Dan York

As more people embrace the decentralized world of the Fediverse - and as we WANT more people to migrate to the Fediverse - we are seeing an explosion of new Mastodon servers/instances set up by all sorts of people and groups. Friends of mine have launched their own just running in simple virtual machines. There are now “Mastodon hosting” springing up - ex. masto.host, although the person running it has paused new customers due to the high demand.

But there are two major challenges for people or organizations getting into the space:

1 - SCALING - If you just run a small server for yourself and maybe a few friends, you can limit the system administration workload. But if you launch a public server… you have to be able to handle the influx of new accounts, particularly during the current Twitter migration/exodus. This might be very cool initially, but at some point it starts to become a serious amount of work. You have the technical challenges of scaling to support more users - and you also have to meet the expectations of members in terms of availability, reliability, etc. You have to answer their questions, feature requests, etc.

Running a Mastodon server at scale (or really any kind of public server with user accounts) takes a considerable investment of time, energy, and money. You need to think about how you involve multiple people, how you will support all your users, and how you financially support it all.

[UPDATE - It was noted to me that there can be very real technical and cost requirements with growing a server in particular with storing media. Whenever someone uploads an image or video to the server, it must be stored on that server. Additionally, your server will host media coming from other servers with which you are federated. So as your server gains more users, who follow more people on other servers, there is more and more demand for file storage on your server.]

2 - CONTENT MODERATION - This is perhaps the BIGGEST challenge for hosting a public server. If you again run a small server for yourself and people you trust, then this may all be fine. You set clear expectations with your friends or people you think you can trust, and that may be all you need to do.

But the minute you start letting the broader public into your server, you run into all sorts of legal compliance issues you have to be aware of. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently wrote, there are a range of legal concerns in the USA for operators of any service that hosts “user-generated content”. One big issue is copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). EFF also mentions FOSTA/SESTA, law enforcement requests for identity information, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

And this is just for the USA. Add in the need to potentially comply with European Union (EU) legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the recently passed Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). And… the legislation popping up in many other parts of the world. And, of course, your content moderation abilities needs to be able to grow as you scale to support more users.

[UPDATE - Aswath Rao pointed out in a comment on Mastodon that as a server operator its not enough that you trust the people who have accounts on your server. For every person your users follow on other servers, that person’s content and media are also copied onto your server. So you wind up hosting content on your server from all of those other external users, too. ]

These are also just the legal compliance issues around content moderation. You also have to think about what kind of community you want to foster on your server. Will you have additional moderation policies to create the kind of community you want? (For example, specifically not allowing “hate speech”.) If so, how will you then enforce those policies?

You need to again have the time, energy, and financial resources to be able to comply with the legal requirements, which may end up involving some level of monitoring / enforcement.

For both of those reasons, it will be interesting to see where the Fediverse goes - and in particular where Mastodon goes - in the time ahead. Will we continue to have the wide range of public servers as we do right now? Or over time will we see larger ones emerge that have the time, energy, and financial resources to address these challenges?

“How do I choose which Mastodon server to join? It’s SO CONFUSING! I just want to sign up to ‘Mastodon’!” 

This seems to be a common refrain from some people exploring Mastodon as part of the Twitter migration/exodus. 

The reality is that the Mastodon server you join is most important in the beginning when you are trying to discover new users. Over time, and as you follow more and more people, the server you are on becomes less important.

Let me explain...

I routinely point out to people asking these questions that it is a lot like choosing your email provider - do you use the email address your ISP gives you? Or Gmail? Hotmail? Yahoo mail? Protonmail? Or even run your own email server? 

No matter where you have an email address, you can send email to anyone else using email. Similarly, when you sign up on a Mastodon server (or “instance” to use the older term), you can view and interact with people on any other Mastodon server.

But that still doesn’t seem to register for some folks in an era when we are used to centralized, monolithic social platforms. You just join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or… whatever service. Mastodon is different - you have to make a choice.

I’ve been using Mastodon since December 2016, and in my opinion, which server you are on really matters the most when you are first starting out and seeking to discover new users. Here’s why. In your Mastodon view on the web or in apps, there are three “timelines” (or “feeds”) that you can view:

• Home - all the posts (or “toots”) of people you follow
• Local - all the posts of people on your local server
• Federated - all the posts of people across the Fediverse who are followed by people on your local server[1]

When you are starting out, your home feed will likely be pretty empty, and so Mastodon will be a bit of a ghost town to you. What’s the point of going into it if you only see a couple of posts?

This is where the Local and Federated timelines are important. They help you discover new users to follow.

With the Local timeline, you get to see posts from all the people on your server. So if, for instance, you join techpolicy.social, you will discover posts and people to follow interested in technology policy. If you join mastodon.art, you will discover more people interested in art. If you join fosstodon.org, you’ll discover posts and people interested in free and open source software. If you join ipv6.social… you guessed it, you’ll discover people interested in IPv6. 😀

Beyond the Local timeline, the Federated timeline will help you discover all the Mastodon users on other servers that people on your server follow. So on techpolicy.social, odds are that you will discover other people interested in tech policy, as well as probably tech news sites, and all the other kinds of accounts people there follow. If your account is on mastodon.art, your Federated timeline will probably tend to have more artistic people mixed in. On fostodon.org, your Federated timeline will probably have more people using Linux, developers, and people advocating for free and open source software.

By viewing the Local and Federated timelines, you can find people to follow!

Each person you follow will then start to appear in your Home timeline.

At some point, you will follow enough people that your Home timeline is all you really need to pay attention to. There are sufficient people posting that you only really have the time to read your Home timeline.

The Local and Federated timelines aren’t as important any more. I mean… you still might dip into them from time to time to see if there are new people to discover, but you don’t really need to do so anymore.

This is the key point. The server you choose to join is most important in the beginning when you are trying to find people. But you don’t have to worry too much. Pick one you like and start there.

Over time, much like what email server you are on, it won’t matter quite as much.

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[1] Yes, it’s a little more complicated than that, but I’m simplifying for the purpose of this article.