Last Sunday saw a spat of fedi drama, that originally started with a screenshot of something that Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko had said on Discord. This post spread quickly through the feeds, leading to some serious misunderstanding, and fuel to fire for people who already felt they had an axe to grind against Eugen Rochko. The drama resolved itself rather when Eugen Rochko came in to explain the context, and the original poster felt this cleared things up enough.
The drama is not particularly interesting or relevant, if not for the fact that it spawned quite a bit of valuable and nuanced discussion on the names of Mastodon, the fediverse, and the role of the organisation Mastodon gGmbH in all of this. My goal with this article is to document some of the different arguments that people have made at this point in time. Mastodon, the fediverse, and the culture surrounding it, is in a state of rapid change. Microblogging feeds are ephemeral, and poor at documenting how a group of people think at a certain point in time. By writing down and summarizing different people’s ideas, we can later look back and reflect on how fediverse culture has actually changed.
Mastodon naming rights and trademark
The thing that kicked off the fedi drama resolved around the trademark for the name Mastodon. For context: Mastodon the software is made by Mastodon the organisation (Mastodon gGmbH, meaning its a non-profit in Germany). Eugen Rochko is the main developer for the Mastodon software, and the CEO of the organisation. The organisation has trademarked the name Mastodon in December 2022.
Why does trademark policy matter? Because the name Mastodon is often used as a stand-in for the fediverse (or at least the microblogging side of the fediverse). One of the core values for a lot of people of the fediverse is the move away from a single person who owns (part of) the fediverse. The events at Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter reinforces this feeling for a lot of people, as it shows them the risk of what happens when there is a single CEO that controls a platform.
How the fediverse is supposed to work, is that there is a lot of different products and software that are all interconnected and interoperable. While the preference for those products and software is to be open-sourced and fully available for self-hosting to everyone, that is not a requirement to be part of the fediverse. Flipboard is a good example of this; it is a for-profit company that uses proprietary closed-source software to connect to the fediverse. This is not seen as a problem at all, and instead widely celebrated as a good approach to take to the fediverse. This illustrates that proprietary software can be a good and healthy addition to the fediverse.
However, this poll illustrates why there is friction:
This shows that a majority of people use the name ‘Mastodon’ as a stand-in for ‘fediverse’. Since Eugen Rochko claims ownership of the name Mastodon via the trademark policy, he also claims ownership of the term that people to refer to the entire fediverse. You might argue that this use is incorrect, but language does have a tendency to be imprecise. People use a term they know and feel is convenient, even if it is technically incorrect.
One of the reasons for this weeks drama is the confusion regarding the name Mastodon, with people accusing Eugen Rochko of only rejecting the equivalence of Mastodon = Fediverse when it suits him, but not when it does not. Eugen Rochko rejects this accusation, and points out that other Pleroma users for example really do not like it when you call them Mastodon users.
Fediverse naming
Anil Dash reflects on that ‘fediverse’ is not an effective term to use to reach a large audience. Mozilla director Ted Han notes that fediverse is unevocative, and telling that software is federated does not meaningfully explain how Bookwyrm and Owncast interoperate. ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou points out that they used ‘the social web’ at W3C. There is also the interesting perspective that maybe ‘no-one cares’ is a desirable end state, in the same way that no-one cares email uses SMTP.
One of the issues that further complicates things is that there is no single agreement on what should be included in the name ‘fediverse’ either. Software that uses the ActivityPub protocol is definitely part of it. Other protocols that implement open standards are regularly included as well, such as Zot, used by other fediverse software such as Hubzilla and Streams. However, since these standards are less commonly used, its not actually clear if people really mean to include them when they use the term fediverse. Protocol Nostr is even more contentious, where a group of fediverse users actively wants to exclude them, for example by blocking bridges that allow interoperability between ActivityPub and Nostr.
For now, there are no easy answers. We are at a point in time where names are still in active flux. I’m excited to return to this article in a year’s time, and reflect on how opinions and usage of words like fediverse and Mastodon have changed.