A few months back, we posted about the new Fediverse instance called “the Forkiverse“. This is a Mastodon instance started by the hosts of the Search Engine podcast and the Hard Fork podcast. The site has picked up tens of thousands of users, with a distinctive local culture, and is a nice part of the Fediverse.
The hosts are planning to shut down the server on Dec 31, 2026. They go over the reasons in an episode of the Search Engine podcast, Vladimir Putin’s Forkiverse. The reasons are pretty understandable — the cost of the hosting and the effort needed to moderate and manage the Forkiverse instance isn’t offset by their own enjoyment of the platform or a sense of mission.
I (Evan) am interviewed as part of this episode. It was a tough interview to do — I never want to talk about servers shutting down. But it’s part of the work that we are concentrating on here at the Social Web Foundation — in particular, the study of Fediverse server sustainability that is partly funded by our grant from the Interledger Foundation. Understanding what it means when instances shut down is important.
The interview was one of several that I’ve done with the Search Engine folks. We talked for several hours back in 2024, when my ActivityPub book had just come out, and when the SWF was just starting. We had follow up interviews in the intervening years. It’s been a good relationship, actually.
Search Engine has a new episode that includes excerpts from those interviews on its premium feed today. The episode is available on a few platforms — I found it on Spotify at Thirty-three minutes of hopefulness for a better internet . I was worried that it was going to be kind of saccharine — here’s this idealist, fighting for hopeless cause — but I think it actually is a pretty good listen. I got to be human, instead of a caricature, which was nice.
It’s been nice to stay connected to the Search Engine team, including PJ Vogt, during this time. I’m glad that he and the other people involved in the Forkiverse are giving the site a long enough time to wind down that the users there can move to other instances. And I’m glad that they’re going to stay connected to the Fediverse from their accounts on Threads, Bluesky, or elsewhere.
I remain hopeful for the Fediverse, and I hope you are, too. We’re doing something important together.
Just a note — we are finishing up our analysis of the data from the Social Web Sustainability Survey that we announced recently. If you run a Fediverse server — a Mastodon or Pixelfed site, a Lemmy site or a NodeBB forum, or an ActivityPub-enabled WordPress blog or Ghost.org newsletter, or even if you run Threads.com — we want to hear from you. What’s difficult about operating a service? What’s useful? How do we keep you on the Social Web? Please take this chance to respond to the survey — it’s the best way to let SWF and others know your priorities for sustainability and support.
As part of the work on Fediverse sustainability announced earlier this year, the Social Web Foundation is running our first Fediverse Sustainability Survey . We’re seeking operators, moderators and administrators of Fediverse sites, from the smallest to the largest, to fill out the anonymous survey and share information about how their instances work. If you help run an instance, please take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill out the survey. We need a lot of responses (hundreds!) to get statistically relevant data, so please feel free to share the link. We’re also on the lookout for operators of instances that are no longer running; there is a lot to learn about sustainability from servers that closed down, for whatever reason. We’ll publish findings here as part of our sustainability report, supplemented by interviews with selected respondents. Thanks!
Update: we hit a survey response limit in LimeSurvey — it’s been fixed. If you had a problem getting to the survey, it should be cleared now.
Thanks to the Interledger Foundation for their generous Grant for the Web to the Social Web Foundation. With the help of ILF, we are launching a new program area focused on economic issues on the Social Web. In particular, we’ll be producing three reports: one on sustainability for social web instances; one for the Fediverse and the creator economy; and one for cooperatives on the Social Web. In addition, we’ll be engaging multimedia Fediverse apps for using the Web Monetization standard. You can read more about grant on our shared announcement: Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media.
Social Web Foundation