Mastodon in 2025

We’re already well into 2025, and it has been a huge start to the year for Mastodon. We want to bring you an overdue update on exactly what we’re working on, from a strategic perspective.

Mastodon’s mission is to ensure that our online social spaces belong to the people forever, and provide a safe place for public discourse.

In February, a few members of the team met in person to discuss next steps. Here are the three priorities we set for this year.

• Restructure the organisation
• Grow the user base
• Reach financial sustainability

Restructuring

In January, we shared a bold announcement: Mastodon must never be owned by a single individual, and serves the community. To that end, we said that we are going to create a new non-profit organisation based in Europe, to own the Mastodon assets; and, that we will be reorganising our team. We’re not yet fully through this process, and this remains a core goal and activity for 2025. There will be more news to share on this topic very soon.

Related to the organisational changes, we have grown the team over the past year, reflecting the broader range of conversations that have been going on around the project. We also assessed and improved contracts for as many of the team as possible, within budget constraints.

Growth

Another element to our strategy is to grow the number of users of the Mastodon network (and the Fediverse as a whole). Mastodon has always been about more than growth itself - we want to build better social spaces for people, and help people to leave legacy platforms. All of that remains true: this is a plan to work towards growth that aligns with our values.

We’re thinking about this in three main ways: user growth, institutional growth, and ecosystem growth.

There’s an element here of how we’re building and adding features to Mastodon, to make it more approachable and useful to more people - to that end, we’ve got new members of the team focused on user interfaces, user experience and design. We also plan to work on features that we’ve heard organisations ask us about, such as greater customisation for their instances. Finally, we’ve greatly increased our presence at community events and conferences, to talk about the broader Fediverse story.

Sustainability

Over the past few years, we’ve shared annual reports that describe where our funding comes from: donations largely from individual / grass roots supporters (currently starting at $8 per month on Patreon), with an occasional substantial gift from an organisation or individual; and, some grants from EU programmes and institutions. We’ve always relied on these to sustain our small core team.

In 2024, we were able to provide commercial services for the first time, by hosting the European Commission’s Mastodon instance, and by signing a support contract with the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein. 2024 was also the first year we were able to raise donations from wealthy individuals, which gave us more financial freedom to make large changes to the organisation.

A diverse range of incomes is great, because it reduces the risk of being dependent on a single source. We intend to build on the regular income channels, and in 2025, we will be offering additional services. We’ll be sharing more about these commercial offerings, as well as the restructuring, in the coming weeks.

We will continue to rely on and appreciate your donations and support as we move forward.