Governance struggles on the fediverse

Part of building out a decentralized social network is that figuring out governance structures that work for your server is hard. Recently this was visible in the drama around the shutdown of the mastodon.lol server, reported on here. This week this continues with a narrowly avoided shutdown of the Mastodon.au server. I also take a look at how other servers are working on other forms of governance.

Mastodon.au

On Wednesday, the admin of the mastodon.au, a server with 6,5k active users in Australia, decided to shut down the server. The admin emailed the Mastodon organisation for a support question, but the response for this took more than a week. The admin then decided to shut down the server, publicly stating “We were in this for the long haul, the shutdown wasn’t based on anything more than an email that went unanswered”. This went viral in the feeds, as people were scrambling to have to move servers. Luckily a partial solution was found, in that the admin rights were transferred to a new person. The server will be closed for new signups, and from the looks of it, will only be in maintainance mode.

The primary analysis of this all is that shutting down an instance, inconveniencing thousands of people over a single unanswered email is just really dumb, not much more to say about that.

There are some things that are worth noting though:

• Instances that only have a single admin, without a further support team, are vulnerably to disruption. People should strive towards bigger admin and mod teams to prevent disruption after a single admin goes rogue. This was visible last week with the drama around mastodon.lol; one of the reasons it could escalate as much as it did, is that all power of moderation decisions was put on one person. So when disagreements about admin decisions arise, things can escalate quickly to a personal level. There is also little space of other people to come in and moderate between the disagreeing groups.
• On December 21, 2022, Mastodon gGmbH added a trademark policy to the joinmastodon.org website. This policy states: “Do not use or register, in whole or in part, the Mastodon marks as part of your own or any other trademark, service mark, domain name, company name, trade name, product name, or service name.”. It is clear that the Mastodon organization wants to avoid issues with servers that use their name. It seems likely that the organisation had exactly these sorts of issues that played out with mastodon.lol and mastodon.au in mind, that they wanted to avoid happen to servers that include the Mastodon name.
• As best as I can retrace from this story the original question centered around a classification for the server, from Regional to General. This has impact on where the server shows up on the joinmastodon.org website. It seems like the admin assumed that moving the classification to General would lead to more sign-ups. Eugen Rochko called this a ‘a break of trust’ for the original users. While both the intent and execution in the case of mastodon.au is not great for sure, it does indicate the power and relevancy of where your server gets placed on the joinmastodon.org website. A proper placement can significantly impact the amount of signups that your server gets.

Searching for other forms of governance

The recent issues with server admins have demonstrated the need for proper governance structures for servers. Current servers are experimenting with this in different ways, with the last week showing some interesting concepts:

• The server Hachyderm.io is actively working on a democratic governance model for their parent organisation Nivenly. A rough summary of the governance model is that members of the server can pay a small monthly fee, that covers the cost of the organisation and server maintainance, and will get you a vote in the organisation. Admin Kris Nóva gave a talk to FOSDEM 23 about the process of running the Hachyderm server, which can be watched here. The part at the timestamp covers the governance part of the server. The entire process and model is something that is worth watching for other admins as well, to get inspiration and lessons learned. Once the model is fully launched I´ll cover it in more detail. For now, something to keep your eyes on.
• Evan Prodromou, one of the co-creators of the ActivityPub protocol, is starting a new Mastodon instance for Canadians as a co-operative, at cosocial.info. Recent issues have demonstrated the need for new forms of governance for instances. It will be interesting to see how the co-operative mode of governance will be put into practice.
• Universeodon is a medium sized server (17k active users) that is currently run by a single admin, @supernovae. He posted about building up a community board. This is a good way to increase transparancy, but does not fully address the issue yet of one admin being a single point of failure.

Moving forward

There are two important takeaways:

• With the new trademark policy, the Mastodon organisation has mitigated some future issues where server drama is not directly linked to the Mastodon name anymore. This does not neccesarily solve the current problem, as there are quite a lot of existing servers that include 'Mastodon' in the name in some form.
• The fediverse is in a period of time where there is no real consensus on what a good form of governance looks like. Issues with a single admin are clear at this point. There are also examples of servers that are functioning very well. Personality and skill of good admins often play an important role in that, and the fediverse is lucky to have so many skilled and driven people running servers. There is however less documented best practices to fall back upon for people looking to start a new server.