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I read over the weekend the interview with Eugen Rochko, owner and CEO of #Mastodon (@Gargron), conducted by Nilay Patel (@nilaypatel) for the Verge's Decoder show.

It’s a great, geeky talk going into details of Mastodon’s operation as a service, a large chunk of the #ActivityPub network, and a company.

What I really like is the frugal, sustainable approach to running an organization. It’s so different from the corporate giants, and it’s refreshing to think that you can sustain a relatively large social network not just with small resources, but also without a drive to grow big. With VC capital (which Rochko consistently rejects).

What worries me in turn is Rochko’s take on participatory governance of Mastodon. He does signal interest in tools that provide better feedback than current GitHub issues (which are apparently the sole “participatory” mechanism available right now.

But he also openly declares that “Benevolent Dictator for Life” is his preferred governance model. Which is worrying, because one person should not be making decisions about a network used by millions of people. And participatory governance should be more than collective petitions to a “benevolent dictator”.

I think that the mistake Rochko makes is thinking about Mastodon as just a piece of open source code that needs to be produced. But in fact the code is just a tool for a social network, that is shaped with software tools. Allowing quotes of posts is not a decision about code - it’s a decision about how millions will comunicate.

I wrote last year about the need for stronger participatory governance on the Fediverse. I hope that we will see some explorations that will boldly go beyond tested - but insufficient, or even flawed - approaches from #opensource.

https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter