Social media sites look to billionaire-proof their organisations

Mastodon founder and Bluesky users seek to avoid the fate of Twitter and Facebook

Social media service Mastodon and prominent users of Bluesky have put forward measures to prevent them from being taken over by wealthy interests.

Mastodon, which saw user numbers surge after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022, has announced plans to turn itself into a non-profit.

“We are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organisation, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual,” Mastodon’s core team said in a blog post.

The organisation, which depends on donations for funding rather than advertising or investment capital, will become wholly owned by new European not-for-profit entity to be set up in the next few months.

Founder Eugen Rochko, who has been running the organisation since Mastodon was launched in 2017, said he intends to transfer his ownership of Mastodon trademarks and assets, including copyright over his code, to the Mastodon non-profit, “and transition to a different role at the organisation.”

The organisation is looking to ramp up donations to an annual €5 million in 2025, in part to expand its core team. In 2023, the most recent year for which accounts are available, total donations came to €545,000 and Mastodon has four permanent staff on its payroll.

The core organisations runs two servers mastodon.social and mastodon.online, but there are thousands other servers (known as instances) run by groups and individual volunteers that federate with these and other sites in the “Fediverse”, including Tumblr, PixelFed, Friendica, and more recently Meta’s Threads, which is also based on the ActivityPub protocol allowing it to federate with similar sites.

Despite the vote for decentralisation, the arrival of Meta’s 1000-pound gorilla has not been universally welcomed in the Fediverse, and many instances immediately “de-federated” from Zuckerberg’s site. The Meta owner’s kowtowing to Trump, with selective lifting of moderation practices and removal of fact checking on Facebook and Instagram, will likely see these blocking measures expand across the Fediverse, including, perhaps, the two servers maintained by Mastodon.

Bluesky users organise

Mastodon’s decentralised structure, open source code, and Rochko’s determination that it should never be put up for sale, make it naturally resilient to takeover by rich individuals. BlueSky, a site created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is also decentralised, at least in theory, although currently all servers are run by the company itself.

Bluesky’s more conventional structure and precise recreation of the look and feel of Twitter before Musk took it over have made it a more natural fit for many fleeing X after its new owner’s manipulation of their feeds and blatant support for the far right.

Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation, owned by CEO Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. It is based on a different federation mechanism called AT Protocol and was launched on the back of funding from venture capital and more recently has received the backing of cryptocurrency firms.

The site’s user numbers have rocketed to Bluesky to more than 27.5 million users and now far exceed Mastodon’s 15.5 million, although both are dwarfed by X (around 588 million) and Threads (ca. 275 million). Meta’s other social sites, Facebook and Instagram, each have billions of users.

However, while Bluesky’s management say it’s “billionaire-proof”, its limited decentralisation, funding and ownership structure make it more vulnerable to a takeover than Mastodon. Concerned about the ability of oligarchical owners to change direction radically according to political expediency, a group of influential users including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Free actor Mark Ruffalo, and Mozilla Foundation executive director Nabiha Syed have created an initiative called Free our Feeds

“With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square,” its manifesto reads.

The initiative is looking for funding to build more viable apps on the AT Protocol to turn it into “something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.”