Hello everybody, thank you so much for having us here today.
We are super excited to tell you what is new and what is coming in terms of community
at Mastodon.
As Evan said, my name is Hannah Aubrey, I recently joined Mastodon as the community director
and you probably recognize this familiar face and the paper are head of communications.
Together, we are community and communications.
It comes unity.
So, quick overview of what we are going to talk about today, full warning.
This is not a technical talk, this is an organizational talk.
If you have, thank you.
If you have questions about anything we talk about today, please come find us at our
stand, F-O-4, or find us online.
Thanks Hannah.
So, we are going to divide this up between us, so I will cover the vision piece at the beginning
here and then I will pass over to Hannah to talk a little bit about some other topics.
So, if you followed our story, Mastodon is going to turn 10 later this year as a software
project which is very exciting.
We will have more talk about near at that time.
But we have been building a team, right?
So, Eugene took a really bold step of saying this project is for everyone and he didn't
want to be kind of in charge.
So, he is taking a sideway step into looking after products and we have got this new leadership
team.
And as part of this whole process of bringing together a group of people to build Mastodon,
we thought it was about time that we actually told you all what Mastodon stands for
because a lot of people have versions of this and we have heard a few people say,
well, what is Mastodon's vision?
We are going to tell you about that.
The other thing I want to tell you is that we are also in the process of finalizing our
transition to a new nonprofit here at Belgium and as part of that there will be
a document that we are close to finishing, we have not quite finished yet, which will cover
the governance process and bylaws for the community project that is Mastodon.
So, we will begin recruiting committees to that really soon.
Hannah is a great person to come talk to over the weekend if you would like to get involved
with that.
But this is really kind of the teaser for what Mastodon is all about.
It has been around for a while, so you probably know what it is, right?
But one of the things we thought as we brought this group of people together is,
what is it?
How do we describe ourselves to ourselves and how does that help us decide where we are going?
How does that help us communicate, which is important to me, as a communication person,
to you all what we are doing and why we are doing it?
And the other important thing to do, and I am spending a long time on this slide,
but this is important, the reason that we are moving a bit slowly is that we have seen the impact,
but social media, social networks can have in the world, and it is not always good, but it can be good.
And we take this really seriously, so that is why you will find us move a little more slowly than you may like sometimes
around some of the things that we built.
We are moving slowly because we do not take this work lightly.
So this is Mastodon's vision.
It is a human-centered social web that serves a common good.
And it is human-centered because we put people first.
That applies when we are making decisions, when we are building processes, for our software,
when we are designing the software, when we are adding features like quote posts,
thinking about how that affects how humans interact.
We want a network that prioritizes socializing and overslop people over profits and authenticity overblaster.
And we are serving the common good because we want technology and community that helps make the world and ourselves better.
So beyond that vision, that grand vision, that really meaningful vision, our mission is then to build Mastodon to connect the world through thriving online communities.
We connect the world by building technology and programs that bring people together.
And we want those communities to thrive.
We want them to be healthy, we want them to be safe, we want them to be exciting and vibrant.
And also to spark a sense of belonging and fun.
So having said that this vision and mission, how does that translate them into what Mastodon stands for, what are our values?
And then we think about how those values shape our decision-making processes.
So these are our values.
We put people first.
We are building an ethical human-centered social web where authentic connections between humans matter more than metrics.
We prioritise genuine human interactions.
We act with integrity, we champion individual agency.
And we make decisions that benefit people and not profits.
As Hannah said, this is not a highly technical talk, but I think this is really important to communicate with you.
We build bridges.
We want to empower communities to connect, but maintain their autonomy.
We want to enable people to make the choices about who and how, who they connect with and how they connect with them.
We are, of course, building on open protocols, activity pub, we're creating pathways for those by those groups in the vetiverse to interact on their own terms.
And we want to enable that to foster understanding between cultures and perspectives.
We're transparent and trustworthy.
I've told you that we are working on a governance processes for the organization as it evolves.
We believe in open dialogue.
I hope if you follow our project and if you use our software, that you've seen this over the course of the last couple of years,
where choices have been made, occasionally something hasn't been thought through as well as we could have done it.
And we've said, I'm sorry, we've owned that.
We've changed that.
We believe in open dialogue.
Our code is open source.
Our policies are public.
And our decision-making welcomes community input.
We've done this with our terms of service for our main master of social instances.
When we make those mistakes, we acknowledge them.
And we make things right.
We're resilient and self-reliant, and this is more important of course in the world right now than ever before.
We offer a free from centralized control and corporate influence.
We want to ensure that the platform evolves according to community needs.
It doesn't mean every single feature that the community requests incidentally,
but we listen to community input.
We want to incorporate that.
We're community funded, community driven in development.
And we want to show that social media can flourish without compromising the values we're talking about here.
And finally, and really importantly, we are part of a movement.
Mastered on is not the Fediverse.
I say there's every single time on stage talking about the projects.
We are part of a movement.
We are part of a diverse ecosystem.
It works towards a better internet than we believe it.
That brings me to Foss Dam on a regular basis, not just for Mastered on,
because the free software movement and open source of things matter to me personally.
Our strength comes through that collaboration,
through the collaboration that we see in this same movement, this same environment,
through sharing our knowledge and mutual support across that decentralized web movement.
One more thing I'm going to talk about before handing back to Hannah,
is a greater commitment to free software.
We are planning to move as much of our digital footprint
to wholly own and operate a digital infrastructure as we can.
It's a long-term project.
We can't do this overnight.
We can't just switch every system we use to something that is free and open source
and hosted by ourselves tomorrow.
We are taking our time over this because we need to balance achieving our mission.
Supporting the millions of people that do use Mastered on every day,
the hundreds and thousands of instances that exist around the world today,
keeping them stable, enabling them to get new features,
but also move our project forward.
We're going to move as much of our operations as we can
without sacrificing our team's ability to get things done.
The first thing that we have done is our community chat platforms
over the holiday period.
It's just gone.
The Christmas period.
We moved our internal work collaboration.
We'd been using Discord for a long time.
Not great for what we needed to do as a team,
now moved over to Zurich, which we have been really enjoying.
It's great.
You may be aware that we also used Discord for a couple of other chat channels,
one of those being our Patreon community.
We will be moving those over to Zurich as well over the next few months.
This is just one step.
This is one example of the changes we're going to be making in this space.
We're not going to do them all overnight,
but I'm excited to say that we are deepening that commitment.
With that, I should hand you back to Hannah to talk about the really hard stuff.
All right, my friends.
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room,
or if you prefer the packing room in the space.
After the Twitter sale in late 2022,
we made a choice to send new signups directly to masks on social
during the onboarding process.
We made that decision out of concern for the new user experience.
Simply to reduce the cognitive load of a new paradigm and social networking
and a whole new set of choices that come with that.
We wanted new users to land on a server that we were sure would remain operational,
not only under that immediate sign-up load, but also into the future.
We haven't revisited that choice for a number of reasons.
One of them being that we're a small team,
and we've been focused on building a new organization, establishing a new entity,
and releasing new features.
Another reason we haven't made a switch yet is because the size of masks on social
is a benefit to us.
It enables us to test new features, new capabilities under a heavy load
to make sure they won't fall over.
But ultimately, we know that as one of the largest and most visible projects
in the Fediverse and the social web,
we have a responsibility to support and to promote the entire network.
We know the delay has been frustrating, we're really sorry about that,
and we're committed to evolving onboarding processes in a way to help the entire network
and grow.
It is my great pleasure and honor to announce that we are going to begin a new experiment
in onboarding, and that is default server recommendations.
What this mean is this new method is a way to assign a server that will prioritize
implementing the closest geographic instance in the correct language,
based on data surface by the app store.
So this experiment will start on our iOS and Android apps,
and because of course we are able to get that data from the app store
in order to do this on the web, we would need to implement tracking,
we want to go slowly with that and make sure we do it in a privacy-respecting way.
This experiment will be designed to ensure that server admins remain in control,
meaning they will have the power to opt in and opt out as needed,
or reduce the percentage of sign-ups flowing their way.
Starting now, we will begin recruiting a group of general purpose servers to participate
in this experiment.
We have a few basic eligibility requirements detailed on this slide,
as the exact design of the experiment finalizes, we may have a few more,
this is the set to start.
And we will be sort of hands-selecting servers to participate in this experiment,
but we may open this up later on,
and this is just a first step in looking at how we can evolve onboarding
to support the entire network.
So if you're interested in participating,
here's a QR code you can scan.
There's a form that this QR code points to,
with some really basic information,
and it's on Google Workspace, but we're going to get a free open source form
builder spun up soon.
So while you're scanning that,
the default server recommendations experiment,
again, is just a first step in reimagining,
how master on onboarding and server discovery works overall.
Our team's intent is to work with the community,
a process of co-creation,
to build new onboarding pathways that support the entire network,
and we are so excited to work with you on this.
Oops, we also have an apology to make,
which is that we have not kept up with submissions
to our server directory.
And we are sorry about that.
As you have just heard, our mission for master on,
is connect the world through thriving online communities,
not one community, but many communities.
So it is really important to us that there are many master on servers,
all around the world that are vibrant,
that are thriving,
that make the system truly resistant, resilient, decentralized,
and global.
So we are going to change the way this process works.
We are going to make it easier to manage for you,
and for us, for us all,
our intent is to move the server directory back into a global request based system,
so that admins can submit, update,
or remove entries themselves,
and other change we want to make to the server directory,
and this will become important in a later phase of our onboarding experimentation,
but we want to add more ways to classify servers based on demographics,
interests, any number of classifications.
This can help us make discovery easier,
and we also want to empower the community
to help us manage the approvals process.
So we can keep up with the load.
So thank you for your patience,
and again, we are so sorry we fell behind on this work.
Right now, we have perhaps one of the best opportunities,
at least the best in a few years,
to grow the open social web.
We have masked on deeply believe in the ideals of the social web of the Fediverse,
because of that we want to see more people using this technology.
We hope you feel the same,
and if you do, we've prepared three things you can do today
to help us grow the movement.
Help a friend or family get signed up,
but don't just send them the link to the website,
don't just send them the app, sit down with them,
and help them fill their timeline.
Our research shows that people with an active timeline
are more likely to stick around,
so help your friend and family find a coach to follow,
help them follow a few hashtags,
and help them craft an introduction.
And also, stay tuned for upcoming collections feature,
which should help people find more interesting accounts to follow.
Another thing you can do is petition your local government
to join the Fediverse.
Start by identifying the most tech forward department,
your local government,
maybe a communications office,
digital office,
pick one specific contact,
who seems most likely to be interested in innovative communications platforms,
prepare a short to the point pitch,
that gets straight to it.
You know, by joining Massed On,
you can communicate directly with residents without paying
for expensive social media advertising.
You all know the talking points.
Make sure to connect the platform
to that organizations that government-specific goals,
if it's a city trying to increase community engagement,
emphasize how Massed On creates more meaningful,
local conversations.
We use multiple approaches.
Don't just send one email, send a few,
follow up with a phone call, request a meeting,
make a relationship.
The key is persistence,
and showing how Massed On solves real communication challenges.
And finally, hit the streets.
Now, we are not condoning vandalism,
but we do know there are a lot of really talented artists
in the Fediverse.
And if some of those talented artists were to create
some JPEGs or PDFs for stickers or flyers,
providing Massed On or their local instance,
and if you saw those JPEGs or PDFs,
if you wanted to print them out
and stick them somewhere where lots of people would find them,
you should not do that.
You can also try a more targeted approach.
If you're part of a local club or a community,
talk to your group or community's leader,
and ask them what would it take to get you to move,
and feel free to reach out to us if you need help.
And also make sure to share what works,
so we can all learn and help the Fediverse grow.
Any questions?
Thank you.
Just before we take a couple of questions,
we dropped a couple of slides that we had had
in this deck to talk about specific technical features
that are coming in the next 12 months.
Our booth is on F-04,
above the by the food vans around the corner there.
Come by, there's slides on our carousel there.
You can have a look and see what's coming.
Talk to the folks on the stand.
We'll take a question or say before we get pulled off stage.
Also, handy Fediverse stickers on the table over here,
since we were talking about that.
All right, hands up for questions.
We'll go out here and then move over there.
Hi, thank you for the talk.
You mentioned that you had discord and learning to move from that one,
and also Google Cloud.
What are the other closed software,
not an open source that you still have,
and are like planning to move ahead?
I think what of the next one we want to address is,
we use help scout for managing our help requests.
There's a great version of it free scout,
and that's probably our next after moving off discord.
I had a question over here.
Great.
A couple of days to come and get through.
Thank you for putting also the topic of growing the users of MasterDawn
at the focus here and asking for the help of all of us,
which is fair.
What I would like to understand better is what are from your perspective,
the biggest motivators of individuals to join MasterDawn
slash the Fediverse.
There was once a thread I read on our local instance on the social,
and honestly it was a bit confusing to me.
It's very hard to synthesize that one to find the right catchphrases or whatever.
Absolutely.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
There's an extrinsic motivation,
which is what's going on with big tech,
big US tech right now.
And so that's a sort of perhaps fear and anger,
and a desire to protect one's privacy,
to get away from those close networks.
But I think even more powerful,
because extrinsic motivators are typically very powerful in the short term
and decrease in effectiveness over the long term.
The most important thing we all need to be focusing on
and certainly MasterDawn needs to do a lot of,
what to do contribute to this as well,
is being with the people and things they love,
that is the intrinsic motivation,
social connection, fun, belonging.
Those are the most powerful motivators,
the longest-term motivators,
the ones that keep people on the network.
And so just having a fun and cool place for people to hang out.
How do you, hey,
Preston Duster from Hackaderm here.
So super excited about, you know,
sort of recommendations.
The requirement to have open signups seems,
I don't know, challenging.
Given that the spam tool,
the tools to fight spam just aren't there.
So like that's a non-starter.
How are y'all thinking about evolving that in a future?
Yeah, absolutely.
We do have some upcoming features over the next two years
of course in the short-term.
We don't have something built-in right now.
And so it is sort of a disclaimer for us to say,
if you want to participate in this experiment,
be ready for this spam.
And of course, we'll be here to help share knowledge, et cetera.
If you want to come talk to us a little bit more about what we can do,
please do.
Hi.
My name is Everton.
So my first question is,
how can we do the lobbying that,
like, competitors like Blue Sky,
they're doing here in Europe?
I also the last days in this talk with
Mustardon Philippe and Sebastian from Eros Sky.
And I could see how people with this money
on venture capital are coming to Brussels
every week to the lobbying for the Blue Sky 80 protocol.
This is my first question.
And the second point is to contact our representatives,
politicians.
I create a tool called LeaveX.eu that
facilitates people to write to politicians.
So the last days I'm receiving emails from politicians
because people are contacting them.
And I'm glad people from Austria,
Netherlands and Sweden had the politicians
who are still on X.
So if anyone else wants to join
and add the data from your country, please help.
And someone from Canada just developed a tool
to provide politicians from all over Canada
to the Fediverse using Mustardon.
So it's just our way to reach out people
and we don't have as many research people as money.
So how can we, more of this grassroots movement,
non-profit, compete with these guys with money?
Get loud.
Yeah, I think probably we need to switch over.
And I'll answer the question,
but you might probably want to,
but the next speaker probably wants to come and get ready.
Yeah, great question, thank you.
You're right.
We have limited resources.
Finally, there was somebody who posted in a couple of weeks ago
saying Mustardon should have billboards all over Europe
talking about how great it is.
Lovely.
Please give us enough money to do that.
We are restricted in what we can do and we do our best.
I would say on the EU, they have an instance.
We happen to host that instance.
We have a hosting offering for companies,
organizations that want to easily get started.
We know there are other hosting organizations.
We are very happy to work with them and encourage them as well
to help organizations onto the Fediverse.
I've been in Brussels myself,
I think four times in the last 12 months
and that's more than ever been in my life.
But I do not have the resources, as you say,
probably not the charisma either, who knows.
These are the folks that are coming.
You're completely right to call that out.
How can we compete?
As Hannah says, we need to be persistent.
We need to be loud.
We need to really make our voices heard,
make people understand that just switching to something
that is cut and paste from somewhere else in the world
with the same business model is not changing the world.
It is still causing people to put their lives into places
where they will be tracked and monetized
and their friends networks will be solved.
That is not what we stand for,
as I hope we show you this morning.
That is what we believe in,
and we ask humbly for your help
in sharing that message with everyone else.
So we really appreciate it.
Thank you for the leave-act tool you built.
We appreciate that.
We appreciate all of you who are helping in this effort.
Thank you.
Okay, so just quick one.
So back in the early, like a star of days,
there's a whole thing where people would go into coffee shops
and they would literally build a website for the coffee shop
and then show it to the owner and say, look, I've built this for you.
You could just use it.
I will literally pass over to you.
Is there an equivalent that could be done with Maston?
Yes, let's talk.
Okay.
That's easy.
Did it?
Good job.
Sorry, I can't see you guys.
I'm not sure if it's perfect.
It's perfect.
It's a nice, nice little stopper.
So I check back over.
Yeah, you're gonna check back over here.
Can you get that mess?
I don't.
I'm gonna grab my hat.
Is that my MCA?
It doesn't make me dull.
Remember what you had?
You had a...
I think it'd be right.
You had TF.
Bless your heart.