Connecting the world through thriving online communities

Over the past couple of decades, the concept of the “social” internet has come a long way - from the first interactive websites and the Web 2.0 era, blogs and self-publishing, the ability for people to create and share their own content online, through microblogging to broadcasting at scale. Today, what we know as “social media” is having a huge impact on society - often, taken advantage of in unhealthy ways.

We believe that the open social web can be better than this. We’ve seen the positive impact that online social platforms can have, and we treat our roles as builders of resources in this space with great responsibility. Our focus on community ownership, trust & safety features, organic user & server growth, and financial sustainability - for the non-profit project, the server administrators, the moderators, the developers and translators, and the creators in the Fediverse - will enable us to build a better way of being online.

To begin, we sat down together to figure out who we are, what we do, and how we operate. This is a first step in building community ownership and governance, which we kicked off in November last year. We may seem to be moving slowly compared to our better funded competitors and even friends in our space, but we think this is the right speed for something as important as the digital fabric of our society.

Today we’re sharing our Vision, Mission, and the Pillars for our 2026 strategy.

Our vision

A human-centred social web that serves the common good.

Our mission

Connect the world through thriving online communities.

Our strategy

Here’s how we’re going to do it:

First, we will finalise a governance model that makes everyone feel consulted and informed about the future of Mastodon. Second, we’re forming and founding an EU-based non-profit parent entity to ensure Mastodon stays European forever. Third, we are developing a funding strategy to reach sustainable operations, including building capabilities into Mastodon that allow users to donate easily without leaving the app. Fourth, we will be moving more of our team and project infrastructure to open platforms for greater autonomy - with the first example being a migration (soon) from Discord to Zulip for our community discussions. Finally, we are investing in our internal systems, to remain a welcoming and well-functioning workplace for our team.

Network Health: Redefine what it means to be safe on Mastodon

Everyone on today’s internet is directly exposed to regulations like GDPR, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and lately numerous age verification (or assurance) laws and related social media bans for minors. We will perform a regulatory audit to ensure full legal compliance of our own servers, and explore how this knowledge can be shared with the community. We are also forming an interdisciplinary age-verification working group, to help us navigate the complex nature of these international laws. Simultaneously, the team will draft and publish new community guidelines and moderation policies for the servers we operate. Additionally, we are updating the terms of service (we ran a community consultation on this in October 2025) and privacy policy for our own servers.

The Mastodon project is planning a global redesign to improve usability and discovery across the next software versions. These releases will include shipping our extension capabilities to all servers (initiated thanks to the EU-funded “Fediscovery” project); creating a specification for automated content detection; and establishing processes to support network growth and health. Additionally, the team will focus on improvements for server administrators, by making Mastodon easier to install, update, and administer, with efforts to reduce hosting costs and enhance documentation.

Over the next two days, my fellow directors will share more information about their plans for the coming year. Stay tuned, and let us know what you think about this plan by posting to us on Mastodon via @mastodon@mastodon.social or by sending us an email.