From a UI overhaul to collections and groups, Mastodon’s Felix Hlatky is laying the groundwork for the fediverse’s most ambitious decade yet.
As Mastodon celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2026, the open source platform’s new Executive Director, Felix Hlatky, is focused on what it’ll take to make the next 10 years even more impactful.
That vision includes an overhaul in version 5.0, a new feature called Collections, and continuing its critical role at the heart of the fediverse.
Highlights of the conversation include:
00:56 What Felix is most excited about right now
02:11 Felix’s Mastodon history
04:16 Mastodon’s growth and organizational change
08:10 Getting set up for success
10:27 Collections — a major new feature
15:18 Lesson to learn from Bluesky
17:05 Weaponization, privacy, nuances around collections
19:35 Making social media more manageable
21:00 Groups
23:44 Power of building at the protocol level
25:40 Collaborations across platforms and protocols
27:27 Bridging technologies and standards work
31:15 Mastodon’s backend infrastructure
33:56 Funding and the EU
37:27 Governments use of Mastodon
40:05 The Forkiverse
45:05 Podcasts in the fediverse
47:14 Custom feeds on Surf, ex dotsocial.surf.social
49:58 Vibrant creator communities on the social web
51:20 Mastodon 5.0, FASPS
53:59 Entering a new era
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find Felix at @felix@mastodon.social
✚ Connect with host Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the open social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new product from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/
This transcript was generated by AI. As such, we apologize for any errors.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the open social web. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to leaders and builders who believe that decentralization makes for a better internet.
Today Mike's talking to Felix Hlatky, the new Executive Director of Mastodon. As the open source microblogging platform hits its 10-year anniversary, Felix is focused on what it takes to make the next 10 years even more impactful.
That vision includes an overhaul in version 5.0, a new feature called Collections, and continuing its critical role hosting instances for governments and communities looking for a more equitable internet.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Mike McCue:
Felix Hlatky, welcome to Dot Social. It's great to have you here.
Felix Hlatky:
Thank you for having me.
Mike McCue:
So much has happened. Let me just ask you, what are you most excited about right now with Mastodon?
Felix Hlatky:
So what I'm most excited right now is, is definitely, you know, we are celebrating our 10 years this year, and basically to think of what would it take for Mastodon, not only to still exist in 10 years, so you know, this is really like the risk management perspective, but you know, to become like a much better version of what Mastodon is right now, and to become really much more important part of the open social web of the fediverse, also, and, and, and what we would have to put in place right now to make these next 10 years a success, so this is what what I find most exciting.
Mike McCue:
Congratulations on 10 years, it's been an incredible 10 years.
Felix Hlatky:
Yes, and a lot of unexpected things happening, you know, both good and bad, and there's definitely more of these things, but yeah, it's the super exciting.
Mike McCue:
So, so obviously Eugen started Mastodon 10 years ago. When did you join the project?
Felix Hlatky:
So, I joined six years ago, maybe. So, it was still much calmer times back then, you know, Mastodon still existed, obviously, but it was like purely a project in the sense of that there was no company behind it, it was literally just Eugen running it as a, at that point already fairly successful open source project. It had a significant, but still quite small user base back then, and, and I made the connection to Eugen pretty much by accident, but obviously on Mastodon, so I joined as a not super early user, because you know the early users joined like 10 years ago, but, but still quite early user, I would say, because a lot of people, they had never heard about Mastodon six or seven years ago, so back when I joined, and and Eugen had this he had this request on Mastodon that he said he's running this this in person workshop with the Austrian Public Broadcaster, actually, so they gave him a bit of money in course of a grant, and and I was just looking to move back from Berlin to Vienna back then, and I, and he said he wanted to use us from from Mastodon to join the workshop, and I thought, yeah, sign me up, I joined this workshop, and that's where I met Eugen, and ever since I've helped him, basically.
Mike McCue:
Wow, that's that's fantastic. Yeah, and of course, just a few years ago, you had that huge growth and awareness. I joined Mastodon as a user. A lot of people joined as X started to, as Twitter that we loved, started to fall apart and be transformed into X. There's been the last, what is it, about three years, I guess. Now it's been three and a half years, something like that, just huge growth and transformation, you know, at Mastodon, you know, culminating now in you as CEO and Eugen continuing to be involved in the project. Tell us a little bit more about, like, how that, you know, why did that transformation occur? What was behind that, and what is Eugen focused on now?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, so I think that there were a couple of different dynamics coming together. I mean, the first one being, of course, the. User growth, that you have mentioned already, as you probably see yourself with Flipboard. User growth, it really comes very much in, in spikes, especially for social product. It's, it's also very often unpredictable, and so also for Mastodon, it was very unpredictable. I mean, nobody saw that coming with, with Twitter, at least not on our end, that we were frankly really unprepared from a, from a product and DevOps perspective, in particular. So this was really the first factor, but the second factor was also the fundraising success that came with it, so, so suddenly we have gotten on the radar of, of first of all, grant makers, but, but also, of course, wealthy individuals, but, but also, also, also, frankly, just the public, our user base, I think this is, this is still our most important source of revenue, and the third thing, of course, more like an organizational change that we just realized that what has worked pre Twitter sale is maybe not the same that can work after this, because the world and everything that we did, it was, it was just never the same again, you know. The whole market changed, and all these three factors coming together, you know, more, more, more funding to grow a small and dedicated team, but also, also new challenges for Eugen, for example, to have to talk to journalists a lot, which I think he did a great job, actually, given the circumstances, you know, he had no, no real com support, and but of course also having to grow up and to find Mastodon’s place in the world. Previously, it was really just in this corner of ours. I think this has really led also to some thinking in Eugen's head, and to decide for himself that he just wants to focus much more on the product, and I'm very happy that he can, or he could make this transition, and that we found a good way, because, as you know, things in these situations, they can go very, very messy.
Mike McCue:
You'd really do see that as you start to have success, you start to have an installed base, then there's a whole set of, you know, existential questions on the horizon, which there's always, they, there always are, but a lot more people care about the answer to those questions, and you really do need to start to have like someone who's focused on the organization, the financing, and the team and communications, and someone else who's really focused on the product front, and you know it's really, really hard to try to do both of those things simultaneously. One of the really fantastic things about, you know, in talking to you and Eugen, as this transition, as you guys were thinking about this, and this was starting to come together to me, it really felt like, you know, Eugen, who really is a hero of mine, he really is one of the most, you know, kind of consequential engineers, I think this, this last decade, and the work that he's done is gonna, you know, continue to just be something that really shapes our online world for years and years to come, but I really felt like this kind of, you know, he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and you know that you know trying to manage all of that all simultaneously, I think was was really clearly you know something that was was weighing on him, and I think you know it was really fantastic that he had a partner like you that he could trust to really give some of that weight to and have a new model for the organization, so I was really excited to see how this came together, and it really does feel like you guys are set up now for success, both in terms of Eugen and his involvement and your leadership and the overall team and the funding situation, which is really fantastic, you know, 10 years later,
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, that's, I mean, thanks for saying this, and of course, I, I have to say that this is, this is definitely not just, not just me, and you know, I mean, me both on the on the leadership team, but also, you know, also on the engineering and the design team that I think I, or at least I hope that everyone sees that there's much more behind the scenes, and also product velocity, it has really improved a lot, and and also just communications, you know, talking about it, it's just something that historically and. Um, we, it's not that we didn't do it at all, but it's more that you know, giving the community, I mean, both the user base, but also, as you know, the whole developer community, a lot of forks of Mastodon and third-party apps, they really rely on on getting a heads up early enough, how we are going to implement something like quote posts or or collections, which, which, which is up for the next release.
Mike McCue:
It does feel like there's a lot of vibrancy right now, and you can see the pace picking up in terms of the product releases and what's happening in the product. It was really exciting to see quote posts, you know, make it out there, the so as you think now about the product going forward, you mentioned collections, so is that like the next big thing that you're focused on? Explain, and explain a little bit more about what is collections. How are you thinking about it?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. So collections definitely the next headline feature. It's really, I mean, maybe let me explain briefly why, why collections, and why, why we think that it makes sense. So, I mean, two reasons, mainly. I mean, the first one being that we looked at our, our numbers, of course, especially after 22 when we had this, this huge spike, and we have just seen that, you know, a lot of these new users, they have actually left as sad as it sounds, and this has led us, of course, to look at why is that, why have people not been happy on Mastodon, and why have they not stuck around, and I think for everyone who has joined Mastodon, they have experienced that this felt a bit different, and that there were things in the onboarding that just didn't feel right, and one of the main issues is that people, they don't really find their, their crowd, so to speak, they don't really find their fellow people that they want to follow according to their interests, and I mean, I assume this is very much in line of what you're doing with with with with surf and with Flipboard in general, but I think you know on the micro blogging side, I think it's even more important because the the if you don't get into it immediately, then it's just very hard to stumble up upon people by accident, give them our decision, like product decision, not to have an algorithmic fit in Mastodon, and that's why, like, a curated collection, which is really just a group of accounts of profiles that I can follow across servers, ideally across the fediverse, and maybe even someday, like including the whole open social web, and this collection could then be famous journalists in Germany, for example, and I can follow all these. What was very important for us is to to have safety in mind in how we design it, so what we have consciously decided against is a follow all button, because collections or starter packs, they can also quite easily be weaponized, you know, having like a collection of enemies, and you follow all them, and you harass them. In simple terms, yeah.
Mike McCue:
So the collections concept is effectively like a public version of Mastodon lists as they exist now, which has always been something that I've wanted to do is be able to share my Mastodon list with other people, see what other people have curated in their Mastodon lists, so is that, is that a good way to think about this?
Felix Hlatky:
Yes, that's correct. Although I, so there's something behind lists I believe that we haven't really explored yet in the same way that lists have been powerful in the, in the Twitter days, I mean, you maybe you have been one of these Twitter power users yourself, that, but, but there's there's people who have like really well-created lists, and, and I think lists and collections, they are, of course, from a product perspective, they are very, very related, but there's probably something behind it in giving lists, additionally to collections, a second thought. Basically, I don't really know what that means yet from a product perspective, but there's I. Yeah, there's, I mean, what you just said, that lists, they should be shareable, and yes, collections, they are shareable. Yeah, but, but also, if you think of collaborative lists, collaborative collections, this is definitely also on the radar.
Mike McCue:
One of the cool things about the social web is, you, you know, you see these ideas being implemented, for example, on Bluesky with starter packs, and there's things to learn about that, right? There's.. it's a great idea, but I think there's at least two areas that, you know, I think sounds like there's an opportunity for an improvement. Number one is the ability to have a safer model for this, because these things can be abused, and I want to come back to that in a second. And then, number two, you know, the challenge with follow all with a starter pack is like, guess what, if you, if you did that and you realize, oh wait, I didn't want to follow all of those people, well, it's incredibly hard to unfollow all those people, you can't undo that very well, right? And so it, and it all becomes a jumble, and you can actually ruin your, your following timeline as a result of, of making, of doing something like that. So, I think that it is really important, from a, you know, as you think about, like, how does one look at just the posts from a collection? Maybe I want to have that totally separate from my normal following timeline, and maybe follow a few people in there, right, but that's that's another lesson I think to learn from, you know, what what we saw on Bluesky.
Felix Hlatky:
Absolutely, and the way I understand you, it's it's probably close to the concept, also of the custom feeds, right? So you have like this collection specific feed, maybe not the Boston suit that is sometimes used as an example. I think it's a good example, and also a good feature, but it's somewhat related.
Mike McCue:
Yes, it is very much so. You mentioned this before, that collections or starter packs could be weaponized. Can you give me some more examples of that, and how you're thinking about that? I'm also curious about how you think about, like, privacy, or like what if I don't want to be in a starter pack, and I remove myself or collection, can I do, I know when I'm in different collections. How are you thinking about that perspective of this?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, so I, that's a great question. So I think it ultimately starts with, with acknowledging that the collections and or starter packs, they can be weaponized, and I think this is, this has been proven that it is, it is an actual risk that has to be taken into account, and once you acknowledge this, I think there's, it's really about thinking, okay, what are the abuse use cases that that we have to prevent here, and as you mentioned, the option to, to first of all, notify people when they are added to a collection, but also to give them immediately the option to to remove themselves. These are really the parts that that make it possible to create a safe version of collections, and there's probably other ways that we haven't thought about yet, because I think this is, and I'm sure you see this a lot at Flipboard, you know, also beyond Surf, that with everything creation related, I mean, you, you try to think of all the, I don't know, the photography creation, and these sort of things, but you don't think of the negative ways, maybe not immediately, how this, because it's at the end of the day, it's, it's humans thinking of, of something that they want to put together, and creation might, might be good, but it might also create a lot of problems, and and this is where we are very excited, also to see simply what our user base, our community is going to do with it, so the there's a lot of inspiration probably to take already from, you know, existing collections that that exist in in first party services, so collections, they are actually, they have been built in a non-native way, so to speak externally already, and, and how they are going to be migrated first, but then also people will come up with completely new ideas.
Mike McCue:
I've always been a big believer in the ability to look at a subset of posts about a particular topic. Or from a particular group of people, or some combination thereof, and you know, the custom feed model lists what you're talking about with collections, these are these are definitely ways of getting at that, and this makes social media even more manageable for people, instead of just looking at one feed all the time, they're able to like dial in and look at just a feed about climate change, or just, you know, just something for fun, and they don't want to be reminded of, you know, a bunch of the, you know, news that's happening in the world, right. So I think that there's this, is a this is a really, really important dimension, and it's exciting to see Mastodon starting to do this kind of stuff, because I do think this is, this is important, this is an important aspect of social media. For too long, we've just been stuck in one feed.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's you put that very nicely, and, and, and of course, we can't talk about collections and custom feeds without talking about groups, which is of course, it's just another dimension of, of, and I think it's probably important not to always just think about it in a too abstract way, of, yeah, this is all just a way to to group account accounts profiles together, either publicly or privately, but I'm sure you're keenly aware that the groups is such a long requested feature, and it will come not in the next release, but this is this is something that we also have some plans.
Mike McCue:
That's very exciting, and presumably you'd think of that almost as private collections, in a sense, at least that could be a building block for it.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, exactly, and but not only private, because they could and should also be public groups, especially if you think of what can a group do that maybe a collection can't do. The collection is something very not unilateral. This is not really what I mean, but, but something that I maybe can't interact with in the same way that I can interact with the group. This was again probably too abstract, but, but I think it's, it's helpful to do think of of all the crazy use cases that you can cover with Facebook groups, for example, and obviously you know we looked at it a couple of weeks ago, and this is it's crazy what you can do with Facebook groups, you know, good and bad things, of course. And how much functionality does, and muscle.. it would take, I don't know, 10 years to just build these, and you know, really thinking of what is the most important part of this that a Masto group, a fediverse group, should, should have actually, yeah.
Mike McCue:
And how are you thinking about this stuff as it relates to being open and you know standards and stuff, so that ultimately developers can build on these. These could be integrated into other third-party clients, groups could be portable or collections could be portable. How are you thinking about that piece?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, so obviously we have to think about it constantly, and in the especially with these big features, collections groups, but there's there's probably others that that I can't think of right now, but, but, but these, these big features, they can only work if we, if we bake it into the protocol layer, and if we fix it there. I mean, this sounds very restrictive, but, but, but I want to frame it more positively, that if we touch it on the protocol, or if we solve it on the protocol layer, it just opens up so much more future use cases that that we we could not do if we just build it basically just on the Master on API, and we would just do it something Mastone specific might then just be enough for the for the third party developer audience of Mastodon third party apps, but but I think this is just generally what I'm most excited about in the next 10 years, you know, to to think of all these different content types that are not there yet, or that are there in a subpar implementation, and what I mean with this is, I mean, for example, you involved with the Altstore, this is something that you know we also didn't have it on our bingo cards, I. Obviously, alternative app stores, they could be, it could be another content type that doesn't exist. I mean, the app updates, I mean, and also, if you think of events, for example, handling events on Mastodon, it's actually, it's not a great experience, it's not, it's not great to, to confirm your attendance at an event, and, and all of these things, they can only work if we, if we invest time in on the protocol level.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah, amen. I couldn't agree more, you know. Do you? So, you must be collaborating with Evan Prodromou and the Social Web Foundation, and folks like that, and I also saw that you were talking to Rose, the COO at Bluesky recently.
Felix Hlatky:
Yes, that's correct. We, we joined a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Italy, which was a great experience, and not a first for Mastodon, because I think the Fediverse house, the open social web house that you did at Southwest Northwest, this was like our first official meeting, but yeah, first for me, so great experience.
Mike McCue:
Even if we're on different protocols, there's still a lot of shared ideas and shared product experiences, and ultimately, the more these things work together and integrate with each other, the better, so that people have more choice, developers have more choice.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah.
Mike McCue:
So I'm very excited about that…
Felix Hlatky:
And, and you know, if you think also a lot about the open social web, and, and what it would look like in the future, and of course, what is Flipboard's role with it, and, and on the protocol layer, I mean, these are these are tough engineering problems, you know, this is like it's getting very philosophical, also. But also, I mean, what do you think? What these protocols, they should actually look like in the future, and you know, a lot of people are talking about collaboration between protocols, but it's something that you know, just from the technical reality, it's just, it's just very, very hard, and it's super important that there's this bridging technologies, but bridging technologies in itself, they are, they're not really doing the groundwork in, in, in making protocols talk to each other natively.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, there's this. Is definitely something that we've put a lot of time and thinking into. How do you create a seamless user experience that's simple and easy for anyone to understand, that is inherently multi protocol. They don't have to think about, hey, do I want to go down the activity pub path or the app proto path. The vast majority of people don't understand either of those things, and they just want it. They just know that they want to be able to join the open social web, and they want to be able to choose what app that they want to use to be able to do that, and they want to be able to post photos and videos, and talk to people, and they want their profile to be portable across different, you know, experiences. So, if they don't like the experience they're on, they can move to a different experience. Now, how do we, you know, make that vision happen? You know, part of it is, you know, the protocol bridging the stuff that a new social has been doing with the news and Ryan, part of it is foundational at the back end, but then there's also a lot on the front end to do as well, right, and so some of these seams that can, you know, emerge even with the best of bridging, there are a variety of seams that can happen there that front ends can deal with, and I think there's a set of best practices with front ends to make it feel more seamless for users, and so I think that's one of the really exciting things to me is that you know we have the opportunity to, because this, the people, the sort of universe of people who are building here is it's, it's big, but it's not so big that we can't collaborate, and so now as we start to think about things like collections or groups, one of the things that's really important is to think about how that relates, then to, you know, focus on Bluesky, and how can we, how can we start to have, for example, a portable feed markup language, for example, right? Just like, just a standard good example is RSS has OPML, right? Right, you. Can go to use any RSS client you want. You can import your OPML file, which is the list of all your RSS feeds that you've subscribed to, and it works in any, in any RSS app. What's the equivalent of that for custom feeds? What's the equivalent of that for groups? What's the equivalent of that for collections or starter packs? Right, so that there can be a standard for this, so there is more standards work to do, and I think it starts with, you know, thinking through the features and the user experience and the vision we want to have, but then ultimately, how do we get to take some of those, those, you know, implementations and boil them down into W 3c standards that you know everyone can adopt, and you really do have that true portability. So, if I build a collection on Mastodon, it could also work on Bluesky, and vice versa, for example.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. Very interesting, and it's very promising to see that on the standards level there a I mean, specifically in 26 there seems to be a lot of new movement, I mean, both on the W3C side, but also IETF.
Mike McCue:
One other aspect of Mastodon that I don't think people really fully appreciate, and tell me if you agree with this, there's the front end of Mastodon, the Mastodon microblogging experience, and there's a set of different apps, apps that you've made, apps that third parties have made to do that, but then there's Mastodon, the infrastructure, the back end, right, the 1000s of instances that are running the Mastodon API, all of the federation that's happened, the relays, the moderation, that to me is actually as or more important than the front-end experience.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And it's really, it's also the cultural elements, and with this I don't mean I don't mean fluffy elements in, in particular, but I mean that the, the way that it was agreed on, how moderation should, should, should be dealt with, and you know there's expectations also of the community, and you know, the most interesting aspect about it is, is also that you know things like, like server rules, you know, this is not something that that is really dealt with, like in a machine-readable way, and it's not something that the servers really talk to each other, and and they use these, these server rules in any meaningful manner, right now. Also, something like moderation signals, you know, they could be, they could be shared across the network in a privacy-respecting way, of course, and there's a lot behind it, of it's basically it's a system that, that really works by itself, you know, with with all of its flaws, but it is like true decentralization with some centralizing elements, of course, that is working pretty okay, ish, also legally quite compliant, you know. Of course, not every server agrees with everything, but and they are bad actors, but but to think of how how all the system could be made more, more transparent and also more efficient, and of course, whether we want it or not, our organization, it will have to have a role to play in this question, and it's something that our community team is working very actively on.
Mike McCue:
So one of the things I know that as part of how you are doing funding for Mastodon is the EU is participating in some of this too, right? Are there.. I think there are some specific projects that they've.. are they commissioning you for, or are they, you know, donating with the hopes that some, you know, some of the work that they care about will happen? How is that relationship work?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, so there's some there's at least two elements that I can think of. I mean, the first one is public grants, so this is something where being around for 10 years and presumably doing like a good, good, good job, and being important for, you know, also topics like digital public infrastructure, which is, which is, it overlaps with social media, but it's, it's very often actually much closer to things like payments, like in India, they have, like, this India stack, for example. And they have plugged in more than 1 billion people in, in this payment system, which is crazy to think, and of course, other, other countries, other regions, they want to to replicate something similar, and, and, as you know, Mastodon doesn't have a payment system currently, but there's also an increased awareness on the European level that the social media, social networks are of course a part of this infrastructure, and this helps with with grants, not only from the EU, but, but, but we have raised actually some also from from the US, and even from Asia, and the second element is our commercial offering, so we, we do offer Mastodon hosting and moderation services, and also others adjacent services, and our first customer was actually the European Commission, so, so they are paying like us an enterprise license, and and we provide the the masters on software in a hosted environment on our infrastructure together with the moderation services, so our moderation team is also doing this part, and this is something that it's a, it's still a small part of our business, and it's probably, you know, it, it can never turn into something like wordpress.com or so it's, you know, the market is just much smaller for it, but it, it really has this strategic element for us, I mean, first of all, to become independent, also from a financial point of view, but second, you know, with each customer that we win, we grow the muscle network, and sure, it's on our infrastructure, so you could say, yeah, muscle takes all the power again, but it's still while this is true from a legal point of view, it's not true from a technical point of view, because it's still a separate instance, and you know there's there's even a potential reality where, where, where this business line becomes big enough that we can spin it out, and it's like a completely separate company with no control over the Mastodon project.
Mike McCue:
That's fascinating. So, this concept of governments that need to be able to have sort of social media presences that are sort of independent of all of the craziness that you might get on something like X that they can own and control and operate themselves, but with help from you from a hosting and moderation point of view, presumably they can also help moderate as well, to the extent that they want to, so that that concept seems like a pretty clear, you know, business model. Yeah, the market, the market, you know, for, you know, how many governments would there be interested in doing, you know, standing up, you know, instances like this seems like there would be a fair number. I also would think that, like, even for, like, regional governments, you know, not just, you know, large countries, you see that being the case too.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely, so we, we actually, I mean, although we have less than 10 customers right now, so it's not huge yet, but, but we even have all these three layers that you just mentioned in our, in our customer base, so we have, for example, a small French municipality that says 150,000 inhabitants, but then we have also, like, a regional, so I'm a German state, which there are around 20 of them, and and they also run their own instance, and, and just to give you some numbers, so, so Germany, for example, has 11,000 municipalities and and each one of them could be a potential customer, of course. There's, there's, there's probably, you know, this is really where it gets into interesting, very theoretical topics of network topography. So, so, so, what's the most efficient way of distributing the load? Basically, so both the technical load of hosting a master loan server, but also just users, you know, what's the optimal size of a mustard servers? Is it that every small municipality needs to run the server, is probably not very efficient, but, but maybe there's.. I don't know, maybe California wants to run their own Mastodon server, and it's just.. it just makes sense for them. There's, there's, there's many interesting considerations there, and there's.. there's no real guardrails or rules that we put into place.
Mike McCue:
As another type of instance that I saw recently was what was incredibly exciting was the Forkiverse. Did you see this with Casey Newton? And so what do you think about that? What did you think about that whole fork averse phenomenon?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, it's great that you bring it up, because otherwise I would have brought it up, you know, I would have sneaked it into the agenda, simply because it's such a great example. I really love it. How it turned out, also because it, you know, there was zero interaction from, from us, from the Mastodon team, and it's something that that grew completely naturally. It's not that we bribe them to actually do it, but they, you know, on the one hand, you have muscled on the open source software, which is really just, I think, at this point, like a reasonably well polished piece of software, but then there's really someone like Kevin Roose just thinking of, okay, I want to play around with this, but I want to bring my community over there, and, and, and then there's the branding aspect, of course, you know, to call it the Forkiverse…
Mike McCue:
Yeah.
Felix Hlatky:
…and then the whole community aspect of what is actually discussed and what, what is on this server, and, and I think that you know, although we are not such big fans of, of, of Discord from, from a business model perspective, you know, we used Discord actually on as an internal chat tool until a few few months ago, and you know, for us, this, this, this freemium model, it really didn't work that well, but I think that there's so much to learn from, from this, more like from a community management perspective, and community management is maybe not even the right term, but, but you know, just of this idea of not thinking of you need to be like an organization to actually join it, but it's really just people connected with a common belief or interest, and and this aspect is actually arguably not explored that much in Mastodon, and generally the fediverse yet, and this is something that we would like to lean in much more strongly in the, in the next couple of years.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, for people listening who aren't familiar with the fork of verse, let me just explain what happened there, so the hosts of the Hard Fork podcast and the host of the Search Engine podcast got together, two very popular podcasts, got together to say let's make a social network and let's build it on Mastodon as an instance, and Casey Newton was like, let's call it the fork of verse, because it was hard, hard fork, and, and what was really powerful about this whole thing was, first of all, they were able to tell all their listeners to go join it, and I think it was about 20,000 people joined just over a weekend a master instance called the forkiverse.com so if you go to The Forkiverse.com now, you can see it, and what was also very cool was to see the community dynamic there, because people were posting, they were, they were posting pictures, I think PJ, the host of Search Engine Podcast, asked people, like, send a picture of where you were when you first heard of the fork averse, and what was so amazing was you saw all these listeners of either search engine or hard fork sending in a photograph. It was, you know, I remember seeing this one really cool wood shop in Norway in the winter where this guy was working on this really cool sleigh, was like, you know, listening to the fork of verse, or to this particular podcast episode, and he joined the fork of verse, and so all of a sudden you had these different bodies of listeners, two different listener groups, some of whom had never even heard of the other podcast, so there was cross-pollinating of the podcast, cross-pollinating of these listeners, and all of them started communicating and talking to each other, and then realizing and discovering the value of the fetaverse more broadly. It was incredibly cool to see that happen, and, and amazing that that wasn't something that you were, you know, you even had to get involved in it, just happened purely organically.
Felix Hlatky:
Yes, absolutely. And, of course, we need to find a way to, to have much more of these experiments, and also to create real use cases, and probably also to do some hand holding once our team size grows, to make that happen.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think podcast communities are another phenomenal reason to, you know, build, build out on Mastodon, to build out a Mastodon instance, just like the Fork of Earth, and you could imagine this is also a great opportunity for groups, so if you don't want to stand up a whole instance, you just want to create a group, you can do that for your podcast, and then as a podcast owner, you also get to own your audience, it's you're not renting your audience from somewhere else, and the thing that I think was really interesting was the reaction that Kevin and PJ and Casey all had to the fact that, like, now we can talk to our audience, because it's always been a podcasting, is always a broadcast, and the fact that you can actually talk to your audience, and they can, you know, influence the next episode, they can talk about the current episode, you can start to know who your audience is is magical. It's a, it's a fundamentally better overall experience.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. And, and you know, where I think, where it really becomes interesting is if you think of platforms that are already, or that didn't used to be social, but they are getting social. If you think of Spotify adding comments features, which is actually very popular, as far as I know, on Spotify, they have a very civil way of discussing podcasts, and, and to think of, and this is obviously where it becomes like a pretty important pitch to these these companies. What is there behind it, or what can the fediverse and the open social web sell them to get these social features in the open social web in this in the followers, and this is something where there's a lot of work to be done, but, but, but I think that there's a lot of potential.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Well, and by the way, this is a good moment for me to mention that now. Dot social has a custom feed specifically for this podcast, and if you go to dotsocial.surf.social, it's the worst URL because of the name of my podcast, but dot social dot surf dot social, you will see that there's a whole feed there of the latest podcast episodes, but more importantly, discussion around each episode, and I've also included in that feed a collection of all the guests that I've had on over the years, and you will be on there as well, and so anytime any of those guests post something that's about tech, it will also show up in that feed, so what you get is this really vibrant, you know, discussion. Of course, the guests that I've had on over the years are all very interested in the open social web, and when they post about tech, it's usually pretty relevant to the social web. So you're going to see, you know, really great discussion of this, perhaps Mike Masnick talking about section 230 and how that relates to the social web, you know, all sorts of really interesting discussions that are very much tied to what Dot Social as a podcast is all about. So this is what I'm hoping we can see happen across the board with, you know, podcasts, these podcast communities, and making podcasts a much more social experience built on the social web.
Felix Hlatky:
Fantastic.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and one of the other things that's really been amazing, and this, you know, it's been fantastic to collaborate with the Mastodon team, and to make this happen, is that when people do, if let's say they come across a podcast, for example, Verge Cast dot surf dot social is now available, and if you go to Verge Cast dot surf dot social, and you don't know, you don't have a Mastodon account, or you don't have a Bluesky account, you don't know what the social web is, that's okay, you can join, and the, the, it will, you'll, you'll end up with an account that is multi protocol that effectively is a Mastodon actor behind the scenes, and so I can go and follow people on Mastodon, I can follow people on Bluesky seamlessly, but also importantly, if you have a Mastodon account, you can just connect it and, and, and you know, follow along and reply to any of the posts in the Verge Cast dot surf dot social, so this this ability to have this kind of more seamless experience rooted really around a use case, which is, you know, a social podcast. I think it's going to be important for creators who have. Large audiences, and many of those audience members have not been on the social web before. To say, "Hey, I'm setting up shop on the social web, come follow me over here, and cause a whole lot more growth to happen. You mentioned that these social networks tend to grow in these spikes, and so far you know I think both Mastodon and Bluesky have grown based on you know Elon driven events, you know he does something crazy or Mark Zuckerberg changes you know moderation policy and a whole bunch of people come over to either Mastodon or Bluesky, what I'm hoping that happens is that you? Just people join Mastodon or Bluesky simply because they want to be part of a creator's community, this great podcast discussion, for example, right? And you get whole new kinds of a whole new model for growth for the social web.
Felix Hlatky:
Absolutely, and it's a much more, much more positive reason to join a different social network than it is to just have this, I mean, as you, as you mentioned, this is like very negative reasons to leave a social network because you're annoyed about it, but there should be a lot more positivity about it.
Mike McCue:
As you look ahead, what are the other other things on the horizon that you want to make sure you get a chance to talk about?
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this, this, this sounds like you know, just just dropping version numbers, and it doesn't. I know that the version numbers themselves, they don't really mean something, but you know, 4.6 is the last release between before 5.0 and five to the o is is is called five to oh because it's like the you know that the next really big release and basically we are redoing the whole user interface there's there's a lot of debt that we have, you know, also on the front end side, and this is something that we wanted to change, and it's something where we have invested a lot of groundwork already, and the team is doing a fantastic job to, to actually make that happen, and this is something that we just think it's, it's not only needed, but it's also important in light of our 10 year birthday, because this is also about setting the stage for for the next 10 years, and, and hopefully beyond. So that's, that's just, that's mainly on the front end side, that this is already important in itself, but I think it's also super important to mention a very technical subject, and these are the fediverse auxiliary service providers, the FASPs, which will frankly open up an ecosystem of all sorts of tooling, you know, it could be moderation tooling, it could be a custom search engine, basically, for for the fediverse, and this is something that that we believe in very strongly, that it's needed to to make the fediverse just just click better and to work better together, also to become cheaper for the server administrators to actually run it, and, and both of these things, they are coming in course of this year, so I think we have something for everyone, I mean, both from the user perspective, but also from Monica Server Administrator perspective.
Mike McCue:
That is incredibly exciting. 5.0 fasts collections groups, these are these are these are all very, very exciting things. And you know, hats off to you for taking on the new leadership role. It's exciting to see now on your 10 year anniversary, you guys entering a whole new era. It's very encouraging to hear about the team that you have and the way that Mastodon is collaborating with other folks, you know, not just in the Fediverse, but now even across the social web, and you know, honestly, I think, oh, the opportunity to have the beginnings of a new business model with this hosting work and moderation. I think there's a lot to this, so I am so excited to have gotten a chance to talk to you about all of this, Felix. And thank you to you and to the team and everything that Eugen and you guys have built over the years, you're doing incredibly important work, and thank you for everything.
Felix Hlatky:
Yeah, thank you, Mike, for having me, and for the kind words, and also for the continued support over the years, and it's just have been. A very fun to build alongside you.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find Felix @felix@mastodon.social on Mastodon. Mike is at @mike@flipboard.social
Big thanks to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
If you're interested in this podcast, you might want to check out surf.social/discover to explore thousands of community feeds being built on the open social web.
Until next time, we'll see you in the fediverse.