Mastodon has a new plan to make money: Hosting and support services for the open social web

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.
- Fortunately it doesn't federate
  Ftfy.
- 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.
- They had to migrate to something else because it violated the AGPL
Absolutely. In fact I wrote exactly that last year.
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
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.

I hope we don't kill this like how we kill Mozilla when it makes a plan to make money.

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

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 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.

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.

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.
- 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.