flaw that you have to work around. And I mean, yeah, you know, there are, you know, activitypub is, in my opinion, quite simple, in its essence, but it can be quite complicated in its implementation, because there are many different details. And I mean, but how can you avoid that when you have so many different platforms that are able to use them to enter? Alright, I mean, the complexity has to come with it, to some extent, right, and Right,
Mike McCue:
right. Yeah. In fact, I would say, I would say, a good 70% of implementing activity, pub is the user experience design, you know, what features are you going to enable, you know, in what capacity to what users what kind of user interface, you know, you could expose the full complexity of the Fediverse to folks, or you can like help people, like, you know, focus in on very specific use cases, and still get a lot of power the Fediverse. And then, you know, if they want to go deeper, give them ways to do that.
Eugen Rochko:
Absolutely agree. In fact, I would say that the most time spent developing Mastodon is not actually activity pub related, it is user facing features and interfaces and features that are basically, you know, quality of life or moderation, that have very peripheral things to do with actually federating or exchanging data through activity pub, like. And then of course, but there are situations where a new feature requires protocol, like changes or new ideas or something. And of course, it takes a little bit longer than, but overall, if you're building an application that with activity pub, most of what you're going to be dealing with is actually making a good application. And activity above is just going to be a foundation that is relatively easy and simple to to implement. In fact, I wrote a tutorial on how to create a basic activity webserver, a couple of years back, and it's basically two blog posts. And it will have very simple Ruby code. I just chose Ruby, because it's really easy to read. But you know, obviously, any programming language, and you know, it's really easy to get a basic bare bones, social app, working with activity, but it's everything else about it that you need to build, and that you need to have good ideas and user experience about to make it successful.
Mike McCue:
And that's where I think, what I'm really excited about the future here, because so far, it's really been about oh, there's an open version of Twitter, or there's an open version of Instagram. And, you know, that's how a lot of the, you know, world has thought about this, you know, at a simplistic level. But what I think is really amazing is that and if people don't, I think most people don't appreciate yet is the new kinds of user experiences that can be created now that are now possible. That that we've never seen before, it won't look like tick tock, it will look like Twitter, right? It will look like something completely, there's a whole set of services that will look totally different, be different. And that I think is, you know, really interesting to think about. And when you think about like, Okay, so now Threads is coming in, it looks and feels very much like Twitter. It's I think, viewed as a Twitter alternative for a lot of people, which is great. And that is now a part of the Fediverse of the social web. But it what it does is it also enables the whole, this larger network of people that any developer can basically tap into, to get a new idea out there without having to go through all the work of building your own little social network, exactly when to join it and use it and
Eugen Rochko:
it makes it so much easier to test new ideas because you no longer have to start from scratch with and deal with all the network effects business. You have all the network effects through activity pub, you just make your application accessible through activity epub and bam, like people can sign up and they have access to all the other users on the Fediverse or in the social web. And you know, it's no longer such an uphill battle, you can just have your, you know, your little startup social media app, whatever. It's, it's, I think it's a game changer. And I'd love to see more. Also more niche social networks, try to join the social web. I know there is like, I think I think there's at least two social media platforms specifically for photographers, I think one of them is called grainy app or something like that. And the other one is called Glass. And I think it would just be natural for, you know, to make the profiles and this networks accessible through through the social lab, and then, you know, our users can follow photographers on those services and vice versa. And I think it was just be it's just such a such a natural progress for for the progression for the for the for the web.
Mike McCue:
It is and, you know, one thing I wanted to ask you about that I've also heard about fears around Threads on is this notion of embrace, extend, extinguish, which, by the way, I've been on the receiving end of that playbook when I was at Netscape, from from Microsoft, that's, that's what they they, that was the playbook, they ran against Netscape. So there are a lot of folks that who are worried about this, they also sometimes we'll talk about the experience with XMPP, and Google, you know, deciding to create, you know, sort of join that, you know, kind of federated instant messaging world, and then pulling out and how they that really harmed that whole that whole movement. What's your take on that? Do you feel like that's a, you know, is that a, is that an accurate sort of comparison? Or is it different here?
Eugen Rochko:
So the XMPP comparison is definitely justified. I mean, yeah, so we've got a federated protocol. And it's being adopted by large companies to interoperate. And you know, you might think, Okay, what happened in the past, and might happen again, and what happened in the past, and I was there, that that was in, in my time already, I was a heavy, XMPP user. When I was in high school, I convinced a lot of friends to switch to services that that had XMPP capabilities. And I ran my own server and I, you know, connected to them through my own server, I used Pichon. It was my favorite app always had it open. It was like a multi, multi protocol chat app for Windows. And, and then eventually, gradually, it just sort of disappeared from from everywhere. It used to be that I was able to chat with Facebook friends from my Google Talk account. And well, I think I think that was the extent of how many different platforms I was actually talking to, then I started self hosting. And then I was able to talk to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger people from my own xmpp server, and then gradually, you know, Facebook, lock theirs down. Google Talk kind of disappeared, became hangouts stopped working, then hangouts disappeared, typical in typical Google fashion, of closing every product down, that isn't their search. And eventually, it became like, something very obscure that kind of, no, it's not mainstream anymore, right? And is a little bit sad in some ways. But I think there are quite a few factors that contributed to this development. And one of those factors was that when XMPP was at its peak, everybody was using desktop computers, which were kind of always on online, or mostly online. And then everybody switched to phones and mobile networking and except that he was just very ill fitted for that because it required an active connection to send and receive messages and the capability to store messages on the server and then download them later. didn't arrive until a much later extension. And not all not all servers supported that extension and there were other developments in the messaging world that XMPP was simple not keeping up with like, for example for for my wife and I. Stickers are really fun feature on a messaging app, and except me never had stickers and never never got them. And this is another feature that exists on Messenger and on signal and all the other new platforms now days. But that never made it into XMPP. And, of course, so those are two factors. And then the third one is, nobody was really using XMPP, or Jabber, they were using Facebook Messenger, or they were using WhatsApp or they were using Google Talk. But there was no mainstream understanding or knowledge about this protocol that was underlying all of that, which is, I think, quite different from let's say, email, which is still, you know, email is something that has been embraced by Microsoft with without look and, and Hotmail, and by Google, with Google Mail, and lots of other different companies, and that still exists exists as a decentralized protocol. And that's because email is something that most people are familiar with. They know what email is, they know, they can send an email from one provider to the other, at least for the most part, people know that. And so it helps the protocol survive, even if sometimes it feels like it's also under threat. Like I believe a couple of years back there was talk that Google was thinking about adding like a private email feature that was only accessible through Gmail. And that sort of thing is bad, obviously, like that's, that's the kind of thing that that threatens the email protocol. And a lot of people are concerned that Gmail has such a huge user base that if they decide to, they don't want to do email anymore, and they just want to let people message other government, Gmail users, but not people outside the network, that they could just get away with it. I'm not sure they could. I think that's still a little far out there. But that is a concern. And yet, despite all of this embracing, right, the embrace, extend, extinguish thing has not occurred with email. So basically, if I were to summarize, I'd say with XMPP, there wasn't bracing, and there was kind of extending. And there was definitely extinguishing. But there were a lot of other factors where the protocol just kind of was not fit for purpose at the time, mostly due to mobile messaging, and other like basic necessity features that we now understand from messaging that were not there from the beginning. And so how does that make a difference to Mastodon, an activity pub. So I think on one hand activity, pub is a lot more fit for purpose from from the get go. Secondly, we actually have a, what I would call a major player in the network that definitely cares about keeping activitypub alive, which is Mastodon, which is us. And we're, you know, we're raising awareness of the underlying protocol. And we're also advocating for more knowledge and understanding that that the web should be interoperable, that this protocol should be underlying all social media platforms, and that we should all be be able to talk to each other through different platforms, using this protocol. And so I think we've got a lot more chances of getting this right, than the historical example of XMPP. That being said, though, there's also kind of not a whole deal of what we can actually do about the situation because, again, it's an open protocol, anyone can use it, even if we decide that, oh, we're just not going to talk to anyone from Meta or we're going to just cross our arms and sit in the corner. I mean, okay, they can just use it anyway. It's
Mike McCue:
the Fediverse shouldn't have a moat either, right? I mean, we should create beat focused on innovating really cool new user experiences as the primary defense against some sort of, you know, embrace, extend extinguish mentality.
Eugen Rochko:
Basically, the extinguish part of being embraced is where would it put us with activity but what does put us exactly where we are now. Now, of course, it could kill the momentum of activity pub, if it was once dropped once it was adopted, but that's basically saying we don't want any momentum because that is the risk that comes with momentum as well. Like if all of these companies adopting activity pup would suddenly decide to drop it again. Obviously it would kill the momentum of the protocol. And what it kind of leave us in the in the place that we were we were before, but it could also like kill the motivation to work on this product, whatever if we if it was if it became clear that it was never going to get anywhere, right. But such is the risk of trying to do this of trying to make A mainstream protocol that everybody uses. And you can't just say, Okay, please don't adopt this protocol, because we were afraid that you're going to drop it later because well, that comes with the comes with the with the playing field here.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's, that's very wise. You know, open means open, and there's risks to being open. And the way to make things continue to be open. And to have momentum is to build great things. One of the things that I think not a lot of people know is that the only way that you are funded to continue to develop Mastodon and move this whole universe forward, is through Patreon donations. And so one of the things I definitely want to encourage people to do if you're listening, and you are benefiting from the mastodon experience, and or you're building a company around activity pub, please make sure you go to Patreon and donate and sign up for supporting the Mastodon efforts. It's it's incredibly important. You know, the, you said your team is roughly one and a half people, engineers. It's amazing what you've been able to achieve with that. But the funding through Patreon is really the only way that that's happening. Is that Is that a fair assessment?
Eugen Rochko:
That is a fair assessment? Yes. Yeah, and I mean, we really do need a bigger team. It's, it's, we wanted to hire more people. In November 2022, we got this influx of donations that basically skyrocketed, skyrocketed our Patreon from it used to be $7,000 a month. And then it became $30,000 a month, which is like, Oh, so much more resources. And so we were able to hire two people. Claire, the other developer on the core product, used to be a freelancer for us. And now she's a full time employee. So we got to upgrade her. And we hired a DevOps engineer so that I wouldn't have to deal with all of the, you know, 24/7. Servers are on fire because Elon Musk did something stupid over the weekend kind of situation. So we got two new employees, we wanted to hire more. But basically, the initial idea was, okay, this is a nonprofit. So we're going to hire people for kind of the same salary that I'm taking. And then when we posted the job ads, people were like, what hell is this, nobody's going to take these jobs at this rate. So we had to readjust them, okay, go with market trade for for the for the region. And so that kind of immediately limited the amount of different people that we can hire. And basically, very quickly exhausted the resources that became available to us. So yeah, I mean, if we got more funding, absolutely, we would like go for an extra engineer on the core product, we'd love to have like a product designer that was full time instead of, you know, a freelancer from from an external agency, we've been working this year is taking a long time. But we've been working on finding a US nonprofit version of Mastodon, as well, which is basically going to be like a, like a sister organization to the German nonprofit. And that will allow us donors to donate and have it be tax deductible. And hopefully, we can attract more institutional funding for that nonprofit in the US as well. What we have done is we have applied for another NL net, and gi zero grant, that is something that is like a European level funding distributor that we've worked with before, that we've applied for a grant to work on the court posts feature. So if we get that approved, I think we'll be able to make some more progress on it. I
Mike McCue:
think fingers crossed it. Yeah. Yes. Fingers crossed. And how do you feel about other engineers, you know, individually or at companies participating to help build different pieces of of mastodon.
Eugen Rochko:
So the way I feel about it is drive by contributions, like from completely outside just going on GitHub and doing something. They're a bit hard to manage. It works for certain things. It works for like fixes or performance improvements and things like that, like deployment configurations, totally like no problem to do it. But anything that involves the user experience, anything that involves like a deeper understanding of the platform, what it needs and how it works, it kind of necessitates a level of communication that goes beyond just, you know, being a random person on GitHub. And there is a certain level of an onboarding that is necessary for a new person to contribute. Code. We've, we've worked with, with Jake from, from from Flipboard, who you very kindly, basically donated to us as an extra pair of hands. And we've, we've, we've, we've had a good experience there. But obviously, it also involves like a period of just getting acquainted with with a codebase. And like how everything works. And so there is like a certain level of time investment that is necessary to make effective use of it in a way that I kind of feel like, if we had a full time person, that sort of thing, like you would do this onboarding ones, and then, you know, they build up the knowledge into expertise in this area that they're then able to, to use, like over a longer period of time.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Well, this, this has been just a fantastic discussion, and I so appreciate the time that you've you know, given here, you can really see your passion for what what is happening, you know, you've created something bigger than yourself. And you know, most people never get a chance to do that. You're, you're, you're like a hero to a lot of people. And, you know, the level of commitment, the level of passion, the level of thought, what you've been willing to go through personally, on an incredibly limited budget. It's just so inspiring.
Eugen Rochko:
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I'm very flattered to hear that. It does definitely come with its own personal costs, though, because it is extremely stressful job. It's, yeah. It's tough. I think that, you know, a lot of these social media platforms, they're out there run, operated, founded by, like, you know, millionaires, billionaires, or people who have an equity in the company that then gets big, and, you know, they benefit from it financially, whereas I'm just some guy who makes like, 60 euros per year, 60,000 euros per year, and it's just the level of stresses sometimes feel completely disproportional for, for the, you know, for the compensation. So
Mike McCue:
you're in that hero's journey right now. And, you know, you're doing something that's just incredibly valuable. And I really, I hope that you get to see the benefit of the value of created, you know, in all the different dimensions, when you look out into the future. Next, let's say year or two. And, you know, given all that's happened this year, what are your hopes? What what is it that you are really working toward that you're that gets you, you know, powers you through the day?
Eugen Rochko:
So, our goal is to grow Mastodon beyond 2 million active users to, you know, let's say 10 million, and eventually 100 million, right? That's that's the that's the moonshot. That's the big goal. I don't know when we'll reach it. But we're working towards that very hard. And how we work towards that is we're analyzing Where do users fall off on the restaurant like and we improve the onboarding, we improve the discovery, we improve the retention, we work also all sorts of different things, polishing different interfaces and experience to make sure that people can get started on Mastodon easier and then they can stick around longer and use it. And we do a lot of outreach work as well. Like for example when we got verge on Mastodon when we we got polygon on Master I was just recently, I got the ox cast on Mastodon, which is like a gaming company that I was a fan of since I was since I was in high school. And, you know, I'm talking with the New York Times with the Washington Post to get them on board. So we do a lot of this outreach for for specific people or organizations to get them on board. I would love to see some more representation of important services like for example, transport services or weather services that do important announcements, because I think it's really it's really not ideal that sometimes their only presence is on IX formerly known as Twitter because If somebody if somebody is unaware, if you go to an ex, formerly known as Twitter profile as a logged out user, if you don't have an account, you just see a random posts from the past. And that is terrible for accounts that are supposed to warn people about dangerous weather, or about delays with the transport or anything else that's time sensitive. And so I think that those services and accounts should be represented on Mastodon, and news organizations and governments, obviously, are already quite impressively represented on Mastodon given that we basically didn't know outreach whatsoever, that all happened on its own European Commission, having their own server, German government having their own server, the Dutch government, the Swiss government, I mean, those those, those developments are amazing. Of course, there's still a bit of a level of the official government accounts are there but like, the actual politicians are still not there, or not always. And so we still need to do a little bit more convincing and outreach towards that. So. And I think on the personal level, what I would love is to reach a level of use for mastering where it's no longer a topic with journalists or the media where they're like, is mastered, I'm gonna make it is mastered on a viable competitor to blah, blah, blah, or just, you know, just have like, a crew, a certain amount of user base where yes, masculino is there to stay. Let's let's finish that topic. Let's just move on to something else to talk about. Right? That would be my hope, because it is really like emotionally very challenging to always constantly hear this, you know, stuff about like, Is my son, I'm gonna make it. Is it just for nerds? Is it just for blah, blah? It's No, it's for everyone. Right?
Mike McCue:
It's yeah, right. Yeah, you've created something for the whole world to use and benefit from. And you know, now you have the, you know, awareness of really big companies like Meta. And and lots of developers, lots of engineers, you've got the German government, you know, who's stood up their own instance. I mean, this is this is a massive achievement. And I think huge already. And of course, it can always be bigger, right? It will never be big enough for some people. You get to 100 million people. And then there are people like, well, when are you going to get to a billion users and when you're going to get you know, it's like, it just, it's never enough for some folks. But but the reality of what you've created here is, like I said, I think has seeped into people's thinking about how people should form connections online, in a very fundamental way. And that's already happened, and how that then plays out next year with, you know, more instances, more users. I'm sure that's all going to happen. But I I know, I speak on behalf of a lot of people Yujin when I say thank you, thank you for your leadership, thank you for your commitment, the things that you've built over many years. You've done a lot of really good for the world at a really important time. And thank you for being on the podcast and talking with us and sharing all of this. So transparently. It was absolutely a pleasure to have you here. No,
Eugen Rochko:
Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here as well.
Well, thanks so much for listening. You can find Eugen on Mastodon at G-A-R-G-R-O-N at Mastodon dot social.
To learn more about what Flipboard is doing in the Fediverse sign up via the link in this episode's description.
You can also follow Mike on Mastodon at Mike at Flipboard dot social.
See you in the Fediverse!