A Vision for Mastodon.Online

In response to: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/02/mastodon-is-for-the-people/

We also haven’t forgotten about mastodon.online. We want to do something wildly different there and push the limits of what the software can do. We have some thoughts, but we don’t really know what this looks like yet! If you have ideas about neat or useful things we could do with mastodon.online, send a message to @staff@mastodon.online.

I have some ideas for how to do something different with mastodon.online. They’re all about removing friction from the onboarding experience of Mastodon, targeting less technical users who are stuck on facebook and other legacy instances. I’m old enough to remember when America Online was a scrappy startup who rose to dominance by smoothing over the rough edges of the mid ’90s Internet and creating a safe, comfortable space for a nation of non‐internet users to start to figure out what to even do on the internet. I believe that old story possesses some valuable insights that can help us envision an entirely new chapter beyond the current paradigm of today’s social platforms.

Mastodon.Online, meet America.Online

In 1995 when “the internet” mostly consisted of BBSes, IRC, and other geeky text‐based protocols, AOL filled the gap with rich content programming and dedicated networking tools within their walled garden that met the needs of mainstream users. It made it dead simple for non‐technical users to find news, weather, movie showtimes, people you know, and topics you want to explore at a time when finding that information outside of AOL was intimidating to unfamiliar computer users. 

Within the span of a few short years, AOL really did get America online, getting the everyday mainstream netizen comfortable with then‐new concepts of real time chat, email, message boards, news feeds, and several other features that made the Internet a compelling destination for a new generation of tech users.

Time‐Warp to Now: Post‐Social Amnesia

Since then, Facebook and Instagram have made a Meta‐sized hole in all our lives that few know how to get ourselves out of. Millennials and younger generations don’t remember a time before the modern social web. Meta’s apps have become the main way that most users keep touch with old classmates, distant family and friends, buy and sell things locally, host a small business presence online, follow brands and celebrities, get news, instant message any of your connections, and more… Having a Facebook account means you have at least one identity that can easily connect with your school, your work, your IRL connections, and anonymous strangers.

It has become the de facto “connective tissue” of the Internet by systematically eroding users’ privacy, pushing us to expose more of our personal information online, overshare with third parties and strangers, and fuel outrage and political division and misinformation to further its business objectives. Others have tried and failed to make a non‐evil Facebook, but the evil is part of why Facebook is so successful.

Facebook, Instagram, and especially Twitter/X have become a shared common space where public policy is debated, news is made, reported, and consumed in real time. They have become a “digital commons” where large political movements like the #ArabSpring, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter have led to large scale mobilization and change. Having these important conversations on a for‐profit commercial platform has become a threat to democracy and safety everywhere.

Mastodon.Online as Fediverse 101

Mastodon was conceived by Eugen Rochko as a quieter alternative to the excesses of the algorithmic commercial social space. It respects privacy by default and doesn’t push us to find our friends and connect with commercial accounts. Users have control over the way algorithms serve their information to produce a saner social experience for readers.

But precisely because Mastodon’s aims have been so limited in scope, it has failed to become a new internet nerve center, a new digital commons, and a new social layer that offers mainstream users a complete suite of online experiences based on Fediverse values rather than on surveillance capitalist business objectives.

My vision for Mastodon.Online is that it offers diverse content types with opinionated user experiences optimized for the kinds of core activities that people now do on Meta’s social networks. Not just mimicking the UX of “Twitter but open”, it could offer long‐form blogging and business/brand homepages (similar to Wordpress or Tumblr), free classified ads (like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist), a coherent Pixelfed experience for photo sharing, a central news reader feed (like RSS or Facebook) for customizing one’s incoming content streams, and a topic discussion forum like Lemmy/PieFed/Reddit. Finally, it should be a coherent and simple place to manage one’s online identities – similar to a cross between a password manager and OpenID, that helps mainstream users keep their internet accounts under their own private control.

The experience should be opinionated to reduce the complexity of joining the Fediverse, and should innovate on simplifying complex technical tasks. It should serve as a default trusted option where non‐technical users can follow internet safety best practices without having to consciously understand what’s happening under the hood. Where Meta helped us connect by eroding our privacy, there is an opportunity to help us connect at a similar baseline level just by offering a coherent suite of interoperable tools that fill the most common social internet use cases with minimal friction and complexity.

There are current projects that are well on their way to offering a cohesive suite of products that also protect user privacy, such as Proton Apps, Vivaldi.net, and Cozy Cloud. Most of these are centered in EU countries who are (rightly) growing nervous at the increasingly erratic and predatory behavior of America’s tech giants and political leadership, and are looking for a saner way forward. These can either serve as allies in the mission of moving towards an open, connected, Fediverse‐friendly future tech ecosystem, or at least a forward‐looking vision for what’s possible.

Uniting Disparate Fediverse Projects

As is always the problem with open projects, they tend to squabble and fuss about joining forces and working in the same direction. There is a vocal faction of Mastodon users who like Mastodon just like it is and don’t want to see it any different. This is the same with many of the open projects mentioned. Uniting these disparate tools into a coherent experience may involve forking existing tools so they play nice with one another and behave consistently across the suite of experiences. While Mastodon.Social may continue to lead the way as a pure example of what Mastodon is and should be, Mastodon.Online can flex and stretch to become a maximally accommodating home site for mainstream social users who want a simple, non‐evil, digital home.

While some Mastodon faithful might fear that changing the platform is the first steps on a slippery slope towards diluting the Fediverse (similar to the controversy around federating with Threads and other commercial Fediverse nodes), the opportunity is to give the average internet user a real viable option for deleting Facebook, Instagram, X, and other predatory commercial social sites in favor of a pro‐user social connective layer of the Internet.