Werd I/O

A quick note before we begin: This post reflects my own views on newsroom technology leadership, not necessarily those of my employer.

I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for it to be treated passively.

Journalism’s most impactful publishing surfaces have all migrated to the internet: websites, newsletters, aggregators like Apple News, social media platforms, and streaming media. And most crucially, every publisher lives or dies on the web: it’s the platform where articles are shared and discovered, where a publisher makes their first impressions, and where most of their revenue is earned.

Recently, journalism’s existential threats have also been rooted in technology: radical changes in the social media landscape and referrals from search engines have been ongoing for a while, and AI threatens to shift the way people learn about the world towards black-box proprietary systems that are prone to hallucinations, bias, and misinformation. We’re in a period of great platform change.

I believe journalism is the bedrock of democracy. We need a functioning press in order to speak truth to power and ensure we have an informed electorate. As an industry, it’s in trouble for many reasons — primarily that it’s lost trust with the people it seeks to serve. This is, in part, because it often fails to be truly representative of the interests and demographics of their communities. And, obviously, not every newsroom lives up to its journalistic responsibilities. But it’s also because it often insists on clinging to the norms, traditions, and voices that worked for it in the print era, even as the internet has brought about great cultural change. The way people relate to information and institutions has been radically altered forever.

Building a strong technology competence inside a newsroom is existentially important. Given journalism’s platform dependence, it’s vital to build and shape the technologies that newsrooms rely on in order to function. Given journalism’s cultural dependence, it’s also vital to ensure a newsroom understands how the internet is building and shaping culture — not just at the periphery, but as a core part of its own culture.

In this piece, I’ll explore how I suggest building these technology competences into a newsroom that doesn’t yet have them. It’s partially about building a team, but newsrooms often operate on low budgets; it’s also about establishing a mindset and practices that will help any newsroom adapt to, and plan for, technological change.

Everything big starts small. If you want to spread a technology competence throughout your organization, it all starts with finding a leader you can trust.

Finding a technology leader

The case for a technology voice in senior leadership

Every newsroom has a senior leadership team, whether they call it that or not: the collection of people who set strategy for the organization across its key areas of operation.

This usually includes:

• Editorial: The editorial vision, standards, and content strategy that define the newsroom’s journalism.
• Fundraising / Development / Revenue: The strategies that bring funds into the newsroom and allow it to continue operating.
• Finance: The budgeting and accounting that keeps the lights on and allows the newsroom to plan for the future.
• Operations: Day-to-day management, HR, vendor relationships, office management. More progressive newsrooms elevate People into its own function (as they should).
• Legal: Risk assessment, compliance oversight, and legal protection for the newsroom’s journalism and business operations, including press law, source protection, records requests, and contract review.

More recently, some newsrooms have added:

• Brand / Creative: The visual identity, tone, and creative strategy that shapes how the newsroom presents itself across all touch-points.
• Product: The design, functionality, and user experience of how readers actually consume the newsroom’s journalism. This often also includes partnerships with other newsrooms. 

Given my previous discussion about journalism’s existential interdependence with technology, adding technology leadership to this mix is vital.

Product is not Technology

Many newsrooms conflate Product and Technology leadership, but they’re different disciplines. Product leadership focuses on the “what” and “why”: understanding user needs, defining features, prioritizing what gets built, and ensuring the end result serves both readers and business goals. They need to understand reader needs, culture, and expectations.

Technology leadership focuses on the “how” and “what’s possible”: the technical infrastructure, capabilities, and strategic technology decisions that enable everything else. They need to be able to understand the implications of today’s technology for the newsroom, including how technology is shaping how people interact with information, but also predict technological changes and understand the impact of those futures, too.

Both Product and Technology leadership need to have an understanding of each other’s worlds. Product needs to be technologically savvy, but is centered on reader and business needs. Technology needs to have a solid understanding of readers and the business, but is centered on the practice and culture of technology.

This needfully encompasses security and privacy, so technology leadership needs to have a holistic understanding of the impact of technology on people and communities. Because Product encompasses the experience of interacting with the newsroom, product leadership needs to have a working understanding of what’s possible.

It’s also about who has the final word. While many decisions should be made collaboratively, responsibility for the technical underpinnings — particularly when it comes to privacy, security, and infrastructure — must ultimately rest with technology leadership. In turn, responsibility for understanding and meeting reader needs rests with Product. And, of course, in both cases, they need to translate their realms of experience and set standards for the rest of the newsroom.

What to look for in a technology leader

At this point, it should be clear that I don’t think being a great engineer is enough to make someone a great technology leader. A pure engineering leader is typically a Head of Engineering. In contrast, a technology leader is more strategic, more predictive, and more people-centered.

As a field, technology sometimes gets a reputation as a place where hard logic is prized, where empathy and social consciousness are not needed. That attracts exactly the wrong people. Fundamentally, technology leadership is as much about humans as it is about technology itself, and doing it well requires empathetic leaders who understand people well, who in turn will build teams with those same qualities.

When I’m thinking about hiring technology leadership, here’s what I have in mind:

• Strategic technology vision: The ability to see beyond immediate technical needs to understand how emerging technologies will reshape journalism. They should be able to anticipate platform changes, evaluate new tools critically, and help the newsroom adapt proactively rather than reactively.
• Cultural fluency: A deep understanding of how internet culture works: how information spreads, how communities form around content, how trust is built and lost online.
• Newsroom sensitivity: A respect for journalistic values and ability to make technology decisions that support rather than undermine editorial integrity. They must understand when technical efficiency might conflict with editorial principles, and how to navigate those tensions.
• Communication skills: An ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical leadership and explain the broader implications of technical decisions. This is also an ability to listen to and understand newsroom needs that might not be articulated in technical terms.
• Community stewardship: They must not just have a technical understanding of security and privacy, but also an understanding and care for the ethical and legal implications of data handling, reader privacy, choosing values-aligned vendors, and how these things intersect with trust.
• Cross-functional collaboration: The ability to work effectively with Product, Editorial, and Business teams without territorialism. Fundamentally this comes down to an understanding that technology serves the mission, not the other way around, and that we shouldn’t seek to remake the newsroom around technology.
• Pragmatism over dogmatism: A resentment-free understanding of how to build and maintain resilient systems within newsroom budget constraints, which are sometimes very tight. It’s important to take a pragmatic approach to building rather than buying, prioritizing technical debt, and making technology decisions that scale sustainably.
• A long-term mindset: A focus on strategies that will serve the newsroom into the future, rather than succumbing to hype cycles or short-term fads. (Spoiler alert: this usually means betting on the open web, while pragmatically engaging with some shorter-term approaches to address proximal business or reader needs.)

Finally, while a technology leader might be a sole operator in a small newsroom to start with, they’re usually ultimately tasked with building a team. They’re responsible for creating a high-functioning technology team that can operate inside a newsroom culture, with strong empathy, social responsibility, and the potential to form a deep understanding of journalistic needs.

Although it’s better to have one, not every newsroom can hire a full-time technology leader right away. In these cases, hiring either a fractional leader (one who works for less than full-time), or a consultant to act as a sounding board who can guide your technology-adjacent decision-making, is the next best thing.

One thing you shouldn’t worry too much about is matching tech salaries. While it would certainly be better if journalism could match tech compensation — journalists deserve this level of compensation too — there are people who are willing to trade high salaries for mission-driven work. It’s not that organizations can or should hide behind their mission to pay poorly, but journalism is a distinct industry with its own norms, and people from tech will make the leap. I speak from experience here: I dropped a six-figure sum from my salary to work in news because I wanted a position where I felt like I was helping in our current political moment. Let’s acknowledge, though, that only some people can afford to drop their compensation, and this contributes to significant staffing inequalities in the industry.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to assume my hypothetical newsroom has the budget to hire one. But this advice scales down to finding people who can help guide you on a regular basis rather than fully in the trenches with you. In fact, it can be better to start with these kinds of advisors, because they can help you vet an eventual full-time hire.

So, in my hypothetical newsroom that needs to build a technology competence, how do I get started?

Sourcing a newsroom technology leader

Look for the bloggers, the community organizers, and the mission-driven founders.

People who are already writing on their own site or starting open conversations critically about both the human implications of technology issues and the underlying technologies themselves, and building trust-driven communities in the process, are demonstrating a number of important characteristics:

• The ability to communicate technical issues, and their human impacts, well to non-technical colleagues.
• A care for, and participation in, the open web that newsrooms depend on. These people are often already thinking about decentralized infrastructure, reader privacy, and how to build technology that serves people rather than extracting from them.
• Independent thinking that doesn’t just echo company lines or conventional wisdom.
• An understanding of community reactions to technical decisions and discourse.

For instance, people writing thoughtful posts on their own sites about how the open social web changes community dynamics — and the protocols that power it — are already engaging with the exact kinds of questions that newsrooms should be thinking about. So are people who are engaging seriously with the ethics of AI rather than joining the hype cycle. People who recognized that the rise of Discord servers and group chats represented a move toward more intimate, trusted information sharing similarly have the ability to predict how changes in the information landscape might affect newsrooms. Depending on your audience, an understanding of how different services and attendant norms are popular in different communities is also important to look for.

Of course, it’s not enough to write, or to organize. You need people who have a track record of not just shipping software (including writing code themselves) but creating technology-informed strategy in resource-constrained, mission-driven environments. That doesn’t need to be a newsroom: it could be a mission-driven startup or a non-profit. You’ll want to interview someone who managed them (which in most cases will be the CEO or Managing Director), as well as someone they managed. In every case you’re looking for:

• A highly empathetic, emotionally intelligent person who isn’t an asshole,
• With a beginner’s mindset,
• Who will do whatever needs to be done to achieve the team’s goals regardless of the nature of the task,
• Who regularly ships both technical and strategic work,
• With enough hands-on technical experience to review code, earn respect from technical staff, evaluate architectural decisions, and understand the implications of technical trade-offs,
• And who takes a “servant leadership” approach to leading and supporting teams and creating a culture of mentorship rather than being a top down-director.

That last one is important, and might be unfamiliar to some newsroom cultures, which may be based on traditional editorial hierarchies. Tech is best created in a collaborative environment of experts, not a top-down, directive culture. While I personally prefer to frame it as empowering leadership rather than servant leadership, the concept is vital: it’s by far the most effective way to create an empathetic, high-performing technology team. (I think it’s probably better for every team, but that might be the subject of another post.)

How not to look for a technology leader

Conversely, two anti-patterns are to prioritize hiring from other newsrooms or people with backgrounds in big tech.

Hiring from other newsrooms perpetuates an insular journalism industry that is not open to outside ideas. While there’s nothing wrong with including people with newsroom backgrounds in the hiring pool, people who don’t have that background shouldn’t be excluded; there are plenty of industries and backgrounds that would bring applicable skills and knowledge into newsrooms, while potentially also bringing in new approaches.

Meanwhile, big tech’s incentives, resources, and constraints are completely different to the newsroom context. An engineering approach that works in a multi-billion-dollar tech company simply doesn’t in a resource-constrained, time-limited environment. That’s not to say that everyone in big tech will be unable to make this shift, but they must know it is a big shift, and they’ve got to be able to lean into it.

Finally, newsrooms still don’t adequately represent the communities they seek to serve, and particularly not at the senior leadership level. This is a fundamental requirement for building trust, and is as important for technology leadership as it is for hiring on the editorial side. More representative teams are wise to the nuances of their audience’s lived experiences. In order for this to be effective, a diverse and inclusive newsroom isn’t enough: a diverse leadership ensures that more representative strategic decisions can be made, and signals to the audience that the newsroom truly represents them.

Technology is not neutral. It must be representative, inclusive, and rooted in service to the public. If we want to rebuild trust and technical resilience in journalism, we must be open to fresh perspectives and hire from outside the usual echo chambers at every level. Journalism and big tech are both fairly exclusionary industries, and not requiring these backgrounds is an ingredient to building a more inclusive hiring pipeline. It’s not enough in itself — intentional outreach to diverse communities is a must, for example — but it’s certainly a prerequisite. Technology as a discipline is not absolved from the need for an inclusive understanding of the impact of leadership decisions, so it’s no less important here.

You do need someone who can build. Avoid candidates who can talk eloquently about technology but have never actually built systems or written production code. Without technical credibility, they’ll struggle to gain respect from technical staff and make informed decisions about complex technical trade-offs — and potentially lead you down some blind alleys.

Supporting a technology leader

Once you’ve found your leader, the most important thing you can do is listen to them — and the most important thing they can do is listen to you.

Newsrooms that have been waiting for a technology function might have a whole backlog of requests. But one of the most common pitfalls for a technology leader is to be treated like a helpdesk: someone who can help execute on existing strategy but isn’t empowered to be a core contributor to new strategy. Given the widely-perceived adverse impact of technology on the journalism industry there may even be some cultural resistance to elevating it into strategic leadership in this way.

Their decision-making power needs to be well-defined. A technology leader’s responsibilities should encompass how software is written, setting engineering standards throughout the organization. In a tech company this is a no-brainer, but newsrooms often have editorial staff who write code, for example to power visualizations or special experiences for specific articles, or to undertake computational research. While this staff probably doesn’t ultimately report to this leader, the way they write software needs to be under their purview too: there’s no sense spending a lot of time making your software fast, modern, and secure if some of the code most likely to be interacted with by audiences doesn’t follow those same rules.

They should also probably be a co-owner of privacy with the organization’s legal function, marrying their own technical understanding of what can a user’s data can be used for with the legal team’s understanding of relevant legislation and case law. Similarly, their understanding of the web landscape should underpin a partnership with the audience teams who work on social media, SEO, and analytics.

But most importantly, they need to be in the room when the senior leadership team meets. They need to be able to bring an informed technology perspective to strategic discussions across the newsroom; advocate for budgeting; make suggestions for ways technology can assist strategic ideas on the table, and how likely future technical developments might affect the newsroom’s strategy; and provide frameworks for other teams to think about how to use technology. As the newsroom sets its goals for the year (your newsroom does that, right?), they need to be a core contributor.

For smaller newsrooms — for example, smaller startups that only have a handful of people — this may still be someone who you contract on a part-time basis to provide these perspectives at particularly impactful moments. For larger newsrooms, it should be someone who’s always there, on the ground with you, standing by your side as you work through every hard decision.

Technology principles for newsrooms

Hiring a leader — and then, in turn, hiring a team — will inevitably take a while. Hiring a consultant who will help you through decisions in the interim is a shorter process, but does take some effort and due diligence in its own right. Here are some principles that will both help you navigate near-term decisions and help evaluate consultants and leaders for fit:

Make human-centered decisions. Looking for ways to use a technology is always backwards. For example, some people would have you believe that if you don’t adopt AI you’ll be left behind. This is marketing! It’s far better to define and scope the real problems you have as an organization and then assess potential solutions, with various technologies in your toolbox as things you might use if there’s a fit. A technology leader can help you assess what’s feasible — what you can build sustainably with the time, team, and resources at your disposal.

Experiment but fail quickly. Sometimes you need the freedom to play around with a solution to see if it has the potential to solve a problem. You can’t know that everything will work out ahead of time — and if you aim for perfection you’ll find yourself paralyzed at the analysis stage. You need to build in explicit permission to run measured experiments (as long as they don’t put your community, your journalism, or your team at risk), but find ways to run scrappy tests to get to a result as quickly as possible. Don’t build something for six months and then figure out whether it’ll work or not.

Pragmatically weigh independence, values, and maintainability. Every technology decision involves trade-offs between owning your infrastructure, aligning with your values, and keeping systems manageable. Perfect independence is impractical: few newsrooms can afford to build their own payment processing or email delivery systems, for example. And because all custom software represents software the newsroom has to maintain, most newsrooms should, on balance, buy far more software than they build.

Vendors and platforms should be evaluated based on switching costs, not just current convenience. Can you export your data? Are you locked into proprietary formats? Does this company’s business model align with your editorial mission? Are their values likely to lead to problems down the road?

A good technology leader will help you understand when dependence is acceptable (standardized tools with low switching costs) versus when it’s risky (platforms that provide core functions but will lock you in). The goal isn’t to avoid all external services, but to maintain agency over your most critical functions and ensure you can change course when needed.

Be a good steward of your community’s trust. Be aware of the implications of any data you collect. For example, could a user browsing history function be used to prosecute someone for seeking out abortion information in a state like Texas? Newsrooms have enormous responsibilities to keep people safe. For example, if people are submitting tips or leaks to you, you should never run them through a hosted system like ChatGPT, lest that information be subpoenaed or otherwise obtained by bad actors; if you want to process that data, you need to create local infrastructure with a clear chain of custody and a least privilege approach to security.

Bet on the open web. When faced with technology choices, default to open standards, interoperable systems, and technologies that strengthen the commons rather than creating new silos. In particular, resilience to technology changes means owning your relationship with your audiences.

This means prioritizing RSS over proprietary feeds, open-source content management systems over locked platforms, and web-native publishing over app-only experiences. The open web has proven remarkably resilient, outlasting most proprietary alternatives; harnessing it ensures your content remains accessible regardless of tech industry changes and policy decisions. Meanwhile, the emergent open social web is still small, but is growing: it’s worth investing in it now.

This principle doesn’t mean you need to avoid all proprietary tools, but it does mean ensuring your core content and relationships with your readers exist in formats that you own and will survive platform changes. A technology leader should help you distinguish between tactical use of closed platforms and strategic investments in open infrastructure that you can control and migrate as needed.

Building a technology competence is not optional

Journalism can’t afford to treat technology as an asteroid crashing into the industry.

Building technology competence is about preserving journalism’s essential role in democracy: when newsrooms take control of their technological destiny, they’re better positioned to serve their communities, protect their sources, and maintain the editorial independence that makes accountability journalism possible. The investment in technology leadership is ultimately an investment in the whole newsroom — and because good journalism speaks truth to power and informs the electorate, it’s an investment in democracy itself.

It’s not a small undertaking, but it’s one that every newsroom must embrace in order to secure its future.

Starting a conversation

My experience is in working directly inside two newsrooms — ProPublica, which is where I currently work as the Senior Director of Technology, and before it, as the inaugural CTO at The 19th — as well as over a decade working alongside newsrooms at organizations like Matter Ventures and Latakoo.

If this is a journey you’re embarking on, I’d love to have a conversation and learn more. Leave me your details and I'll reach back out to schedule a chat.

If you’ve enjoyed my recent series about the open social web, great! There were four parts, which I think are collectively some of my best work:

• What the future of Bluesky might look like
• How Mastodon could be the future of online communities
• What I’d do if I was running my own platform
• How I’d approach funding it all

If you didn’t enjoy it, I’ve kind of got bad news: that’s the kind of writing I intend to do here in the future.

I lead technology teams, most recently at ProPublica, but writing fiction has always been my first love. And I think it’s a place where I can meaningfully help.

There’s a lot wrong in the world, and there are a lot of problems to highlight and bring attention to. There are a lot of people (including my employer) who are doing this very well.

But one of the other things we can be doing is imagining better futures and describing them in detail. This helps us have conversations about what a better world might be in practice; how we can build more equitable, pro-social and progressive structures, how they might work, and what the impact might be. The details might not be right; people might disagree with what I’ve written; but describing these possibilities in detail helps us have more substantive conversations that will hopefully lead us somewhere concrete.

I believe that design fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, and — maybe controversially — business fiction all matter and are a huge part of building the future.

So you can expect to see more of that here.

What you can expect to see less of: if you’re subscribing by email, I’m discontinuing the notable links email that I’ve been sending every Monday. I reserve the right to save an interesting link here and there on my website and on my social media accounts, but they won’t be the focus of my writing.

If you’re interested in links, I continue to make my RSS subscriptions available as a feed. These are the sources I read every day. I haven’t necessarily read a particular article, but it’s the exact same feed I use to start every day, updated every five minutes.

If you have any feedback for me, I’d love to hear it. Reach out via email, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It’s always a gift to hear from you. Regardless, thank you for following along — there’s more to come.

If the open social web is going to grow and thrive, people need to be able to build new platforms and services sustainably. But that’s not what the email I was reading was telling me.

The message in my inbox captured a persistent and problematic idea in open tech circles. It reminded me of one I’d received years earlier, back when I was building my first platform.

“You should be doing this for the love of it.”

The author, a well-known blogger, was outraged that I was trying to make money from Elgg, the open source social networking platform I co-founded. Its users included Ivy League universities, Fortune 500 companies, international NGOs, and even governments at the national level, but how dare I make enough money from it to pay for rent and groceries?

Now, deep into building my second open source social platform, the same sentiment had returned. Different person, same message:

“You shouldn’t try to make revenue. We need to abolish money.”

With no hint of irony, I was being criticized for failing to establish a Star Trek post-financial utopia. Meanwhile, I was building new web software, which meant infrastructure, teammates, and bills to pay. And to do anything at all, I needed a place to live and a way to meet my basic needs. To be clear, I’m all for imagining ways out of our current economic system. But asking individual underfunded founders to operate outside it isn’t a viable strategy. These systemic changes are far outside the scope of a software platform or an underfunded founder.

I wasn’t independently wealthy. I didn’t have a trust fund. I just wanted to build something good. How could anyone like me, with experience but without a financial safety net, possibly win? And if that’s hard for me, imagine how much harder it is for builders from underrepresented or vulnerable communities, with even less access to capital.

Supporting builders to create a strong ecosystem

Even people with experience and a track record from those communities struggle to get funded. Recreating that inequality on the social web would be a disaster. Social media is a huge part of how we learn about the world and make our democratic decisions. If those perspectives are excluded, the platforms shaping public discourse will reflect only the interests of those who already hold privilege and power. In effect, only privileged perspectives will shape how our platforms work, what voices get heard, and how people come to understand the world around them.

I believe in the promise of the open social web. It’s a pro-social alternative to existing social media platforms, which has the potential to support communities and discourse rather than strip-mine them for value. But if we want it to survive, let alone thrive, we need to:

1. Fund and support new pro-social platforms.
2. Build models that support a broad, representative set of builders, including those from communities most impacted by today’s platforms.
3. Support community ownership models to reduce the risk of platforms being used as instruments of political manipulation, as we've seen with X and Facebook.

In previous posts, I’ve discussed what I would do if I was running product at Bluesky, Mastodon, and my own platform. Those posts have focused on what sustainability looks like once a platform is up and running. But how do you get from an idea to a functioning platform and set it up for success?

Establishing a new open social web platform takes time, effort, and money to get right. So how do we fund that early stage in a way that’s sustainable, and aligned with the values of the ecosystem we want to build?

In this post, I’ll explore what I would do if I was funding open social web platforms. This is not designed to be universal advice. It’s what I would do if I was setting out to solve the problem. Others will bring different ideas to the table, and I hope they do. We need all of them. Together, maybe we can spark a bigger conversation about what it would take to make the open social web truly viable.

My experience

My thinking here comes from experience across multiple sides of this problem as a builder, investor, and long-time participant in the ecosystem. When I think about how we can fund the next generation of platforms, I’m drawing on five key experiences that span the full lifecycle, from hacking together early infrastructure to funding mission-driven teams at scale:

• I’ve been a part of the open social web for decades. I’m a board member at A New Social, a non-profit that aims to create a healthy ecosystem across protocols, have advised the Social Web Foundation and FediForum, have built my own platforms, and have owned my own single-user Mastodon instance for years. I know and respect folks working on Mastodon, Bluesky, Ghost, and many others, and think of myself as a friend to all of them.
• In 2004, I co-founded Elgg, an open source social networking platform, in the UK. We won awards and grew a strong open source ecosystem: one version of the platform was translated into 80 languages. I also co-founded a startup to offer consulting and support services for it, which we successfully bootstrapped for years before receiving direct investment.
• In 2014, I co-founded Known, a startup that produced an open source social publishing platform, in San Francisco. It was a part of the third cohort at Matter, an accelerator for startups with the potential to change media for good. Our customers included KQED, the public media organization, which won an award for its Known-powered site. Outside the startup, the software was used as part of the indieweb. (It still powers my site today.) We ultimately exited to Medium, but the open source platform remains available and in use.
• In 2017, I became the west coast Director of Investments at Matter, the accelerator that had founded Known. We tweaked the mission to support startups with the potential to create “a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society”. I was involved in directly investing in 24 startups and supporting a portfolio of 75. While I was there, I saw thousands of pitches from startups hoping to be funded, and got a strong sense of what makes a team succeed.
• I’ve been the first employee at two venture-backed startups that are still alive and growing, and part of the leadership team at others, including a non-profit that raised significant support through individual and institutional giving. Outside of my employment, I’ve given technology, product, and strategy advice to hundreds of startups and organizations.

Together, these experiences have shaped how I think about funding infrastructure that actually lasts, and who gets to build it.

A theory of change

How do we fund that early stage in a way that’s sustainable, and aligned with the values of the ecosystem we want to build?

That’s the question I’ve been sitting with. Most funders have a thesis (if they’re investors) or a theory of change (if they’re philanthropists) that informs how they allocate capital. Here’s mine:

Social media has failed us. Nowhere is this more visible than in Elon Musk’s acquisition of X, where a platform with 335 million monthly active users is manipulated specifically according to its owner’s point of view. It’s also true on Facebook, where gutting its fact-checking policy and changing its algorithm has led to a degraded experience for many people.

As a result, many people have reduced their engagement with incumbent social platforms. And with growing disillusionment around privacy, algorithmic manipulation, and platform control, that trend is unlikely to slow.

Notably, a significant subset is already exploring the open social web: a world of alternatives to traditional social media platforms that includes Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as a long tail of platforms that includes Farcaster, Nostr, and more. Each of these platforms is built on an open protocol that prevents them from falling under control by a single entity.

Because of their distinct architecture and reliance on open protocols, open social web platforms are more resilient to manipulation for political gain. They are more transparent and auditable, and either don’t have a single point of control or allow for a credible exit from a platform owner if they make decisions that are unpalatable to its users. Some of them have even made forays into community governance.

From a philanthropic standpoint, these platforms advance public discourse, media pluralism, and digital rights: some of the core pillars of healthy democracies. I believe providing alternatives to hard-right discourse is morally right. But they also represent a significant commercial opportunity. They have the potential to disrupt the entire incumbent social media landscape — a market worth over $250 billion. Even today, there is a serviceable available market of around $333 million, and growing quickly. (I’ve estimated these numbers using existing social media user and revenue per user figures.) These platforms are better for democracy, but because the potential market size is enormous while the current one is small but growing fast, they also represent a rare window for significant investment gains. This is already playing out: Farcaster raised $150M last year, while Bluesky has raised $36M and is growing rapidly.

I believe that teams who are focused on solving meaningful problems for real people rather than serving a rigid ideology, and who encompass technology, business, and design skills, are more likely to create platforms that find enough users who love them to become sustainable. These are teams with the willingness to pivot their platforms, sometimes multiple times, in order to make sure they’re building something people want. I want to back teams with this mindset and mix of skills who are building open social web platforms with the potential to unseat today’s incumbents.

Funding is infrastructure. Without it, the ecosystem crumbles. I see this as a rare moment to shape the foundations of a better internet, before the next wave of social infrastructure calcifies. But for people who are primarily motivated by returns, there’s also a solid reason to participate.

So what’s the best way to fund them?

Some common ways projects are funded

There are a few different funding vehicles available to me if I want to support the open social web. Let’s take some time to go through them in turn.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Each funding model brings different trade-offs, and different possibilities for the kinds of builders, communities, and outcomes it can support. Here’s how I think about the options.

(If you’re familiar with funding models, you might want to skip this section. It’s up to you.)

Grants

‌What it is: Grants are money given by an organization for a specific purpose, which don’t need to be paid back and aren’t given in exchange for equity in a business. They’re made to further the grant-maker’s goals. If the grant-maker is a non-profit foundation, that might be a social mission; if it’s a software platform, it might be to encourage developers to adopt its APIs.

On the open social web, these might come from a few different sources. It might be a foundation that sees the impact current platforms have on the democratic process and wants to promote more democratic platforms. It might be a government that wants to promote alternatives to US-centric software hegemony. (See the United Nations open source principles, calls for the EU to promote technological autonomy, or initiatives like the Docs project.) Or it might be an already-funded vendor that wants more developers to use its protocol.

‌When it works well: Grants work best when a project’s goals align clearly with the funder’s mission, and when the builders are able to focus on delivering outcomes without the pressure of immediate monetization. They’re particularly valuable for early-stage infrastructure work, protocol development, accessibility improvements, and research-backed exploration that may not yet have a business model. Grants can help de-risk experimentation and support projects that serve the public good but aren’t obviously profitable. In many cases, grants have been the difference between an idea staying in someone’s head and a working prototype seeing daylight.

Risks and trade-offs: Grants come with strings (even if they’re not financial ones). Applying for them can take significant time and labor, and reporting requirements can be burdensome, especially for small teams. Funding cycles can be unpredictable, and priorities may shift with leadership changes or political winds. (At Matter, I discovered that an organization that was friendly under one leader became unresponsive after they handed the baton to someone else.)

Most importantly, grants rarely support the long-term maintenance of a platform. They’re great for getting something off the ground, but without a follow-on revenue model or sustained support, grant-funded projects risk becoming abandoned or fragile.

Examples in the open social web: Many open social web platforms have been funded by the NLNet Foundation, which supports organizations and people “who contribute to an open internet for all.” This includes multiple ActivityPub projects including Mastodon itself. The latter has also received grant funding from the European Commission, among others.

Donations

‌What it is: Donations are flexible gifts from individuals or organizations to support a cause. In contrast to grants, they aren’t necessarily associated with a specific project, and come with fewer strings. They’re most often given in smaller amounts (sometimes on a recurring basis) to non-profits, so that the donation can be written off of the giver’s taxes.

‌When it works well: Donations work best when a project has a clear mission that resonates with a broad audience, and when it can inspire sustained goodwill and trust. This is especially true when the project is visibly active, communicative with its supporters, and aligned with nonprofit values.

Recurring donation models, whether directly via a dedicated fundraising platform, via check or transfer, or on platforms like Patreon, OpenCollective, or GitHub Sponsors, can provide a lightweight income stream to help cover operational costs or ongoing maintenance. Donations can also be powerful in moments of visibility (like a major release, news event, or crisis) that mobilize supporter enthusiasm.

Risks and trade-offs: Donation income can be inconsistent and hard to predict, especially if it's reliant on public attention cycles or goodwill from a niche audience. It can also subtly shape a project’s public narrative, nudging teams toward emotional or symbolic gestures rather than behind-the-scenes infrastructure work that’s harder to explain to donors.

Unless the organization is a 501(c)(3) or similar nonprofit, larger donations may be limited by the donor’s ability to write them off. Typically, organizations that accept donations receive the majority from large foundations and very wealthy individuals, with a minority coming from regular people. It’s very hard to raise enough money to support an organization from small donations alone, and if you look closer at successful projects that appear to be grassroots-funded, you’ll often find that they’re surprisingly top-heavy. Independence means increasing the dependence on smaller donors, but it’s a steep hill to climb.

Finally, running donation campaigns and managing supporters’ expectations takes time. For small teams, that can compete with actually building the software.

Examples in the open social web: Mastodon has long accepted individual donations via Patreon and other platforms; Pixelfed follows a similar pattern.

Crowdfunding

‌What it is: Crowdfunding collects small donations from a large number of people in order to raise money for a specific project. Whereas regular donations might be recurring on an ongoing basis, crowdfunding contributions are one-offs. Typically, each person who donates receives something in return for their donation: the product itself at higher levels, or even direct access to the team, and cheaper gifts like stickers and T-shirts at lower levels.

‌When it works well: Crowdfunding works best when you have a clear, concrete offering, a deadline, and a story people can rally behind. It’s particularly effective for launching new products, features, or major upgrades, especially when there’s already an audience or community eager to support the work. Campaigns that feel urgent, personal, and exciting tend to perform better, especially when the creators are transparent and communicative.

Risks and trade-offs: Even if a campaign succeeds, crowdfunding can create a false sense of sustainability. A single successful campaign might cover an initial build, but it doesn’t provide a long-term revenue stream, unless it’s tied to a larger strategy. The overhead is also larger than you might expect: running a campaign well involves marketing, community management, and often customer support. (Many campaigns hire an outside marketing agency, which can eat 20% or more of the final budget.) And if expectations aren’t met, the backlash can be swift and public.

As with startups themselves, teams with design polish, storytelling chops, and access to online networks are more likely to succeed, perpetuating the same inequalities we’ve seen elsewhere. These are traits that don’t always correlate with technical merit or long-term resilience. As a result, important but unglamorous infrastructure projects may struggle to compete with flashier ideas.

Finally, here’s an open secret: successful crowdfunding campaigns often have a significant percentage of their funding committed ahead of time. That way the campaign looks like it’s more organically successful than it actually was, which in turn attracts more contributors. The trick is that this only works for people who have the networks to find those initial committed participants to begin with, ensuring that people with established wealth and connections are more likely to succeed here too.

Examples in the open social web: Micro.blog was originally funded with a crowdfunding campaign. It helps to have an existing following: Micro.blog succeeded in part because it already had an audience invested in Manton Reece’s blog and podcast work, as well as because it offered a clear product vision people could imagine using.

Venture investment

‌What it is: Venture capital invests in businesses with the potential to be high-growth. Investors write checks to a portfolio of startup businesses in exchange for either equity (typically for more established businesses) or the promise of equity (for earlier-stage businesses that don’t have an established valuation yet).

A venture capital investment pays off in two main ways, which are colloquially known as an “exit”:

• If the startup grows to the point of making an Initial Public Offering, allowing shares in the company to be traded on a public stock market.
• If the startup is bought by another company.

VC investors can also make money by selling their holdings to other investors, for example if the startup raises another round of funding and a later-stage investor is willing to buy stock from an earlier-stage investor.

There are a few different kinds of venture investors that we should pay attention to in the context of funding the open social web:

• Venture capital funds raise money from “limited partner” sources like endowments, pension funds, and family offices and invest based on a hypothesis. They tend to charge a 2% management fee on the total funds under management, and once the limited partners have made their money back, the fund managers tend to receive 20% of any further profits.
• Corporate VCs invest according to the interests of a corporate parent. For example, Google Ventures invests in startups that might strategically benefit Google; Salesforce Ventures invests in startups that might strategically benefit Salesforce.
• Angel investors are, essentially, rich people who invest on behalf of themselves. They tend to invest using a venture model and expect to receive a return in the same way. But because they don’t have any commitments to limited partners or corporate parents, they can invest more or less any way they want. If they particularly want a startup to exist, or if one of their friends becomes the founder of a startup, they might cut it a check even if they’re not sure it will work out.

‌When it works well: Venture capital works best when a startup has the potential to scale rapidly, reach millions of users, and produce outsized financial returns. It’s especially well-suited for commercial products that address huge markets and have strong network effects (where each new user increases the value for every other user). For open social web platforms that are aiming to replace incumbent social networks, this kind of growth trajectory can align with VC expectations, if there’s a plausible business model.

It can also work when the investor deeply believes in the mission and is willing to be patient with the return timeline. Angel investors or mission-aligned VCs (such as purpose-driven funds) can be effective early partners if they share the founder’s values.

VC funding is most helpful when it allows a team to scale quickly to meet demand or secure talent, or when time-to-market is critical.

Risks and trade-offs: Venture capital comes with heavy expectations: usually of a 10x return on investment within 7–10 years. This puts pressure on founders to prioritize rapid growth, which can lead to compromises on user safety, governance, or long-term sustainability. For social platforms, it can incentivize engagement-hacking and ad-driven models that run counter to community well-being.

It can also distort governance. Venture-backed platforms are typically structured as Delaware C-Corporations; many investors will refuse to make an investment if they aren’t. This corporate structure comes with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. That makes it hard to implement democratic ownership, cooperative governance, or exit-to-community models, unless those are baked in early on a legal level (perhaps by incorporating as a Public Benefit Corporation instead of a C-Corp) and supported by investors. It’s rare for this to happen, and the investors would need to be unusually progressive to accept it.

Once you’ve taken VC investment, you’ve effectively committed to a path: a high-growth company with an eventual exit. That’s not necessarily bad, but it limits flexibility. Many founders who take early-stage VC find themselves building something quite different from what they set out to do.

Because you’re moving at speed, and likely burning a lot of money in the process, a lot depends on being able to raise follow-on funding; even if a VC investor is willing to give an open social web platform a check at an early-stage level, it’s not a given that another VC investor will be willing to give them a follow-on check later on. If that happens to your startup, you might be stuck.

That’s if you can take VC investment at all. Many firms prefer “warm introductions”, which means that they prefer to be introduced to founders by people they already know and trust. At its worst, that means that people from communities with stronger connections to funding — typically wealthy people from a narrow set of demographics — are much more likely to be funded. For example, black women founders received just 0.34% of VC funding in 2022. Some firms also look for “founder pedigree” — assessing whether the founders went to universities like Stanford or have existing capital behind them — that further compound these inequalities.

Not all VCs are created equally, however. There certainly are mission-driven and mission-aligned VCs who operate in a way that’s more values-aligned with the open social web. Some, like Homebrew, even self-invest into their own funds, giving them far more flexibility in how they support startups. It would be a mistake to treat every firm in the space as being the same.

Examples in the open social web: I mentioned the main examples earlier on: Bluesky raised at least $36M, including early funding from Twitter and later-stage investment from Benchmark Capital and others. Farcaster raised $150M from a16z and others in 2024, with a stated focus on building a decentralized protocol and app ecosystem.

Revenue-based investment

‌What it is: Revenue-based investments function similarly to venture capital: investors write checks to early-stage companies. If the company wants to remain independent, it can provide a fixed portion (10% or so) of monthly revenues to investors in order to pay off their investments. Usually payoffs are set to 2-5X the original investment for early-stage startups, but I’ve seen as high as 15X. It’s non-dilutive by default, but if the startup chooses to raise traditional VC funding, the revenue-based investment converts to equity.

Indie VC was an early pioneer of this kind of investing. The Calm Company Fund was another. The former shut down its original model because its limited partners were unhappy with the arrangement; the latter because they found they didn’t have enough money to operate well under the model. (Indie VC is back with a more traditional VC model.)

‌When it works well: Revenue-based investment works well when a startup has a clear path to steady revenue, especially from subscription or recurring business models, but doesn’t necessarily want to pursue the high growth strategies required by traditional venture capital. It’s ideal for founders who want to stay independent, build profitably, and maintain control, and for investors who are comfortable trading equity upside for cash returns over time. It can also be a fit for mission-aligned platforms that aim to serve a specific community sustainably, rather than chase growth.

Risks and trade-offs: This model assumes the startup will generate consistent revenue early enough to start repayments, which may not be realistic for infrastructure-heavy or slow-to-monetize platforms. The obligation to repay a multiple of the original investment can also create stress on cashflow if margins are thin or revenue is volatile. And while it's non-dilutive upfront, the conversion clause means equity is still in play if the company raises a future VC round, so it’s not always as clean as it looks. Depending on how the terms are structured, founders may end up giving away more equity than they would have in a traditional VC seed round.

It’s also notable that investors have had trouble maintaining this model. (It’s not lost on me that both Indie VC and Calm Company Fund ran into choppy waters.) Limited partners have been trained to accept the VC model, so success for a fund depends on finding upstream investors who are comfortable with slower growth and less outsized returns. Theoretically these funds are less risky — more of their investments should lead to a return — but it’s not clear that this is actually the case.

Examples in the open social web: No major open social web platforms have publicly disclosed using revenue-based financing so far. I think the model could be a strong fit for these kinds of services; a major piece of my arguments for both Bluesky and Mastodon were revenue-based. But so far, most open social web projects haven’t been charging money for services; there’s a cultural resistance to money, which I discussed at the top of the piece, but many projects have preferred to set themselves up as non-profits and take donations.

Bootstrapping

‌What it is: When you bootstrap, you don’t take investment at all, except perhaps from your savings. You then attempt to make the business grow using its own revenue, re-investing profits smartly.

‌When it works well: Out of necessity, bootstrapping reduces the length of the feedback loop between you and your customers to almost nothing. You need them to pay you to keep the lights on (and for you to pay rent and buy food), so you’re forced to be attentive to their needs. It can be fraught (I’ve done it!) but when it works, you end up with a valuable business that you own outright, and can therefore run entirely on your own terms. Companies that have bootstrapped include Mailchimp until its acquisition by Intuit, and GitHub for its first four years.

It also helps if you’re wealthy enough to feel comfortable spending your savings on a startup to begin with. Most people are not lucky enough to be in that position.

Risks and trade-offs: Bootstrapping is financially conservative, but emotionally intense. You carry all the risk, and early mistakes can cost you months — or everything. Without funding, you may struggle to hire help, pay yourself, or scale infrastructure. And while you own 100% of the business, you also carry 100% of the stress.

Examples in the open social web: Write.as, and its parent company Musing Studio, are bootstrapped.

Structuring my fund

So if I were putting real money behind my theory of change, what would that look like in practice? What if we could design a fund that was specifically for the open social web?

In this thought experiment, I’m founding an organization called Pro-Social to fund the open social web. The name Pro-Social is overtly about helping — but, of course, it also clearly name-checks social media.

This is a thought experiment — but it’s one I believe someone should do.

Let’s return to my theory of change and break it down a little:

• Founders who are focused on solving problems for real people
• Who build representative teams and possess a mix of technical, business, and design skills
• Who are building open social web platforms with the potential to disrupt incumbent platforms
• That are sustainable and community-aligned
• Have the potential to strengthen democracy
• And build generational organizations
• That provide a real alternative to the status quo
• Regardless of whether they have wealth or existing startup connections.

Its aim isn’t just to foster the open social web: it’s to support human-centered product thinking, and to help create consumer-grade platforms that real people want to use. In turn, I believe that will attract more people to the ecosystem, benefiting everybody involved and increasing its real-world impact.

When you’re doing something good, you owe it to the people you’re helping to be able to keep doing it. Not only do I want the projects I fund to be sustainable, but I want my own funding model to be sustainable. In other words, not only do I want to invest in a batch of open social web projects, but I want to be able to do it again, and again, in perpetuity.

I’ve broken down the various funding options, as well as my principles and experience. While this is informed by all of my experiences, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Matter Ventures, whose influence is strong here. Some of these ideas are directly inspired by practices at Matter; some others are things I wished we could have put into place.

It’s not the only funding that I think should exist. Organizations like NLNet and Sovereign Tech Agency are doing great work. And I strongly believe that the EU and other governments should be funding the open social web. My intent is to describe something that sits alongside these efforts.

Here’s how I think it would work.

A dual structure

Having seen the strengths and limits of each model up close — and knowing the kind of ecosystem we actually need — I don’t think we can rely on just one. So here’s what I’d do instead.

Pro-Social is built on the belief that different types of projects require different types of funding. Nonprofit tools that strengthen the ecosystem shouldn’t be forced into a for-profit path, and promising commercial products shouldn’t have to apply for grants. That’s why Pro-Social has two complementary arms:

• The Pro-Social Foundation funds non-profit projects through directed grants.
• Pro-Social Ventures makes values-aligned investments into for-profit startups.

Each tackles a different part of the ecosystem and ensures we’re not forcing every project into the same mold.

We’ll talk more about deal structure further down. For now, let’s start, as all funders should, with the founders.

To select founders, we must first select ourselves

Both the Pro-Social Foundation and Pro-Social Ventures support diverse teams with a mix of skills and a human-centered mindset, as we’ve previously discussed.

In order to achieve a more equitable, representative portfolio, the organization must bake equity and inclusion into its DNA. That means a representative team, inclusive selection criteria, and shared decision-making on investment committees, as well as the following core concepts:

An open application process. Not only is there no need for warm introductions, but they are explicitly disallowed. Every project that applies for funding has to go through the same process from the beginning, starting with filling in a web form.

A clear rubric for evaluation. Regardless of the funding type, projects are evaluated using the same rubric and peer-reviewed, and the answers are made available to all staff with decision-making ability.

Fund the founders, not the project. I believe that long-term success is tied more to founder mindset than to initial product ideas. A project might seem unpromising, but if its founder is smart, willing to test their assumptions, and pivot based on what they find, it should still be considered for funding. In contrast, if a project initially seems promising but the founder is unwilling to waver from their vision even in the face of evidence that it doesn’t work, that should be a mark against them.

Grow a community of founders. Every founder who is funded by Pro-Social joins a community that grows over time. The network effects of this are important: each new founder can draw on the expertise of the existing ones, so the power of the community to effect change becomes greater over time. Not only must funding recipients be great founders, but they also need to be great community participants, with strong personal integrity. There should be a strict “no asshole” rule that particularly guards for the safety of diverse founders, and a collaborative mindset is vital.

Provide free help ahead of time. Pro-Social should design and make available a free, asynchronous course akin to Y Combinator’s Startup School. This would help project founders hone their human-centered thinking, evaluate their core assumptions, and ensure they’re aligned with making their project successful instead of just writing code. Unlike most founder courses, it would also contain lessons about the open social web itself, including its underlying protocols and existing models. At the end of the course there would be an easy on-ramp to applying for funding if founders are ready to take the next step. Even if founders don’t want funding from Pro-Social, hopefully the course would help all open social web founders.

Here’s what each arm would do, starting with the foundation.

The Pro-Social Foundation

The Pro-Social Foundation offers structured grants at three levels:

1. Flash grants for user research. A small ($5,000) grant that helps a project team validate the core assumptions underlying their product vision, with the express intent of testing whether it is building something that real people will use. Recipients are expected to follow a set process to conduct user research, validate their assumptions, and present a modified version of their product vision that takes these findings into account. These grants are specifically not intended for implementation; they’re just for testing whether the work is worth building at all. Founders who have demonstrated that they follow this process — whether supported by a grant or not — are more likely to receive funding from Pro-Social.
2. Project grants. A larger ($50-100K) grant for non-profit projects that have demonstrated they will build something that is desirable for real users, viable financially, and feasible to build using the time, team, and resources potentially at its disposal. This grant can be used to write code, but is also expected to be used to establish the organization to support it.
3. Ecosystem grants. A larger-still ($100-250K) grant for non-profit projects that have established themselves and have both real-world users and a working strategy for sustainability.

The Foundation does not fund protocol-level work unless it directly connects to an end-user experience. That’s not because protocol work isn’t important, but there are other organizations in the ecosystem who will already help fund it. I see the biggest gap as being human-centered end-user products that are anchored directly in user needs, so that’s what I would want to fund.

Because sustainability of the fund is a core value, it’s important to consider where the money would come from. The Pro-Social Foundation would be funded in two ways: through donations from foundations and individuals who care about the ecosystem, and from profits from Pro-Social Ventures, the for-profit arm.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation.

Pro-Social Ventures

Pro-Social Ventures makes investments into for-profit open social web startups using a hybrid between VC and revenue-based financing: a revenue share with an equity conversion.

It aims to conform to the principles set out by the Zebra movement: profitable but values-driven companies that prioritize cooperation over competition, community over monopoly, and long-term resilience over short-term growth. Of course, each company must be a participant in, and supporter of, the open social web.

Here’s how it works:

Pre-seed: These startups are going from idea to execution. The team almost certainly just consists of the founders. These are the teams Pro-Social spends most of its time supporting.

For these founders, Pro-Social Ventures writes $100,000 checks. After the startup has made its first $200,000 in revenue, this is paid back through a 10% gross revenue share with a 3X cap. It can also convert to equity at 7% of the company with a $4 million valuation cap if the founders raise a traditional VC round instead (in other words, it will automatically convert if a priced round is raised).

(A quick terminology primer: a valuation cap sets the maximum company valuation at which an investor's money converts to equity.)

If the startup is promising, has validated its assumptions, and is not just gaining real users but is beginning to get traction on a business model, it can ask for a follow-on check from Pro-Social. For these startups, Pro-Social Ventures will write a $150,000 follow-on check, which again is paid back through a 10% gross revenue share, this time with a 2X cap and no delay on repayment. It will convert to equity at 4% with a $6 million valuation cap if the founders subsequently choose to raise a traditional VC round.

Seed: These startups have traction, likely have a larger team, and have shown that their product and business model works. They’re growing but need more support. Because Pro-Social Ventures focuses on helping founders move from idea to execution on user-friendly open social web products, it will only cut this deal if there is also a clear gain for the open social web ecosystem.

If the startup hasn’t raised an equity round, Pro-Social will cut a check for $400,000, paid back immediately through a 10% gross revenue share with a 3X cap. This check can convert to equity at 5%, at around a $10 million valuation cap.

If the startup has raised an equity round, or if such a round is currently being raised, Pro-Social Ventures will do a standard equity investment at the same terms as other investors. These checks vary between $250-400K.

Exit to community: Exit to community is a way for ventures to transition into ownership by its community of stakeholders instead of an acquirer or an IPO. This is such an obviously values-aligned idea for the open social web. How this works specifically varies from company to company, but it often looks something like transitioning to becoming a worker-owned cooperative, a community trust, or a decentralized autonomous organization. The Exit to Community site is a great starting point.

Exiting to community needs to be the founders’ choice, but it’s heavily encouraged and institutionally supported. It aligns long-term platform governance with the communities it serves, and reduces the risk of extractive exit outcomes.

For ventures that choose to exit to community, Pro-Social Ventures will reduce its stake at the time of the exit. The original repayment cap is reduced by 40% (pro rata, or reducing to 0 if repayments have already exceeded the new threshold); the conversion percentage is reduced by 25%. For example, a 7% conversion would become 5.25%. Pro-Social will also explicitly not influence governance structure in the new entity. It will also actively facilitate introductions to experts in the process — and those same experts will confirm if a venture’s actions qualify as an exit to community.

Terms: Pro-Social Ventures never takes a board seat, but is always available for help and support if founders want it. It doesn’t demand special preferences or control rights.

The deal is structured like a SAFE note: there’s no maturity date, no rate of interest, and there’s always both a valuation cap and a cap on revenue share repayments. (I’ve omitted valuation caps from the descriptions above, but they should be present.)

If the startup is acquired and there hasn’t been a priced round, but there are proceeds for investors, Pro-Social will receive the greater of (a) 1X its original investment or (b) the amount it would have received had it converted to equity at the agreed percentage. Of course, if the venture fails and is closed, the investment is annulled and founders are still prized members of the community. The effort was worthwhile, and the hope is that everyone can learn from it.

Overall, revenue-based investment is a choice that hopes to overcome a potential lack of traditional venture investors who are willing to put money into open social web platforms. Over time, as more of these platforms become sustainable and valuable, I assume that more traditional investors will be willing to put money in, but in the shorter term, it’s important to get these projects to a self-sustaining state as quickly as possible. I believe that selecting for human-centered, cross-functional teams will overcome some of the problems revenue-based investment has experienced in the past.

A supportive structure

So that’s how projects are funded. But support doesn’t just mean putting money in.

Pro-Social provides a light program for founding teams. It’s not an accelerator, but it builds on some of the things accelerators do well without requiring founders to participate in a curriculum.

Check-ins: For the first six months after funding, the Pro-Social team checks in with the founding team every two weeks. This can just be a half hour call, but the team is available to help them with any challenges they might have. Feedback and advice are given, but nobody is required to follow it. After six months, this can drop to whatever cadence the founders prefer.

Introductions and other support: Like all funds and investment firms, the team works hard to provide useful introductions. Resources are also made available to assist with marketing, sales, design, and partnerships with other organizations.

Summits: Every six months, there’s an in-person summit over three days. The first day is just for founders who have been funded since the last one, and includes an introductory workshop on human-centered design. The following two days contain talks from outside speakers, workshops, and demos, and all funded founders are welcome. Dinners are held throughout. The idea is to ground everybody in the same fundamental ideas and make sure strong relationships can be built between all founders in the community.

Conference: Every year, Pro-Social puts on an in-person public conference about the open social web, which is open to all but free for all of its founders. This contains speakers and talks about the open social web; an open space unconference for everyone in the community to discuss issues that matter to them; and a showcase of Pro-Social-funded projects.

How the foundation and venture arm are supported and support each other

Revenue shares are received earlier in a startup’s life than a payout from an exit event would be. Some of these proceeds go into keeping the lights on at the fund; some are re-invested into the fund; some are donated to the foundation.

The project-validating flash grants are designed to keep the venture fund aligned with the foundation. It’s far cheaper to test a venture’s assumptions quickly using this process than to write a full investment check and find out later that the venture doesn’t work, or that the founders don’t want to deviate from their idea even in the face of obvious evidence that real people won’t use it. In turn, some of the profits from for-profit ventures that have been the recipient of a flash grant are donated to allow the foundation to make grants to non-profit projects.

Initial funding for Pro-Social might come from:

• Established companies that will gain if the open social web grows
• Foundations that believe in the open social web’s potential to support democracy (or conversely, the potential of the existing social media ecosystem to erode democracy)
• Wealthy individuals with an interest in the open social web for social, financial, or technical reasons, or some combination thereof

Learning from the failure of revenue-based investment funds in the past, and because of the need to remain aligned with the principles of the open social web, I don’t think it’s wise to raise from traditional limited partners.

What success looks like

Traditional venture firms measure their success using metrics like the total value of their investments vs the amount they put in, and the percentage return the firm receives from an average investment year on year. They also inevitably measure the management fees they receive compared to how expensive it is to run the firm.

These are also appropriate for Pro-Social. But success looks like more than that; this is a mission-driven fund that aims to promote a vibrant open social web. We also need to measure the following.

Each metric should be measured in terms of projects funded by Pro-Social as well as in the open social web ecosystem overall, because Pro-Social’s success should be determined in part by the overall success of the space. The aim is for each of them to grow a significant percentage (to be determined after an initial baseline analysis) each year.

• Sustainability of projects. Are platforms still operating and growing after 2, 3, or 5 years? Have they found viable models that align with their values? What’s the average lifetime?
• Number of platforms exited to community. How many open social web platforms have exited to be under the control of their users?
• Diversity of open social web founders. What percentage of founders in the space self-report as being from traditionally underrepresented groups?
• Cross-collaboration between founding teams. How many projects are directly sharing findings, outcomes, and code with each other?

Ultimately, if:

1. The open social web is thriving, with platforms that last, communities that flourish, and founders who reflect the breadth of human experience
2. Pro-Social can continue to fund projects at a constant or growing rate, while supporting its own team

Pro-Social will consider itself to be succeeding.

So now what?

Pro-Social is a hypothetical fund. But it doesn’t have to be.

Funding the open social web doesn’t have to start big. A handful of values-aligned funders, a couple of thoughtful pilot investments, and a real commitment to founder support could begin to model an ecosystem that works differently. I’ve laid out a comprehensive blueprint, which would absolutely take a larger organization to implement in full. But it can also be a menu. Funders can pick and choose the pieces that align with their goals and resources.

The most important thing is to recognize that growing the open social web requires capital — and that doesn’t need to be in conflict with its values. The ideas I’ve proposed might not be completely right, and there are plenty of hard, unresolved questions to answer. There needs to be discussion, further exploration and testing, and lots and lots of trial and error. We won’t get it right the first time, but the only way forward is to start.

We don’t need to solve everything overnight. We just need to begin.

Here are some ways we might:

For funders: Try out one of the structures I’ve outlined — for example, a revenue-share investment — with a small open social project. Learn by doing.

For builders: Start a project aligned with these principles. What does it look like to found an explicitly human-centered open social web platform with a cross-functional team that elevates design and business to the same importance as technology?

For me: I mentioned a free course to help people grapple with human-centered principles when starting an open social web platform. I also implied a worksheet that helps people test their assumptions with respect to their existing projects. These are things that don’t require much capital to produce; I can build them.

For all of us: Let’s start a conversation about these principles. I’d love to bring together mission-aligned funders, builders, and technologists to explore a real-world implementation of this model.

Those are my ideas: what are yours? How might we begin?

However we start, the exploration is worth it. The goal is to build a better internet: one where our platforms nurture communities instead of strip value from them, where we all enjoy privacy and safety, where diverse and vulnerable voices can find a home, and where nobody is locked into software produced by any particular vendor.

The open social web has enormous potential to reshape online discourse, but it can’t thrive without sustainable, values-aligned funding. In this post, I’ve proposed a dual-structure fund called Pro-Social, combining grants for nonprofits with flexible investment for startups, and designed to support diverse, human-centered founders. It’s a thought experiment for now, but one I believe someone should build.

If we want a better web, we can’t wait for someone else to build it. We have to fund it — and build the institutions to make that possible.

Corey Ford just launched his new consultancy, Point C, and I couldn’t be more excited. He’s changed my professional life — more than once — through a kind of empathy-driven coaching I’ve never found anywhere else. He didn’t ask me to write this post, but I feel compelled to.

As he puts it on the Point C website:

Point C is more than just a coaching practice — it’s a strategic advisory focused on helping leaders build extraordinary lives and lead cultures of innovation.

That’s not fluff. Innovation starts with building an intentional culture. Much of what I’ve learned about creating and leading human-centered teams has come from Corey.

We first crossed when I was working as the first employee at Latakoo. Corey was just launching an accelerator for early-stage media companies called Matter, and we were building a compression-enabled video sharing platform for journalists that ended up powering HD video news-gathering for the likes of NBC News.

That collaboration wasn’t meant to be, but I ended up bringing my second co-founded startup, Known, to Matter. There, I learned a new-to-me approach to venture design thinking that has informed the way I’ve worked ever since. It changed my career.

I came back and worked at Matter for a few years as its west coast Director of Investments. We built cohorts of startups with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society, and helped international media partners like the Associated Press, McClatchy, KQED, the New York Times, PRX, Tamedia, CNHI, A.H. Belo, and Tribune Publishing contend with their biggest innovation challenges.

Through all of it, Corey’s been a coach and mentor — including now. (I’ve been one of Point C’s first clients.) He calls me on my bullshit, helps me steer clear of magical thinking, and pushes me forward every time. I genuinely wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without him.

As he says:

As a strategic advisor, executive coach, and occasional secret weapon, I help founders, CEOs, and executives clarify their visions, lead cultures of innovation, and navigate their next leadership chapters.

This is correct. Can confirm. If you're a founder, exec, or changemaker figuring out what to do next, Corey’s your guy.

His newsletter is free, and he promises to share useful techniques there. You should definitely go sign up. But if this kind of transformation is something you urgently need, I highly recommend that you go grab that first free consultation with him.

Erin and I stood at the front of the room, our seven-minute pitch slides for Known still projected above us. At the wooden table in front of us, investors and media executives prepared to give us unfiltered feedback about what we’d just presented to them. Beyond them, an audience of entrepreneurs, more investors, and other enthusiasts were raising their hands.

“Does your excitement outweigh your hesitations?” Corey Ford asked the Matter audience. A spattering of hands shot up; most of the audience did not raise theirs.

At Matter, Design Reviews were a big deal: a structured, safe way to find out what investors and potential customers actually thought about your business. You would pitch; then the audience would vote on a handful of questions; then the panel would weigh in.

Corey took a beat before asking his next question, microphone in hand. “Does this venture have the potential to change media for good?” A few more hands shot up this time.

“Does this venture have the potential to raise investment? If not, does it have the potential to raise alternative funding?” No hands.

The panel eviscerated us.

I’d started writing the first version of Known while my mother recovered from her double lung transplant. My mother wanted people to talk to about her experiences, but she didn’t trust the likes of Facebook to host those conversations. I’d built the platform to provide an alternative. I cared about the platform deeply; I cared about the idea of communities that didn’t yield their data to one of a handful of centralized services even more.

Indieweb and open social web people seemed excited. But I couldn’t tell the story in a way that resonated with people who weren’t a part of those worlds. This was 2014, before Cambridge Analytica or the genocide in Myanmar. The most common question I was asked was, “what’s wrong with Facebook?”

A decade later, nobody’s asking that question. We’ve all seen what’s wrong. The centralized social web has failed us; its owners treat their platforms as a way to spread propaganda and further entrench their power, often at the expense of democracy. Mark Zuckerberg likens himself to a Roman emperor even while his policies fail community after community. Under Elon Musk, X has been reinvented as a firehose of toxicity. Users are hungry for alternatives.

In my previous posts in this series, I discussed what I would do if I ran Bluesky and Mastodon. But now let’s zoom out: what if I started fresh?

There are several ways you could approach building a new open social web platform. You could hope to be remembered for building a great open protocol, as Tim Berners-Lee is, but I believe today’s need is more acute. Few people were asking for the web in 1989; it emerged anyway, changing peoples’ minds, habits, and culture. For its first decade, it was a slow-burning movement. In 2025, great harms are being done to vulnerable communities, and the profits from centralized platforms are used in part to fuel global fascism. Building a great protocol isn’t enough to get us where we need to go. We need to adopt a different mindset: one of true service, where we build an alternative to serve people’s direct needs today.

I think these principles are important:

• Any new product must be laser-focused on solving people’s needs. The technical details — protocols, languages, architecture, approach — are all in service of creating a great solution to real human problems.
• The perfect can never be allowed to obstruct the good. Ideological purity is next to impossible. The important thing is to build something that’s better than what we have today, and continue iterating towards greatness.
• Everyone who works on such a platform must be able to make a good living doing so. Or to put it another way, nobody should be financially penalized for working on the open social web.
• The platform must be sustainable. If you’re making something people rely on, you owe it to them to ensure it can last.

In his post Town squares, backyards, better metaphors, and decentralised networks, Anders Thoresson points out that social media and social networks are two different things that have sometimes been conflated. Social media is the proverbial global town square. A social network is the web of relationships between people; these might span apps, the web, and in-person conversations alike.

As I wrote in my 2008 piece The Internet is people:

Let’s reclaim a piece of language: a social network is an interconnected system of people, as I’ve suggested above. The websites that foster social networks are simply social networking tools. A social network doesn’t live on the Web, but a website can help its members communicate and share with each other.

I believe there’s enormous value to be found in building new platforms to support social networks in particular. The goal shouldn’t be to try and gather everyone in the world around a particular voice or algorithmic spectacle, as X now does with Elon Musk’s account and ideas; it should be to support networks of people and help them connect with each other on their terms.

From the same piece:

The idea of a social networking tool is to make that network communicate more efficiently, so anything that the tool does should make it easier for that network to talk to each other and share information. The tool itself shouldn’t attempt to create the network – although that being said, new network connections may arise through a purpose. Most of us have made new contacts on Flickr or Twitter, for example, because we enjoyed someone’s content.

Compare and contrast with Meta’s latest strategy to fill its platforms with AI-generated users, literally creating the network.

If I were starting from scratch — grounded in these principles, and committed to serving real human networks — here’s what I’d build.

As I hinted at in my if I ran Mastodon piece, I believe there is a need for a private-by-default, federated platform designed for groups that already know each other or are actively building trust. Think mutual aid groups, local advocacy orgs, artist collectives, parent groups, cooperatives, or even small media orgs with deeply engaged communities.

On this platform, anyone can build a group with its own look and feel, set of features, rules, and norms. As a user, I can join any number of groups with a single account, and read updates on a dashboard where I can easily switch between types of content (long-form vs short-form), modes of engagement (conversations vs published pieces), and categories (topics, timely updates vs evergreen).

Because it embraces the open social web, a user can connect to these groups using any compatible profile, and if a user doesn’t like the dashboard that the platform provides, perhaps because they don’t like how it prioritizes or filters content, they can choose another one made by someone else. Over time, groups can be hosted by multiple platform providers — and users will still be able to interact, collaborate, and share content as if they were on the same system.

Let’s say I’m part of three very different communities: a neighborhood mutual aid group, a nonprofit newsroom, and a writing collective. On this platform, each has its own space, with its own tone, style, and boundaries.

The local mutual aid group uses their space to coordinate grocery drop-offs, ride shares, and emergency needs. Everything is private, and posts are tagged by urgency. There’s a shared resource library and a microblogging space for check-ins. Members can signal availability without having to explain.

The newsroom uses its space to share behind-the-scenes updates with engaged readers, collect community tips, and publish previews of investigations. It connects directly with their existing WordPress site and lets audience editors manage conversations without needing a developer.

The writing collective is weird and messy and fun. It has a public-facing stream of essays and poetry, but also a rotating “writing prompt room” and a long-form thread space that acts like a slow-moving group zine. It’s run as a co-op, and contributors vote on changes to how it’s governed. The writing is mostly private for its members, but every so often the group makes a piece available for the outside world.

Each of these groups lives in its own lane and can be accessed individually on the web, but I choose to keep up to date on all of them from a dashboard that reflects how I think and what I care about. I can configure it, but it also learns from my use over time, and even suggests new groups that I might want to be a part of. It also lets me search for people I know or ideas I want to hear more about and surfaces groups relevant to both. The dashboard is available on the web and as a clean, responsive mobile app with a best-in-class consumer-grade design.

Because it’s all built on the open social web, I can take my identity and content with me if I ever leave. If there’s a dashboard by another company that works better for me (or fits my ideals better, for example by not learning from my use automatically), I can switch to it seamlessly. If I want, I can move my profile and memberships to an account hosted by another provider. Even if I don’t do those things, I can connect other apps to my account that give me new insights about the content and conversations I’m interested in — for example to highlight breaking news stories, surface group events I might be interested in, or to give me extra moderation powers for communities I run.

Here’s the bit that might make open social web purists upset: all of this would be built by a for-profit public benefit company and run as a hosted service. At launch, there would be no open source component.

Gasp! I can already read the Mastodon replies to this post. But rather than a betrayal of open social web values, I see these things as a way to better support the needs of the platform and the values of the space. This isn’t about profit above all else. It’s about aligning incentives to support a healthy, values-driven product, and making that alignment resilient over time. (Don’t worry, I’ll get back to open source below.)

So far, most open source self-hosted platforms have prioritized engineering efforts. Resources haven’t been available for researchers, designers, trust and safety teams, or for dedicated staff to foster partnerships with other projects. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves: they’re vital for any service to ensure that it is fit for purpose for its users, a delightful experience to use, and, crucially for any social platform, safe for vulnerable users to participate in. Building a financial model in from the start improves the chances of those things being available. If we want great design, we need to pay designers. If we want a safe, healthy community, we need to pay a trust and safety team. And so on.

In order to pay for the teams that make it valuable, the platform will charge for non-core premium features like SSO and integrations, offer a hands-on enterprise concierge service, and take a cut from marketplace transactions inside groups. Most importantly, the business model isn’t based on reach, surveillance, or ads; the values of the business are aligned with the communities it hosts.

In its earliest stages, every platform needs to reduce the feedback loop between its users and builders as much as possible. Incubating it internally until the basic interaction models, look and feel, and core feature-set are right will allow that to happen faster. I’ve found in the past that open source communities can muddy that feedback loop in the earliest stages of a project: there are people who will cheerlead something because it’s open source and not because the product works for them in itself. There are also other people who will relentlessly ask for esoteric features that benefit only them — or will be abusive or disrespectful in the open source community itself. None of these is what you want if your focus is on building something useful.

Finally, something happens when you release a project under an open source license: anyone can use it. It’s a permissive ethos that sits at the core of the movement, but it also has a key downside for open source social platforms: someone may take a platform you’ve put a great deal of work into and use it for harm. There is nothing to stop someone from taking your code and using it to support Nazis, child abuse, or to organize other kinds of real-world violence. In contrast, a hosted product can be vigilant and remove those communities.

By not releasing an open source project at first, the business has a chance to seed the culture of the platform. It can provide the resources, support, and vigilance needed to make sure the space is inclusive, respectful, and safe. Once the platform has matured and there are thriving, healthy communities, that’s when we can release a reference codebase — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a foundation others can build on without compromise. That moment would come once the platform has proven its core use case, the community culture is thriving, and the financial base is strong enough to support long-term governance.

In the meantime, because it’s all based on open social web protocols, other developers could have been building their own participating open source community platforms, dashboards, and libraries.

Last thing: I haven’t mentioned where I would run this from. Vulnerable communities are under attack in many parts of the world, notably the US, and it isn’t clear that data will be safe from subpoenas or other legal threats. So the business would be headquartered in Switzerland, a traditional home for neutral parties and a jurisdiction that offers stronger protections for user data. While starting it would require raising investment — and, perhaps, grants for starting a mission-driven high-tech business from Switzerland, the EU, and elsewhere — it would not aim to be a venture-scale business, and would operate largely independently from the US tech ecosystem. It would inclusively hire talent from all over the world and offer hybrid work: remotely but with the opportunity to come to Zurich and collaborate in-person as the need arose.

It would, of course, be a business that invested heavily in DEI, with strong benefits. These policies would allow a more diverse staff to collaborate on building it, ensuring that a greater array of perspectives were involved in its design. This isn’t just morally correct: along with the choice of location and business model, it represents a commitment to resilience.

Resilience, I hope you’ll agree, is something we need in abundance.

I began this series by asking how I’d run someone else’s platform. But the real question is: what should we build now, and how do we build it together? What are the mindsets that will provide a true alternative? And how can we ensure it succeeds?

If any of this resonates, I’d love to chat. You can always email me at ben@werd.io or on Signal at benwerd.01.

Previously in this series: if I ran Bluesky Product and if I ran Mastodon. Subscribe to get every post via email.

Photo by Renzo D'souza on Unsplash

This is the second part in a three-part series. Part one was about Bluesky. To make sure you get part three, make sure you’re subscribed.

In 2011, I sat on a panel at SXSW Interactive with Blaine Cook, the former Twitter CTO who had demonstrated an decentralized integration with the social media platform Jaiku, and Christian Sandvig, who at the time was the founder of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the University of Illinois.

The argument I presented was that social media sites are, at their core, search engines: people want to search for their friends’ names and topics they’re interested in, and are generally not excited to remember the URI of someone’s identity. Any decentralized social media network is going to need to create a great search experience if it wants to win users from centralized services. That search experience is not necessarily where the networks need to start, but it is where they need to end up.

As evidence, I brought up the time that the tech news website ReadWriteWeb briefly outranked Facebook for the search term “facebook login” and received thousands of very confused visitors wondering why their favorite site had changed. People weren’t typing “facebook dot com” into their browsers; they were searching for Facebook.

It was not well-received by the decentralization community in the audience. “People know how to use URLs,” someone said, disdainfully. “That’s how browsers work.”

Fourteen years later, in Ghost’s latest update about joining the ActivityPub network, they noted:

Many people have requested a more comprehensive search function, and are confused about the lack of username autocomplete, or why - when they search for keywords like "news" or "pugs" - nothing comes up. This problem exists across almost every ActivityPub product out there.

There is a long-standing disconnect between the technical assumptions of the open source decentralized web community and the expectations of mainstream users. The result has often been products that feel exciting and powerful for technical early adopters and mystifying to everyone else.

Earlier this year, Mastodon revealed that it was hiring a new CEO and moving to a new non-profit entity. In the spirit of my previous post about how I’d approach Bluesky’s product strategy, I want to explore how I’d think about Mastodon, too. What would I do if I was the CEO of Mastodon?

In practice, Mastodon is actually three entities: the new, European-based non-profit; its original, German non-profit, which is now a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary; and a US 501(c)3 that is primarily used to allow it to fundraise from American sources. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to treat it like one cohesive whole, headquartered in Europe, although there may be nuances to how each one is led.

It describes its mission like this:

To replace centralised platforms with robust social networking software that is inherently decentralised, open source and fully interoperable, with a commitment to privacy.

It has also described its mission like this:

To create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms or corporate monopolies.

These are different! The first explicitly calls to replace the existing social networking landscape with decentralized, open source software. The second one is less combative; instead of replacing the existing ecosystem, it implies an alternative ecosystem, free from exploitation and monopoly control.

Mastodon’s declared “vision” is:

To reimagine the social media landscape, one that is inclusive, diverse, user driven and supports dialogue.

Vision statements describe the world an organization wants to create. They’re not frivolous. The most famous one in software is Microsoft’s, which was a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software. This concreteness of vision allowed Microsoft to make strategic decisions clearly: would a proposed strategy potentially lead it to this world, or would it not?

By this definition, Mastodon’s declared “vision” reads more like another mission: well-intentioned, but still focused on what it opposes, not what it aims to build.

The implication is some confusion over the difference between Mastodon’s reason for being (its why) and its immediate goals (its what and how). The first step to establishing a robust direction for Mastodon is to clear this up. We need to define:

• The mission: why Mastodon exists
• The vision: what world it intends to create, in service to that mission
• The strategy: how, concretely, it will take its next steps to get there

If I was stepping into the CEO’s shoes, here’s what I would propose. The following revised statements are inspired by Mastodon’s existing three mission statements, as well as Mozilla’s mission statement:

Mission: To ensure the social web is a commons that is open, accessible, decentralized, and safe for all.

Vision: A world where everyone can easily join and create authentic, constructive online communities that are free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies.

Strategy: To build and steward the world’s best decentralized, open source community platform, based on the ActivityPub protocol.

I suspect people on the Mastodon team might bristle at “the world’s best”; like many highly-principled people, it’s not their style to be competitive. My point is to help the team aim high: it’s not enough to build an open source, decentralized community platform, although that’s a significant achievement in itself. It’s got to be really good.

Of course, those statements — really good, the world’s best — are subjective. They invite probing into what it means to be great.

My mission and vision statements imply certain characteristics. Here’s what I think are the minimum requirements for Mastodon to be a viable decentralized platform for communities; these things aren’t what will make it great, but what it needs to provide in order to exist at all.

• Open source: anyone can view, modify, and re-share its code. Development is maintained with a participatory approach that actively invites contributions from outside the core organization.
• Decentralized: based on an open protocol that allows anyone on one Mastodon instance to communicate with anyone on another, with a coherent and consistent user experience across the network.
• Permissionless: anyone can use Mastodon without signing an agreement with the Mastodon organization. Mastodon cannot prevent someone from using the software, and the software does not rely on centralized services provided by Mastodon itself.
• Safe: the platform includes infrastructure for communities to manage moderation, prevent abuse, and establish effective trust and safety norms.
• Usable: the platform follows modern UX patterns, is mobile-friendly, accessible, and easy to onboard onto across devices and user skill levels.
• Searchable: users can find relevant people, resources, and conversations across the network with ease and precision.
• Discoverable: users can find and join communities that match their interests.

But meeting the table stakes isn’t enough. If Mastodon is going to set the standard — not just participate — in the next era of social media, it needs to offer something more than principled infrastructure. It needs to be the platform people want to use.

From the beginning, Mastodon has worn its values on its sleeve. When you click through from the website to sign up, you’re presented with a plurality of different servers to start from, all with different owners who have signed a server covenant that attempts to keep users safe and ensure a decent baseline experience. This is a principled approach: nobody could accuse Mastodon of trying to maintain a monopoly over the network. On the other hand, before they can get started with reading, posting, and sharing on the network, users need to consider which server owner is trustworthy and can meet their needs. This user experience — principled but hard to understand — is where many users drop off, never to return.

For users that really care about decentralization, the need to make this up-front choice is a sign that Mastodon is ideologically aligned. But for everyone else, it’s a sign that the team doesn’t care about their experience.

The same goes for features like quote-posting: the ability to reshare someone’s post with your own commentary added. This originally emerged organically from Twitter’s userbase; people were doing it themselves before Twitter turned it into a core feature. It’s become a key part of Bluesky’s platform, and has been a longtime Mastodon feature request. But quote-posts can also be a vector for abuse, so the team is undergoing a careful process to implement it that might take years.

For users that want Mastodon to be as safe as possible, this approach could demonstrate that the team really cares about their needs. For everyone else, it’s a sign that they shouldn’t expect the features that have become normal elsewhere.

People who deeply care about safety and decentralization see Mastodon as responsive and aligned. Others might see it as slow, frustrating, and lacking baseline social features. To thrive, Mastodon needs to overcome this dissonance.

I think the key is in its role as a community platform. Every Mastodon server is its own community, with its own norms, settings, standards, and ideals. We should stop calling them instances or servers, and treating them as homogenous nodes in a wider network. Instead, we should describe each Mastodon site as being a community in itself.

Mastodon should be the WordPress of decentralized communities.

Each Mastodon-powered community should have its own look and feel — and its own distinct features. Mastodon’s greatest strength isn’t in being a single network — it’s in being an ecosystem of communities, each with its own identity, design, tooling, and norms.

One of the challenges of the current signup process is that every Mastodon community looks and acts more or less the same. Right now, choosing a server often means parsing descriptions and guessing which admin seems trustworthy. Instead, every community should feel alive with its own personality: not just a hostname and a set of rules, but a clear sense of what it's for and who it's for, and an experience and set of features that match this purpose.

What if:

• A community for climate scientists featured up-to-date live dashboards and research highlights?
• A queer art collective could display an evolving digital gallery of its members’ work?
• A Black-led tech community could feature tools for job support, mentorship, and organizing?

Decentralization is flexibility: one size does not need to fit all. In this world, the decision about whether or not to enable quote-posting, join network-wide search, or let news websites know they’ve been linked to is devolved to individual community owners, not the platform owners themselves. The decision about whether to build a large, expansive fediverse or keep it small and safe is devolved too: any community owner can decide how locked down or opened up their space should be, because it’s their space.

The ability to theme Mastodon also means the ability to brand it. Today, every paid Medium subscriber can have an account on its Mastodon community, but that community looks like Mastodon, not Medium. The Newsmast Foundation’s community looks exactly the same. The ability to deeply customize a Mastodon community allows organizations with deeper pockets to adopt the platform in a way that adheres to their existing standards. These users are more likely to invest in customizations — and in doing so, help grow the broader ecosystem.

Mastodon should treat its own flagship community, mastodon.social, as a living testbed — a place to experiment, learn from user behavior, and refine the experience. That’s the community space that Mastodon itself owns. It can try new themes, run experiments with new features, and, yes, make it the default community new users try, so they can get a handle on what Mastodon is and how it works before they potentially move to another community. All with a best-in-class mobile app experience.

So far, I’ve described a world where Mastodon communities are:

• Visually distinct: with themes and branding that reflect their identity and vibe.
• Feature-extended: with plugins or integrations tailored to the needs of a specific group — whether that’s custom moderation workflows, polls, discussion threads, or event coordination.

But remember our vision statement? All of this only matters if it’s easy. So we also need to add:

• Easy to spin up: where launching and running your own Mastodon community is as simple as starting a blog.

The mission can’t be met if only technical people can create and run Mastodon communities. Part of the task of lowering this barrier to entry is about infrastructure: the underlying platform needs to be able to run simply on any number of hosting providers. Mastodon could also offer a turnkey service — similar to WordPress.com — that abstracts away the hosting layer entirely for non-technical users. Not only will this bring more people onto the network, but accessible hosted services will serve as an avenue to bring in funding.

Another part of the task is about running a healthy community: moderation, abuse prevention, and trust and safety. Some communities are equipped to provide this themselves, but others simply cannot. Mastodon can provide conduits to both paid and volunteer services to help communities keep themselves safe.

Finally, there are the legal implications of running a community: adhering to local regulations and protecting community owners from undue risk. Just as newsletter platforms help writers comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, and WordPress.com makes handling DMCA takedowns straightforward, Mastodon can offer built-in tools and guidance to help communities stay legally compliant in their jurisdictions — without requiring every community owner to become a lawyer.

WordPress has built a valuable ecosystem of plugin authors, theme designers, and infrastructure providers, who all gain as the ecosystem grows. The same can be true of Mastodon if it embraces its role as a movement-defining layer of a vibrantly diverse social web.

That means supporting an ecosystem where:

• It’s easy for developers to build and monetize plugins, themes, and integrations.
• Service providers, including Mastodon itself, can offer hosting, customization, moderation, or legal compliance as value-adds.
• Organizations — from local newsrooms to global NGOs — can create spaces that reflect their missions and identities without starting from scratch.

In that vision, Mastodon is no longer just a destination. It’s a foundation: a public utility for self-governed, interest-driven communities across the world. Some might be tiny and personal; others might grow large and influential.

But all of them would benefit from a shared protocol, a shared codebase, and a shared commitment to making the web better — without requiring lock-in or top-down control.

That’s the opportunity: not just to build a platform, but to unlock a new era for the social web — one where communities are in charge.

And that’s where I’d start if I ran Mastodon.

Previously in this series: if I ran Bluesky Product. Next up: if I was starting a new platform. Subscribe to get them all via email.

A lifetime or two ago, Biz Stone was showing me and my co-founder around South Park in San Francisco. The Twitter office was sat there, a weird building with glass bricks across the road from what would later be the Instagram office. We grabbed a coffee at Caffe Centro and talked social media; two founders talking shop with a member of our advisory board.

He was particularly excited about the Twitter API. At the time, over 80% of Twitter’s traffic wasn’t driving through the website: it was through third-party apps that used the API to create entirely new experiences on top of the platform. Around the same time, unbeknownst to me, Blaine Cook was internally demonstrating interoperability between Twitter and Jaiku, another social network, establishing the first decentralized link between two unrelated social networking sites.

Of course, we know what happened next. Twitter realized that the proliferation of the API was actively blocking its ability to make money through advertising, and radically locked it down in favor of its own experiences. Blaine’s adventure in decentralized social networking was shut down for the same reason. Subsequently, a lot of people made a lot of money. And, you know, some other stuff involving the future of democracy happened, too.

What happens when you build, well, the opposite of that?

Bluesky’s origins lie in that moment when Twitter turned away from the open social web. It is both a user-friendly social media site and an open protocol that could underpin all social media sites. Like Twitter, it has built a lively community of engaged people who talk in real time about anything that hits the zeitgeist, from current events to pop culture. It has a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and services. And it has venture investors who, ultimately, will need to see it make money and raise its valuation so that they can make a return. Unlike Twitter, it has no way of turning off its openness in order to do so.

Recently, the company advertised for a new Head of Product. Whoever assumes this position will have quite a job ahead of them: growing the protocol and the social app together in symbiosis. Nobody has ever tried to build a highly-valuable tech company this way before; it’s new ground. I think it’s a very positive experiment — we need people to be able to make money doing the right thing — but it is an experiment.

I’m not applying for the job, but I think it’s interesting to consider how one might go about it.

The first paragraph of that job description is interesting for what it prioritizes:

Our mission is to build an open protocol for public conversation. We give users more choice, developers more freedom, and creators more control. The Bluesky app is a gateway to a more human-centered social web, and we’re looking for the right strategist to shape its future.

The mission isn’t to build a social network: it’s to build an open protocol for public conversation. (Emphasis on the protocol.) The vision is a world where everyone is in control of their social presence. From the About Bluesky FAQ:

We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.

The strategy is to build a central tool based on the protocol — the Bluesky app — and use it as a way to grow the reach and influence of the protocol, and further these open ideals. In some ways, the app is a means to an end: a way to understand what the community needs, ensure that the protocol provides it, and shorten the feedback loop between the company and its users. It’s also its best chance to make revenue in the short term.

Bluesky is not currently self-sustaining. In order to continue to do this work, it will need to continue to raise more money and prove that it can generate revenue.

Currently, its venture investors are largely drawn from the world of decentralization: either people who are friendly to the ideals of the open web or come from decentralized spaces like crypto. That mission alignment is going to be harder to maintain the larger the funding rounds get; mission-driven investments are more common in earlier, smaller rounds, and later-stage institutional investors don’t typically back companies for their ideals.

The norms of venture capital dictate that it will also likely need to raise more money in a subsequent round so as to maintain investor enthusiasm: raising a similar amount as the last round, or a lower amount, could be seen as a sign to VCs that the company is struggling. So Bluesky the company needs to quickly prove to investors that it and its protocol can make them a meaningful financial return.

Providing strong investor returns and maintaining the ideals of an open social web is a very ambitious needle to thread. Where to begin?

It’s no secret that Bluesky is going to introduce a subscription layer. It sounds like this will come in two parts:

1. A Twitter Blue style subscription called Bluesky+ that will give users profile customizations, higher-quality video uploads, and post analytics, among other features.
2. Creator monetization tools that will allow creators to “get paid right on Bluesky and any other platforms built on their open AT Protocol ecosystem”.

The first will obviously sit as part of Bluesky’s own service; while features like analytics will obviously draw on the protocol, these are really features that improve the experience of using the app itself. Speaking personally, I can’t say that I care that much about profile customizations or video uploads — although I know that these will be draws for some users — but I can certainly see a reason why an organization might want to pay for brand analytics. It makes sense as a place to start.

The second is interesting for the way it’s described. I’m generally not bullish about venture-funded creator economy services: Substack, which has kind of become the flag-bearer for creative economy services, is not profitable, and Patreon has had real trouble reaching sustainability. Medium is profitable, but only after Tony Stubblebine radically shifted the company away from high-growth VC dynamics (and cut a ton of unnecessary costs).

So if Bluesky was pinning its future on a creator subscription play, that wouldn’t grab me at all — but that’s not what’s going on here. The “… and any other platforms built on the AT Protocol ecosystem” demands my attention. This is the future of Bluesky as a platform and a company.

One analogy you could use (and Bluesky has used) to describe Bluesky’s app on its protocol is GitHub: git is an open protocol for collaborating on software development, but GitHub’s implementation is so good and so seamless that almost every software development team uses it. You absolutely could use GitLab, Codeberg, Gitea, or any number of others, but they’re considered to be the long tail to the market. Similarly, Bluesky’s app is going to be the best social experience on the protocol, even if there are many others.

But you could also use Android as an analogy. The open source mobile operating system is largely developed by Google, and Google’s implementation is the one most people use: most Android phones use its Play store, its payments system, and its discovery layer. You don’t have to — many others are available — but if you’re an app developer, you’re probably going to write your software for Google’s ecosystem.

There’s a credible exit from GitHub in that you could move your development to Codeberg. There’s a credible exit from the Google ecosystem in that you could move to the Amazon ecosystem, the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem, or open source ecosystems like Aptoide. You’re not locked in, even if Google’s ecosystem is the most convenient for most users.

There will be a credible exit from Bluesky’s social app on its protocol: other social apps will be available. But this principle also goes for tertiary services. Bluesky will clearly provide payments over the protocol, taking a cut of every transaction; others will be available, but theirs will be the easiest way to pay and accept payments on the network. You’ll be able to discover apps that run on the protocol any number of ways, but Bluesky’s discovery mechanisms will be the best and the most convenient. There will be any number of libraries that help you build on the protocol, but Bluesky’s will be the best and easiest for developers — and, of course, they will have strong links to Bluesky’s default services. Each of these is a potential revenue stream.

The goal here is to grow the AT Protocol network to be as big as possible. Anyone will be able to permissionlessly build on that platform, but Bluesky’s services will be there to provide the best-in-class experience and de facto defaults, ensuring that its revenues grow with the protocol, but not in a way that locks in users.

This principle also answers a few questions people have had about the community:

• Why did crypto investors put money into Bluesky when the company itself has stated it won’t become a crypto company?
  The company’s own payment systems are likely to run off credit cards, taking a standard transaction. But clearly, crypto is another option, particularly in nations that might not be well-served by credit card companies, and crypto networks can step in to provide alternative payment mechanisms. By establishing the notion of decentralized subscriptions, Bluesky creates a ready-made bedrock for those payments.
• How will VC investors see the financial return they need without Bluesky necessarily having to let go of its principles?
  The company actually becomes more valuable as more people use its open protocol: the bigger the network is, the greater the addressable market available to its services. It needs developers to build tools, services, and experiences that its own team wouldn’t produce. It also needs them to address markets that it itself cannot, allowing the possibility for local control of app experiences. (Imagine if developers in Myanmar could have easily created their own Facebook with their own local trust and safety.) It will then serve them with easy payments, great libraries, and perhaps other services like analytics and even dedicated hosting.

Clearly, there’s work to do on both the protocol and the app. For one thing, payments become more valuable if scarcity is introduced: people may be more likely to pay for content if it is not otherwise available. That means adding features like per-item access permissions — which also help vulnerable communities that might not feel comfortable posting on the completely open protocol today. Discovery and trust and safety on the app can still be improved. But these things are intrinsic to creating a valuable ecosystem and best-in-class tools that sit upon it.

Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively. What Musk is branding, Bluesky may build.

To be sure, this isn’t a Twitter clone play. If Bluesky succeeds, it won’t be because it tried to beat Twitter at its own game. It’ll be because it stayed open, built the right tools, and helped others do more than it could do alone. That’s not just a better app. It’s a better kind of company.

This is the first post in a three-part series. Next up: Mastodon. Subscribe to get them all via email.

Photo by __ drz __ on Unsplash.

As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by the whole event.

Perugia in itself is a beautiful city: ancient, cobblestoned alleyways weave their way between the old city walls, revealing unexpected views, storefronts, restaurants, street vendors, and gardens. These days, I’m settled into a sedentary life in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I found myself walking a great deal more than I would even in a city like New York. The Italian tradition is to eat dinner far later than in America, so it was the norm for me to find my way back to my hotel far past midnight, buzzing from interesting conversations throughout the day. My legs were sore; I was hopelessly jet-lagged; I wandered dark alleyways in the vague hope that I was heading in the right direction; it was fantastic.

There’s something about that far-removed context, the beautiful surroundings, the breadth of journalists present, and our collective physical state that led to more honest conversations. At most conferences, I always have the sense that someone is out to sell me something; here, when someone attempted a pitch it stuck out like a sore thumb. The sense that people were holding back to maintain their newsrooms’ professional reputations and appease their comms teams was also mercifully missing.

In the panels and talks, people were willing to share their failures at least as readily as their successes, and I was particularly taken by a panel on AI deepfake detection that went into the computer science and discussed the practicalities, rather than gearing itself for a surface-level introductory audience.

The pure journalism track — which comprises almost all of the Festival — was similarly wonderful. A panel about media censorship in Israel and Ukraine didn’t shy away from the details, revealing a more complex situation in Ukraine in particular than I’ve been hearing from the US press, alongside some specifics about Israeli censorship that I found very surprising. (They have a direct WhatsApp chat with the censor! Who gives them a thumbs up or a thumbs down on stories before publication!)

This year, for the first time, the Festival also held a Product track. The News Product Alliance, where I participate in an AI advisory group, helped to shape it — and I was honored to participate in one of its panels.

My session, with Damon Kiesow and Upasna Gautam (both brilliant people in the field who I felt privileged to present alongside), was about ensuring we use technology in ways that are aligned with our values. As we put it in our description, “every design choice, paywall adjustment, build/buy evaluation, or marketing campaign carries a potential risk of violating journalistic ethics or harming reader trust” — and that’s before you take on the issue of newsrooms trying to model themselves on Silicon Valley business models:

“Social is radically transforming. Search is flatlining. AI continues to rapidly change the web. News organizations that relied on unearned audience windfalls to drive programmatic advertising revenues are in similar straits. It is time for local news organizations to return to their roots: serving local readers and local advertisers and giving up on the dreams of limitless scale and geographic reach which is the pipedream of Silicon Valley and the bête noire of local sustainability.”

Upasna shared a succinct, powerful summary of our key takeaways afterwards on Threads:

1) The false promise of scale:

• Journalism has always been innovative but adopting Silicon Valley’s values of scale, surveillance, and extraction was a false shortcut.
• Tech platforms succeed by commodifying attention but journalism succeeds by earning trust.
• When we embed vendor platforms without scrutiny, we don’t just adopt the tool, but the business model, the values, and the blind spots.

2) There is no such thing as neutral software:

• Software is not neutral. It’s a creative work, just like journalism. It’s shaped by the priorities, privileges, and politics of the people who build it.
• Tech decisions can enable serious harm when teams optimize for growth without understanding community impact.
• It’s not enough to ask if a tool works. We must ask: Who built it? Who benefits? Whose values does it encode?

3) Assumptions are the first ethical risk:

• The highest-leverage activity we have is to relentlessly challenge assumptions. Assumptions hide risks, and audience value should be the north star of every system we build.
• Ask not just what we’re building, but why and for whom. Does it create real value for our audience?
• Systems thinking is a necessity. If you don’t understand how your paywall, CMS, personalization engine, and editorial goals connect, you’re building on sand.

The message seemed to resonate with the room, and plenty of interesting conversations with newsrooms of all sizes followed. My most controversial idea was that newsrooms should join together, as governments and higher educational institutions have in the past, to build open source software that supports newsroom needs and safeguards the duty of care we have to our sources, journalists, and readers in ways that big tech platforms tend not to. To many people in today’s news industry, it feels like a giant leap — but it is possible, and products like the French and German government project Docs are showing the way.

While the Festival now has a Product track, it’s still sorely missing a true Technology track. These are different things: Product is about addressing problems from a human-centered perspective — and using technology to solve them where it makes sense. That’s a mindset journalism urgently needs to embrace. But it hasn’t yet made enough space for the people who make the technology: not Silicon Valley tech companies, but engineers and other technologists who should be treated as domain experts and involved at every level of newsroom strategy, not relegated to a backroom office and handed a list of product requirements. Newsrooms still seem wary of bringing hard technology skills into their strategic circles. That’s extremely shortsighted: every newsroom today lives or dies on the web.

But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.

These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it.