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Serious Investors And A Web3 Takeover Have Come To The Mastodon World: Is That Good Or Bad?

from the Gmail-moment dept

In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.

That’s not the only danger for the Mastodon world. The sudden emergence of Mastodon as a popular alternative to Twitter has inevitably attracted the attention of people with lots of spare money looking to invest in the Next Big Thing. The German software developer Eugen Rochko, the person who created the Mastodon software, told the Financial Times (non-paywalled version on Ars Technica) that he had received offers from more than five US-based investors who were keen to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into his project:

But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”

Rochko runs one of the biggest Mastodon instances, mastodon.social (disclosure: it’s the one I use). Another big instance is pawoo.net:

Pawoo, operated from Japan since 2017, is the second largest instance of Mastodon. It has drawn users from all over the world including illustrators, anime fans, novelists, and music enthusiasts since its inception. Accumulating around 800K users, Pawoo has become a “place to enjoy creative activity and unfettered communication.” The Pawoo acquisition marks another milestone of the Mask team towards the building of a decentralized social network and a free, open internet.

That description is in a press release from Mask. Few people in the West have heard about pawoo.net, even if they use Mastodon. That’s because on mastodon.social and many other instances, access to pawoo.net is “limited” as a result of “inappropriate content”. The complex saga of why pawoo.net is mostly disconnected from the rest of the fediverse is described in a long post on the Ansuz blog, written by Matthew Skala. As the blog post explains, the “inappropriate content” of pawoo.net involves sexualized drawings of children, which are unacceptable and probably illegal in much of the West, but largely unproblematic in Japan, where the majority of pawoo.net’s users are based.

Rochko may not be interested in selling some or all of Mastodon and mastodon.social, but the purchase of pawoo.net underlines the fact that those running other servers may be willing to do so. Pawoo.net has been bought by Mask Network, which describes itself as bringing “privacy and benefits from Web3 to social media like Facebook & Twitter – with an open-sourced browser extension.” The roots of Mask Network are in the world of cryptocurrencies – it even has its own native token, Mask – so we may be about to see an infusion of Web3 ideas on this particular instance.

The federated nature of the Mastodon means that it is hard to stop this kind of experimentation and commercialization, even if bans are imposed by other instances that are against this shift. How all this works out over the coming months and years is one of the key issues facing the burgeoning world of Mastodon and ActivityPub.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon or Twitter.

Filed Under: activitypub, cryptocurrency, eugen rochko, fediverse, japan, mastodon, tokens, web3
Companies: google, mask network