I hope we don't kill this like how we kill Mozilla when it makes a plan to make money.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Firefox is doing amazing right now. My uBlock origin on desktop and mobile Android is still working months after it stopped working in Chrome.
it really is. I know this doesn't mean a whole lot, but since chrome blocked ad blockers, ublock origin installs on the addons.mozilla.org site have gone up about 2M installs
I wish government organisations would host their own Mastodon servers. Get off Twitter.
Germany actually does that! Quite a few government bodies are already active at https://social.bund.de/. Maybe there‘s hope that other countries will follow.
Trump actually does host his own Mastodon server. It's called "Truth". Unfortunately it doesn't federate 🤣
But yeah, pretty rough to see Obama and Biden still posting to Xitter.
They had to migrate to something else because it violated the AGPL
I had no idea truth social was powered by mastodon. But it makes sense that maga is too dumb to build their own platform lol.
Fortunately it doesn't federate
Ftfy.
No, I think it would be great if it federated. More people would come into contact with the idea of federation. I doubt most people using truth social are aware it's Mastodon. I certainly didn't know.
Federation is a 2 way street! No federation means his users all get to live out their days in a big circlejerk.
it's not like being exposed to other people's content would change them in any way
Why not? All the Fox and Facebook misinformation radicalized them once. Why couldn't they change again?
Because they will create their own circlejerk in the fediverse too and people will leave them alone to do it. Instances would likely defederate from a truth social instance if it were federated. They are also in the habit of banning anyone who speaks against their side so it wouldn't do much good to try.
In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.
Even then, would rather my government contract out Mastodon hosting to a company based here in the UK than to use the American Hosted and moderated Elon tool.
Honestly, imo they wouldn't even need to get off Twitter and other platforms completely. Just make their own mastodon instance (or something similar that they control themselves) the primary source of truth and place of interaction. They could still link and reference it on other platforms to increase visibility, but make sure that all primary information is in a freely accessible place and not beholden to unreliable entities.
I think that sounds like a really good idea, if you want to get corporate- and government hosted instances on board. What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can't write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees. If Mastodon offers these types of contracts, it would help the adoption rate.
What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees.
They can. There are plenty of companies offering Mastodon hosting.
Paging @paige@fedihost.co
We are big fans of them!
Mastodon isn’t different than any other software, anybody with a half-way experienced IT department could spin up an instance. This sounds like it’s more for small organizations and individuals.
Any company with experienced IT staff could do 80% of SaaS themselves, but they don't because it's a huge headache to maintain and issues can easily balloon costs. The bean counters much prefer fixed cost contracts most of the time
It's a good approach, it's exactly how NodeBB operates as well.
We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don't have the technical know-how.
Win-win.
Corporations only want to deal with companies, not ideas or people. I've been thinking about it from my experience with red hat. Support and services. I don't want to host, but I'll absolutely help others.
Mastodon has already been exploring this solution ahead of today’s launch by partnering with clients like the European Commission, the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, the city of Blois in France, and AltStore, a software company making an alternative app store.
Great idea!
I would love to see hosts start offering subscription based instances and do things like paying for regular auditing of their infrastructure to give us some assurance that our data is actually secure.
I'd legitimately pay for that.
I would love to see hosts start offering subscription based instances
Communick offers access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix for $29/year
I’d legitimately pay for that.
How much? "Regular auditing of the infrastructure" seems like a very enterprise-y thing to expect from a basic SaaS.
Regular auditing of the infrastructure" seems like a very enterprise-y thing to expect from a basic SaaS.
That's the entire point. Offer a premium service when compared to the alternatives and you get to bring in revenue.
Currently, every instance essentially makes a pinky promise that our data isn't being used maliciously. An audit provides assurances they are.
You didn't respond the second part: how much are you willing to pay for this? Anything less than $100k/year and I will guarantee you there is no serious provider who will care about being certified for it, and any who is willing to pay that much money surely will be better off by running their instance on their own.
Of course I didn't respond to it. Because it has nothing to do with my point. Im not going to go out there and do extensive business research just to satisfy your weird demand.
It's something I'd like to see someone take on. It's something I'd wager other people would like to see take on. The economic viability I leave to anyone that wants to take it on.
I'm not going to go out there and do extensive business research
I didn't ask you to do any research. You said "I'd legitimately would pay for it." and I asked one simple question: how much?
The economic viability I leave to anyone that wants to take it on.
This attitude right here is why the Fediverse is bound to stay small and amateurish. Everyone is just focused on keeping their own little pipe dreams and wishing that someone else to take on the sacrifice to do these gigantic efforts without expecting any reward.
I want a kebab shop down the street. You gonna demand I tell you how much I'd pay for a kebab and then wildly insult the community for not doing it themselves?
without any reward
It is called a business. Someone sees a potential opportunity (through, i dunno. People talking about how much they'd like it), does the research, determines if it's a viable investment on their part, and either starts it up or doesn't.
I want a kebab shop down the street. You gonna demand I tell you how much I’d pay for a kebab
No, I will look at kebab shops in your area and see how much they are charging, and I will check if their operation is actually profitable (instead of being a front for someone who needs to launder money) and I will see if they have enough customers paying the asking price. If the math checks out and if I see an opportunity for the market, then I'd go invest time and resources to open a shop there.
There is no such thing for "hosting providers that have been audited and can certify that the data is secured and properly managed". And given you are the first person saying "I'd pay for that", why do you think is somehow offensive to be asked "How much?"
Someone sees a potential opportunity (...) does the research,
Yeah, part of the research is exactly going to potential customers and asking how much are you willing to pay for this?.
Seriously, I do not get what is so weird about asking it.
Well I'm glad you would go into the depth of researching the economic viability of something when you think "I'd like to have this amenity".
But I don't. Because why the fuck would I?
If someone wants to go through the work of researching the costs of setting up such a service, layout the costs, and make some proposals and how much they'd need to charge to the community I'd happily contribute.
Until then....dude you took an offhand "Hey I'd like to see something like this" and turned it into some weird obsession with making me name how much i'd spend on something.
In case you didn't notice, I have a hosting business. This is why I'm "obsessed" in figuring out how much someone would pay for it, if they were serious about what they are asking.
By asking you "how much would you pay?", I'm trying to gauge how serious you are about it. Your refusal to go ahead and name any amount for something that you said "I'd pay for that" shows me that you are not serious about it and therefore a bad idea.
I honestly would've preferred a referral program where you could get a pre-configured vps at your chosen vps provider (where the end user can choose from vps providers such as Hetzner, Glesys and so on), and that the referrer (mastodon, friendica, piefed, lemmy or mbin) gets a small cut out of every monthly payment.
Though I'm not sure how to make that an intriguing deal for the vps providers.
Centralizing the decentralized web at one provider sounds counter productive.
Completely agree that this "feels like" a centralisation vector. That's not the intent of it, and if you read the blog post we make it clear that we want many Mastodon servers, everywhere, rather than one organisation hosting them all. This is to do two things - 1) get us a more sustainable financial foundation that is less dependent on grant cycles and 2) enable the larger institutions (EU Commission being an existing example) to get set up on the Fediverse.
Even if they were to use a single cloud for the managed instances, this is not at all like the centralization of platform ownership. Here's the critical difference.
If something happens to Twitter, say a methhead buys it and turns it into a propaganda machine, its users can only stop using it and/or move elsewhere. For this to have a significant effect, the a large part of the network of people has to move. Every individual has to do non-trivial amount of labour to do so. That's hard.
If something happens to the cloud provider hosting some sizeable Mastodon server, the owner of the server can migrate (copy) the instance to another cloud provider, or their own hardware, switch the DNS records and shutdown the old one. Their users would only notice a brief interruptin. There's no significant labour needed by the users, apart from perhaps logging in again. Only a much smaller amount of labour by the instance owner, compared to the labour needed for mass user migration performed by individual users.
And that's the major difference that fundamentally changes the dynamics.
All they have to do is not censor or take down domains. Looking at you GoDaddy
I remember when I wanted Mozilla to do that, since they had the organizational might, the money, and it fit perfectly with their mission when they created mozilla.social. On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.
On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.
Yeah, I could see it going two ways. On one hand, they could devote too much time to their for-profit arm and neglect the FOSS branch, or worse, make the .com a favored child over the .org, like WordPress does. But on the other hand, they could be like Canonical which, while they've made some questionable decisions with Ubuntu over the years, has pretty staunchly put open-sourced all of their improvements and opened up their improvements to everyone downstream.
And I too miss moz.soc.
I hope they don't go open core.
Can confirm there are no plans for this to happen or be attempted. We're getting the new European non-profit worked out (more news soon), no changes to the licensing.
The code is AGPL. They can't do open core.
TIL GNU Affero General Public License is a flavor that closes loopholes that were used to extend open software without actually open sourcing your contributions.
Matrix Synapse is AGPL, and it is very much open-core these days, see Synapse Pro.
This is IMHO the main risk, at some point someone might say, why not give our hosting an small advantage over others, and it is all downhill from there.
Approved.