I was chatting with a friend recently who’s made the decision to quit social media wholesale, simply seeing it now as draining. Hearing that rings true, but it hurts, too. My experience of the social web growing up as part of the first “digital-native” generation was on balance a positive one; though there were plenty of potential (and all-too-often actual) harms associated with having access to Everyone, Everywhere, All Of The Time, it also allowed me to find communities of people who were like me. The friends I made during my undergraduate degree had far more in common with the people I spoke to online growing up than they did with the people I was friends with in high school; the Internet allowed me to find those people earlier, and there were certainly times where it really did help me express myself and discover parts of my identity.

I fear, though, that that experience has dramatically changed now. With the enshittification of the Internet, we’ve pretty thoroughly departed a world in which those kinds of connections are easy to make; I see it in myself meeting far fewer interesting people online than I used to, but I worry for people growing up on the Internet today, experiencing it primarily through consuming the attention-stealing slop we all find ourselves confronted by on corporate social media. Where Twitter, for all its many varied faults and flaws, did at least outwardly appear a generally well-meaning attempt to create a public square online, X under Elon Musk has relegated itself to a cesspit of hatred. While companies like Meta may never have been good-faith actors, there was at least external regulatory impetus to make a showing towards reducing abuse on their platforms; now, it appears there’s impetus to actively increase it, especially targeted at vulnerable groups.

Of course, the solutions touted to this problem by technologists – myself very much included – are invariably solutions like ActivityPub apps, Bluesky and ATProto, and Matrix, and many are genuinely technically impressive. They do an excellent job at solving the problem of how to federate messaging, albeit with different opinions on how to solve it; yet, sometimes as technologists we get caught up in the detail of our technologies, and forget to examine the bigger picture. The problem with the social Internet is not a lack of federation, for that would be too easy to solve; its sickness runs deeper and more fundamental.

Follow the money

Some see the Fediverse as a panacea to the problems of traditional social media, and whilst I certainly agree that it’s an absolute foundational requirement for improvement, I don’t think it solves our problems in and of itself. “There is no golden goose”, to quote Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton on SNL in 2015. Concerns are well-documented about the impact of “centralised decentralisation”, where although it’s possible to use services in a federated fashion, they are de facto dominated by large players. This causes issues not only because the large players have the ability to embrace, extend and extinguish standards, but also, less cynically, because they then face the financial pressures naturally associated with being a large player. Some of the largest Fediverse servers currently rely on donations; whilst it remains to be seen whether that model continues to scale, it’s noteworthy that Mastodon gGmbH, which runs mastodon.social, experienced a 335% increase in its server and hosting costs between 2022 and 2023, with only a 65% increase in donation income.

The obvious comparator here is the Wikimedia Foundation, which of course runs largely on public donations. However, several things are fundamentally different about the Wikimedia example. Among others, the proportion of their income they spend on their servers is a dramatically smaller proportion than Mastodon – using only their public fundraising donations to ensure a like-for-like comparison, WMF spent about 1.8% of their donation revenue in 2023-24 on server costs, whilst Mastodon spent 13.9% of their donations in 2023 on them. To be clear, I’m not in any way suggesting that this is inappropriate or wrong – far from it; it’s inevitable that it will be far cheaper to host a platform whose users are mostly read-only than one which is both read and write, and which needs to serve personalised content to each and every user. Of course, there are economies of scale at play here too; yet, at the same time, Mastodon’s costs have the potential to scale not just with the size of their own userbase, from whom they can at least solicit donations, but rather with the size of the entire Fediverse – and remember, Mastodon.social is the large player here, setting aside Threads. Other, smaller servers may continue to have their server load scale up with even less first-party associated user growth; it’s no surprise there’s a strong driver towards advertising revenue on online platforms.

Setting up a Mastodon server is probably middling levels of easy when it comes to setting up a server of anything online; the trouble with that is that that still completely rules it out for most users. As Dan so eloquently put it: