Trends in fediverse structure

There are currently trends happening in the fediverse that might not be directly visible if you look at the day-to-day usage of the fediverse, but that are significantly shaping the fediverse over larger time period. The Nordic Council of Ministers recommends the Nordic countries to use open protocols for their communications, and specifically mentions ActivityPub. This is one of those policy documents that is influential under the surface, the impact will take a while to play out. In a more medium term trend, the fediverse is starting to experience competition; Mastodon is professionalizing and expanding the organisation, while Calckey is rapidly profiling itself as software that not only has more features, but a different culture, that is more focused on brevity and fun.

As usual, there is more than enough other news happening, presented below. But lets first take a look at some of the recent trends

Policy and Protocols

Public policy about the internet often has great impact, even though that might not be directly visible. One example of this in the Nordic countries. A think tank that is set up by the Nordic Council of Ministers recently published their recommendations, about democracy and Big Tech. I spoke with Carl Heath (@carl), one of the members of the think tank, about their recommendations, why they recommend ActivityPub to the Nordic Ministers, and how he thinks about the internet as public spaces.

The report, A Nordic approach to democratic debate in the age of Big Tech, outlines a vision of how "Big Tech threatens to undermine open democratic debate", and comes with multiple recommendations. One of which is that "We recommend that Nordic countries support the use of open standards and protocols (such as ActivityPub) to encourage effective portability between competing platforms."

Talking with Heath is an enlightning experience, and he chooses his words carefully. One thing that sticks out to me is how consistently he compares digital spaces and products with places in the physical world (meatspace, he calls it). Heath describes this way of thinking in more detail in an excellent article about digital spaces as well.

Seeing the digital space for the real space that it is, in which the public should have a major say in how digital spaces should work, is the real shift in thinking. Our digital spaces on the internet have been run by commercial players for the last 15 years. Think tank recommendations as this one are part of a larger trend of public institutes taking ownership of their own digital space. And it is hard to imagine a situation, like this piece also recommends, where ActivityPub and the fediverse do not play a significant role in this.

Fediverse structure

Mastodon has long been the centre of the structure of the fediverse, both in terms of marketshare as in mindshare. It is by far the most commonly used software, and in most mainstream media, the term Mastodon gets used interchangeably with fediverse. This dominant position of Mastodon within the fediverse was managed largely by Eugen Rochko as the main player, supported by a few freelance developers.

In the May update on Patreon, Eugen Rochko goes into detail about all the personnel changes that are happening within the Mastodon organisation: a long-term freelance developer becomes a full-time employee, the organisation hired a DevOps engineer and a hiring manager, and multiple advisors have joined on legal issues, communications and developer relations. This makes the Mastodon organisation a significantly different, and more professional, organisation, than the earlier Mastodon that has shaped the fediverse so much.

At the same Calckey is continuing to be part of the conversation, with the flagship instance calckey.social having to close registration for a while to handle the server load. Medium sized Mastodon instances such as Mastodon.world (32k MAU) and infosec.exchange (19k MAU) are both setting up corresponding calckey instances as well. One of the interesting aspects of Calckey is culture. Software is never neutral, and design decisions affect the culture of the community that uses the software. For Calckey, that is an explicit focus on fun and friendliness. This is even more pronounced that Calckey has a lot of opportunity to shape its culture, as it is new and can still establish itself.

The rise of Calckey, and the organisational growth at Mastodon, lead to the structure of the fediverse also changing. Many of the design decisions that lead to the current community culture about search and quote posting, for example, were made in a time where Eugen could largely make these decisions by himself. Now the game is rapidly changing: Mastodon as a growing organisation has more input from other professionals to help shape decisions that the organisation makes. And users who are not happy with the choices that Mastodon makes feel like they are getting a real alternative now, they can simply move to Calckey.

Structural changes

Software alternatives have always been present on the fediverse; Friendica and Misskey predate Mastodon after all. But what feels different this time is that people see it as a real alternative. When this winter discussions were being held about features that Mastodon did not have or should have, comments that people should move to Pleroma were few and far between. Now it is a clearer part of the discussion, that other software has made different decisions that Mastodon has. Those alternatives were always there, but Calckeys moment as part of main feed discourse is helping people realize what has been there all along.

These trends should not be seen as a singular turning point. Instead, they build upon previous works and changes, and keep gathering momentum. Calckey is not the first alternative, but builds upon other software. Other software is being build as we speak, creating a scene of fierce competition. Mastodon becoming a larger and professional organisation is a gradual process that has been happening for a while. A single policy document is not an inflection point for governments either. The EU has been part of the fediverse for over a year now, with the EUVoice project, as well as the German government having a seizable established presence.

Over time, these changes do build up, and it seems like we are building towards an inflection point for the fediverse. On the software side, we are in the early start of a new digital goldrush. People are realizing the massive untapped potential there is to create new social networking software. On the policy side, the conversation is crystallizing into the realization that public agencies should own and have control over digital public spaces. Heath's work is an especially luminating description of that shift in thinking.