I spent some time reviewing various Mastodon drama from over a year ago that I thought contributed to Eugen Rochko eventually stepping away from a leadership role in the project. In Eugen’s announcement post:

I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realise that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process.

I was not following it closely at the time, so I dug up some of the public criticisms from that time that had kicked up a lot of negativity. However, in a Reddit reply, Eugen says that it was separate from anything in public:

It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.

That rules out whatever drama I found. I won’t attempt to summarize it because I don’t want to rehash it again. As the public face of Mastodon, I expect Eugen is frequently overwhelmed with complaints that are too much for one person to deal with.

Still, just looking over the online drama reminded me of how big a problem we have on the social web. Some of the most unexpectedly personal and harsh replies I’ve ever received have come from Mastodon folks who think they’re fighting the good fight. When people are sure they are on the side of justice, they justify extreme rhetoric, even dehumanization of people on the wrong side. As I’ve blogged about previously, the focus on smaller communities is a double-edged sword: good in the move for decentralization and to focus more on community moderation, but also amplifying the negative effects of filter bubbles.

When I quit Twitter in 2012, I remember noticing for the first time how influential it had been to have a community of peers that shaped popular opinion. After I stopped reading Twitter, when Daniel Jalkut and I would record Core Intuition, I would often come to the show with a different perspective than what our Mac and iOS developer community on Twitter had already decided was best. That didn’t mean I was right more often, but I was happy that it felt like my opinion was my own.

It’s easy to look at many Mastodon servers now and see what the groupthink is and how it affects discourse. It’s often political or cultural, which means in today’s climate it’s divisive.

The civility problem combined with slow growth should be worrisome to the fediverse community. From FediDB, there seems to be a decline in active users. That trend will continue without some kind of event to shake things up, like the influx of Twitter users a few years ago. Bluesky is now four times as large as Mastodon because it has managed to break into the mainstream social web, more approachable for new users.

In a great interview this week with Jon Henshaw, Eugen talked about appealing to people dissatisfied with US-based companies:

People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software.

This matches my own experience running Micro.blog, which is why we added European web servers earlier this year. Whether on the fediverse or the IndieWeb, people want ownership of their content and their connections with others. That isn’t likely the path to significant growth for the fediverse, though, as it introduces more complexity in choosing where to sign up.

I believe Mastodon will be around for many years to come. Can it be a healthy community for newcomers, or will it remain an opinionated niche in the social web?

If 2025 was about the fediverse — with new activity from Ghost, Flipboard, WordPress, and also newer platforms — I think 2026 will be a partial reset to the IndieWeb. More blogs. More independent voices, as diverse as the web. More platforms and bridges that span multiple protocols. And of course Micro.blog is well positioned for this future because those were our founding principles all along.