Mastodon: Funding for work on encrypted direct messages and more
The Mastodon team receives 614,000 Euros from the Sovereign Tech Agency for work on features that the entire Fediverse will soon benefit from.
(Image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock.com)
The Mastodon development team is receiving 614,000 Euros from the Sovereign Tech Agency of the federal government to expand the microblogging service and the Fediverse in general with central functions. The money will be used to finance work on better ways to block unwanted content, on external media storage and automatic content recognition, and on end-to-end encryption of private messages, the team announced a few days ago. In addition, documentation will be improved. The work is expected to be completed partly this year and partly next year, and the functions will then also be made available to other services.
Relief for Admins
According to the announcement, the money is being provided as part of a service agreement. In return, technology is to be developed that will allow instance administrators of Mastodon to share or subscribe to blocklists. This is intended to reduce the time-consuming work of keeping out unwanted content. The external storage concerns the problem that Mastodon instances always have to create local copies of media as they flow through the network. In the future, it should be possible to store these externally, which should reduce the costs of operating an instance. Both are to be implemented by the end of the year.
Furthermore, the team intends to develop and also provide technology for other services that will enable instance administrators to use external tools for searching for spam or illegal content. Work on this is scheduled to begin at the end of the year and be completed by mid-2027. Private messages on Mastodon are also to be end-to-end encrypted from 2027. For this, the responsible working group at the W3C must first have completed its work on the specification, the team further writes. It also promises better documentation of the technology and a new, officially supported Docker version of Mastodon for admins.
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Mastodon was launched in 2016 in Jena, Thuringia, as an open-source project and an alternative to Twitter. The decentralized microblogging service has always benefited from dissatisfaction with the role model since then. However, the real big growth spurt only came at the end of 2022 after Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X). As a result, many migrated to Mastodon and the user numbers increased massively. Meanwhile, with Threads and Bluesky, there are significantly larger alternatives, but Mastodon has a loyal user base and is part of the much larger Fediverse. This means that on Mastodon, you can interact not only with other Mastodon users but also with users on platforms that function completely differently and are, for example, more modeled after Facebook or Instagram.
(mho)
