'Social media should be built on protocols, not platforms,' according to Mastodon's CEO

Last week, Meta announced changes to its content moderation policy, including the removal of third-party fact-checking across its apps in favor of a crowdsourced community notes feature, similar to X. Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, to explore what these changes mean for users and how decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon could offer a viable alternative to mainstream giants like Meta. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Mastodon’s decision to transition to a non-profit in Europe The challenges of implementing interoperability with platforms like TikTok -- which is set to “go dark” in the US over the weekend -- and the importance of user choice. Which other decentralized platforms we should keep an eye on. (Hint: Pixelfed is in the mix.) Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Last week, Meta announced some controversial changes to its content moderation policy. So to talk about what that change means for users and how decentralized social media could potentially replace the likes of Meta, we're joined by Mastodon CEO Eugene Rochko. Eugene, welcome to the show.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Hi, thanks for inviting me.

• 0:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, thanks for coming on. Super excited to talk to you. So for those who don't know, Eugene is the creator of Mastodon, which is a decentralized, open source, social networking platform founded in 2016 that aims to compete with the likes of X, Threads and Blue Sky. And actually Eugene, you've had some fresh news this week, right? You plan to create a nonprofit in Europe and hand over ownership to it. Can you explain briefly what that means to our listeners and why you're doing it?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So so far I've been the sole owner of Mastodon's assets and copyright, assets including trademarks. What we're doing is we're starting a new nonprofit that will own all of these trademarks. And this is meant to avoid future issues that seem to become more common in the open source world, where there's just a conflict between the project lead and the community in terms of like trademark enforcement and so forth. And it's just reducing risks for the project going forward and for the community as well in terms of this sort of power being misused. It also unlocks more potential for fundraising for Mastodon because there is a limit to how much people and funds and organizations are willing to donate

• 1:53Speaker 02

  if there is like a single owner versus just it being in a foundation and having a board of directors and a more traditional structure. So that's kind of the motivation to sort of give the community more. Assurance about Mastodon's future beyond myself.

• 2:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, and while also, you know, creating like a funding structure and not having to rely on investment or venture capital or anything like that.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've always rejected venture capital. This is the sort of thing that I've always wanted to avoid because I believe that social media should be built on protocols, not platforms, and that people should be able to choose freely between different platforms and can also be able to move between them.

• 2:31Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, and you know, we talk about kind of consolidating control around certain people. I mean, we look at Meta, which has also had big news in the past week. I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg owns like 62% of the voting power of Meta. And, you know, last week, there's been a lot of controversy, as our listeners might have heard us talk about on the Friday show last week. So Meta's overhauling content moderation policies, they're taking off guardrails in that regard. They're also ending third-party fact-checking, moving to a more community notes à la X. They're lifting restrictions around, quote, "topics that are part of mainstream discourse", whatever that means. And they're also just bringing back in more political content that they had kind of said they weren't going to push as hard.

• 3:15Rebecca Bellan?

  So, you know, you actually posted a little bit about this. Can you just walk me through your thinking of what this kind of means for the internet?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I think the fact-checking part of it is probably the least problematic because I'm not sure the fact-checking is dissuading anyone from sharing misleading articles. And you could argue about like how much work this fact-checking has been doing. That being said, I'm personally not a Facebook user, so this is all like from the eyes of an outsider.

• 3:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  The more problematic part for me is the changes to moderation policies regarding LGBT content and the fact that they explicitly allow calling gay and trans people mentally ill and that sort of rhetoric, as well as anti-immigrant stuff. I mean, it clearly aligns itself with a new presidency and it's honestly, from a moral standpoint, it's quite awful because. While they argue that this is free speech, and this is a very American view on free speech, that everything should be allowed to be said. And in Germany, there is a kind of a different view on free speech, where there is a carve out for hate speech. Because there's kind of this concept called paradox of tolerance,

• 4:27Speaker 02

  that if you display tolerance towards intolerance, then eventually intolerance will displace tolerance, right?

• 4:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And there is a similar analogy with what people call the Nazi bar, right? If you have a bar where people come to drink, and you start allowing Nazis in, then the other clients will start leaving, and then your bar will fill with just Nazis, and it will become a Nazi bar. It's kind of the same principle here. This kind of moderation policy will eventually force all of the people who disagree with this sort of policy, who disagree with this sort of statements, as well as LGBT people, to leave the platforms. And the only people remaining will be people who are homophobic, transphobic, and so on. And so it's just a very concerning thing to see.

• 5:12Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's, you know, people make this argument that there's a marketplace of ideas, and, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of putting all the ideas out there, but...

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Well, the thing about the marketplace of ideas is that if you allow this sort of rhetoric on your platform, people will leave.

• 5:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  And those people also have ideas. Trans people have ideas, gay people have ideas, black people, and so on. And if you force all of them to leave because they're exposed to hate and hate speech, then you will lose out on a lot of ideas. And the only ideas you'll have left on your platform is going to be hate speech.

• 5:44Rebecca Bellan?

  Yep, yeah. And it is particularly ironic considering that Facebook once, you know, banned Donald Trump from the platform, but now it's just a complete 180, really. Yeah, I mean, LGBTQ people, trans people, I think that, it was interesting, there was a policy, I think in the policy it says that, you know, they are banning dehumanizing speech, but then also within the policies, it says that you can refer to transgender people as "it" and women as "household objects." So I don't really see how those two ideas can mesh, but...

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, they really manage to offend everyone in their moderation policies.

• 6:16Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I feel like that's by design. I think that there's a lot of kind of desire to get people angry and maybe focus on the wrong things. But as you say, like, people will start leaving the platform, right? Like, I'm considering leaving, which is, you know, hard because it's so all encompassing. We've been, you know, I grew up with Facebook and Instagram and everything. I've already deleted my threads. But it's everywhere. It's photo sharing, it's messaging, it's life updates, it's marketplace, it's private groups, right? Like, my local neighborhood group for posting local news and information and, hey, does anybody, you know, have a cup of sugar I can borrow, whatever, right? There's events. There's so much that it's hard for people to wrap their heads around decentralizing, if you will, right? Everything's all in one place, and now we have to find it in other

• 6:59Rebecca Bellan?

  places. I'm curious, has Mastodon seen a boost from this news, like, in the last week?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Um, sure. I think so. There's definitely been an uptick in signups in our different apps and servers. But I've got to admit, I don't track those metrics super hard, because it's kind of a different approach that we have. We don't really need to report those numbers to, like, investors or shareholders or anything like that.

• 7:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  So it's basically just like, we're just vibing. And if it grows, it grows. I typically can pull up stats and, like, provide, like, here's how many new people joined, whatever. But since I didn't prepare for it, I kind of, I can't really, I can't really tell you.

• 7:38Rebecca Bellan?

  That's all right. I mean, we've certainly seen, you know, there's been a lot of chatter about people moving on to different platforms. One thing that I, before we start talking about some of the decentralized options, I did kind of just want to point out that among the many features available in Meta's world includes a TikTok competitor, which is Instagram Reels, right? And now we've got TikTok. At the time of this recording, it's expected to go dark in the US on January 19th. I'm curious if you think that those users will end up on Reels now, or if they'll, you know, the exodus to Red Note will continue?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Well, I've heard that Red Note was doing really well now.

• 8:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  So. I'm kind of maybe in the minority of people in the sense that when TikTok came out, I wasn't very excited about it at all. And I've never been into the short video story type content. That being said, even I've been exposed to it through YouTube at this point, because YouTube also has like a shorts section, which is a TikTok competitor. I do think it's kind of very emblematic of the tech industry that eventually all platforms sort of copy each other's features. Because I remember there was a time when, well, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, that they were building, they were building stories into Twitter.

• 8:52Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, the stories in Twitter, that was so weird.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  After the Clubhouse thing, they built audio chat into Twitter. And you can observe that sort of all across the platforms. Because obviously, Facebook built the reels into Instagram as well.

• 9:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Are there any features that Mastodon would copy? Like, for example, you know, Blue Sky had, what is it, the lists, right? So you can just kind of order starter packs?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were working on starter packs, because that's a decent feature for getting people started and discovering content. That's one of the main challenges of social media is how do you bring people to the kind of content they want to stick around for? Mastodon has a sort of anti-algorithmic stance, in a sense, not entirely, I wouldn't misrepresent it like that. But one of our main selling points is that the home feed is chronological, so it is predictable. Whereas on, let's say, Instagram, you could have a situation where you follow a whole bunch of people, but you never see posts from them. Or they post something and you never see it. On Mastodon, if you follow somebody, you will definitely see their updates. And so it becomes a more reliable platform for keeping up with people or organizations

• 9:55Speaker 02

  that you want to see updates from. That being said, of course, because I think that the modern social media user has sort of been trained to expect an algorithmic feed that just sort of predicts what they're going to like and serves everything on a silver platter, it does create a sort of challenge for us on how to make people adjust back to this more manual curation approach. But we do have alternative ways of discovering content. There is an explore feed, which is algorithmic, it's just that that's not your home feed, and it's also not personalized, at least. Currently, so it's just stuff that's popular on the platform similar to the Reddit front page. And I think that's a pretty decent way to discover content. But I think starter packs, yeah, they're kind of a cool way to sort of assemble a list of users

• 10:40Speaker 02

  who you think might be interesting to someone else. And then, you know, they get right into it.

• 10:44Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, like, do you have any tips for people who are making the switch or who want to join Mastodon? And they sign up and they're like, uh, I have to find all these people again. And it's not recommending things to me based on my interests. And like, how do I do it? Like, do you just set aside the time? Like, what's your?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  In my view, the key is to some extent exploration, but also starting with the explore feed is a pretty good option. And then just following anyone who you think posted something interesting on there. Right? Because then you're starting to fill your home feed and then it becomes more organic. Because those people, they're boosting other people's posts. Boosting is resharing, retweeting, whatever. And then through that, you find other people. And if you just keep following people, you will eventually have an interesting feed. One other feature that we have on Mastodon is following hashtags instead of people. So if you have a topic that you're interested in, you could follow the hashtag. And then you just see everyone who posts in it, which it could be sort of high volume situation. Right? If you pick a super popular hashtag and then it could maybe become less manageable.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  But there are certain hashtags that are really, really good. For example, I'm a big fan of the believe and film hashtag, which is all the photographers who shoot analog are using that hashtag. And so I just get all of that in my home feed and it's really beautiful to see. And you could do the same thing. I think my wife is subscribed to Catcher Day and Cats of Mastodon. And so, you know, you see all that content in your home feed and it's a great way to start as well. Until we have starter packs now, then the advice will change.

• 12:12Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:19Anthony Ha?

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• 12:57Rebecca Bellan?

  So another thing I wanted to ask you about is when you sign up to Mastodon, there's all these different potential servers that you could join and that you can be hosted on or what have you. Can you explain how the different servers work?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  So you could. You could join all those different servers. But two years ago, we decided that it's a bit overwhelming for people and we changed around how it's presented. So right now, actually, if you go to, let's say, joinmastodon.org, which is the homepage of the whole project, or go to our Android app or iOS app, what you will see is a big button at the top that says "Join Mastodon Social," which is the server that we operate, our nonprofit. And if you join that, that's all you need to do. It's like signing up on any other website, right? You just fill in your details and you're logged in.

• 13:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Well, how will you handle that in terms of scale going forward? Like, will you need to get other servers and connect them? Or, you know, like, let's say you do see some really explosive growth, can your servers handle it?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Well, we'll definitely need more hardware to handle explosive growth and so on. But it's kind of the price of user-friendliness, I would say, because we did try the different approach and all we got is criticism from the press and users saying it's too complicated. The reason it's complicated, or was complicated, is that on Mastodon, you don't have to join the server operated by us. You could decide to join one of the community-operated servers. So Mastodon is open-source software, and anyone can take it, install it on their own hardware, attach it to a domain name, and you basically have your own social media platform entirely under your own control. You control moderation policies, you have your moderators, admins, whatever. And because it uses a decentralized protocol to communicate

• 14:36Speaker 02

  with other platforms, it becomes part of the Fediverse, the network of servers that some of them run Mastodon, some of them run other similar projects. Some are different proprietary services, like Flipboard and Threads, for example.

• 14:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. Yeah, I've seen a lot of Flipboard on there.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So basically, from this custom server, you can follow any user on any other server and you get their stuff in your home feed and you can reply to them and so on. It's quite seamless. Basically, you could compare it to You like picking an internet service provider to access the internet, but you're picking a like a Mastodon service provider to access the Fediverse, right? That's kind of the analogy, or picking a phone provider to be able to call anyone in the world. And so you have this choice in this ecosystem where it doesn't have to be us. It could just be, you know, there's, there's like 12,000 servers that people are running. Some of them are just, you know, they're running them just for themselves or their families. So they're not open to registrations, but there is a smaller number of larger servers that are meant to be used by other people.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  And so this gives you a lot more control about what kind of experience you want to have. So on one hand, like if you disagree with some of the moderation policies that we use or the way that we do moderation, you could choose something that has different rules that fit more towards what your expectations are. You could have a server that has a more like a free speech like approach, or you could have a server that's even more like isolated and more like safety purpose.

• 16:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  But of course, this kind of choice, it's a great thing. It's a wonderful thing. I also being able to self-host if you're like technically minded or if you want to pay like a hosting company to do it for you. Basically allows you to be entirely in control of your social media experience. Like you don't have a middleman at that point, especially if we're talking like organizations or like government agencies, like that's 100% the right thing to do because, you know, you connect directly to your audience, like you connect directly to your citizens or whatever, and they can follow the updates and there's no middleman that can decide, oh, now I'm not going to show these posts to your followers or whatever.

• 16:38Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's not trendy enough.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:40Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And then, you know, you mentioned content moderation policies. So for each server, each server gets to kind of determine their own content moderation. How does Mastodon do it? You've got quite a small team. I think you said it was around five full-time staffers, a handful of freelancers.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:54Rebecca Bellan?

  How are you managing content moderation on the platform?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we have a team of moderators, they're contractors and yeah, well, how do we manage? So we have rules, we have rules against hate speech, we have rules against misinformation. We require people to put disclaimers on AI-generated content. And then the community reports anything that they think. Goes against those rules, or sometimes they report things because they disagree with them. And then our team reviews those reports and decides if it's something that can be acted upon or not. And we try to approach it sensibly and try to sort of escalate slowly for minor offenses. And you know, if there's a big offense, eventually, you know, we can issue a ban.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  And so a ban is, it means that the user cannot use our server anymore. But of course, because the network is decentralized, they could make an account somewhere else and continue.

• 17:48Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. But you mentioned something the other day on a post that threads content, if any of it is violating Mastodon's policies, that it will be banned, or can you explain that?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, every service on the vetiverse obviously has its own moderation and it's under, you know, independent control. Threads is a great example of this. They're Meta's property and nobody can tell them what they can do. But of course, if we are ingesting content from threads, if people from Mastodon are following threads users, we can then decide on the receiving end, do we want to receive it or not? And so this is what I was talking about. If there are threads users that are breaking our rules by posting hate speech and so on, then we can decide no more, those users' posts will no longer be displayed on our platform. So that's kind of the extent of what you can do on Mastodon to sort of block content from the network that violates your rules.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  You could escalate that and say, you know, this server is beyond redemption. I don't want to see any content from it whatsoever. And by the way, users can do that for themselves as well. There's both individual block and mute functionality, but also as a user, you can block a whole server. You can just say, you know, I personally don't want to see any threads content, so I just block threads dot net and that's done. You never see it.

• 19:02Rebecca Bellan?

  Nice.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Threads moderation policy changes kind of puts us in a sort of Silly situation because obviously we were welcoming the threads implementation of the common protocol that we operate under because the whole point is that we want a social network that is not bound to one specific platform that unites all sorts of different platforms. And so far, it's mostly been like open source projects, right? It's Mastodon, Pixelfed and so on. Like Mastodon is probably the biggest names of those, but Meta is one of the largest social media providers in the world, right? With Facebook, Instagram and now Threads. And so it was sort of exciting to see that

• 19:46Speaker 02

  our principles are being adopted to allow interoperability with a larger platform like that. But at the same time, now that they're changing their moderation policy to allow hate speech, it just feels icky to like cooperate with them on a technical level. Super icky. And so it's not quite clear like how to deal with it because on one hand, you could argue that interoperability is still important because it's difficult to leave a platform. When platforms have walls built around them, you have to make a decision, do I leave and then get disconnected from all of the people I know on this old platform? And I have to like manually bring them over? Or do I remain on this platform indefinitely?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And a lot of people choose to remain indefinitely because it's just too difficult to move everyone. But if these walls are taken down and platforms become interoperable, then you can leave yourself and it's super easy. Like you're just making your account, right? And then you can re-follow or like get follows from all the same people that you were interacting with on the previous platform. And you don't really have to convince them to switch themselves. You only have to make the choice for yourself. So it's a lot easier. So one of the reasons to keep compatibility with threads, even despite the moderation changes, is just to allow people to switch from threads to Mastodon easier. Yeah. That being said, Threads has been super disappointing in implementing the Activity

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Pop protocol. I think the platform launched like two years ago at this point, maybe one year, but it feels like two years. It was supposed to be fully compatible from the start, but I remember they said that they launched early because of some Twitter stuff that was going on and so they weren't fully ready. And then every single step towards compatibility has basically been breadcrumbs. Like, Threads users have to opt-in to Fediverse sharing, which is a really silly thing. Like, imagine if you had like a Google Mail account and you had to opt-in to receive email from somebody who was not on Google Mail, right? That would be silly, right? But that's what's happening on Threads. And that option is super hidden.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  And every 30 days, they give you a scary pop-up asking, "Are you still sure you want to enable this?" And so it just feels like, you know, very uphill.

• 22:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, but what's the point of that? Like, what are we playing at here?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And for the longest time, you could not see a lot of content from the Fediverse on Threads. And eventually, they allowed you to see replies that you get and who liked your post. Now, you can finally follow people from the Fediverse on Threads, except that there's all this opt-in stuff around it. Like, for example, the posts on Threads, they could have replies from the Fediverse, but unless you yourself are opted-in to Fediverse sharing, you will not see them. Which is, it just feels hostile, right? At this point.

• 22:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Fediverse Lite.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, the question then becomes like, is it even worth it to try to stay compatible with that? I mean, I say stay compatible, it's really a moderation matter. Like, do we unmask it on social and the server that we operate? Do we block Threads going forward or not?

• 22:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  You know, we just expect that eventually it's gonna become just overwhelmed by hate speech.

• 22:56Rebecca Bellan?

  I mean, it's possible. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's just gonna be one of those things that you're gonna have to watch and adjust and, you know, maybe you'll block and then maybe later on, you'll roll it back and, you know, it's an interesting time to be alive.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  For now, we're taking a wait-and-see approach because we basically leave it in the hands of the users to do it for themselves and make that choice. And again, the basic principle is, we want to allow interoperability because it might make it easier for people to switch from Threads to Mastodon. And so the idea is like, that eventually... All social media platforms would support this protocol and you would be able to just, for example, follow a YouTube channel from your Mastodon account and you just see new videos in your home feed. And, you know, you can just comment and the comment appears under the YouTube video. You could follow, you know, an Instagram user, follow a Tumblr user, whatever. All the same principle. All of these platforms are essentially the same. There's users, they post stuff and they follow each other.

• 23:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Why shouldn't they be compatible, right?

• 23:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. Well, are they compatible now? Like, let's say you-

• 23:52Speaker 02

  They are, well, some of them.

• 23:53Rebecca Bellan?

  Like Pixelfed, for example, like that's becoming an Instagram alternative. For those who don't know, it's a photo sharing app, but decentralized. And apparently Meta is blocking links to it on Meta Platforms, but yes.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you can follow a Pixelfed user, just like you can follow a Mastodon user. You see them. I mean, sometimes you can't even tell because you just see them in the app, like any other user, and you can just follow. And you don't even notice they're on a different platform. But they're using Pixelfed, they post photos, and you get them in your home feed, you reply to them, and they see your comment under the photo. And so there are platforms that implement this right now, and Flipboard is one of them, which is really cool. So you can follow Flipboard users, they can follow you.

• 24:31Rebecca Bellan?

  So this is like a, maybe a dumb question, but I think as of November 2024, Mastodon had about nine million accounts, 9.04 million accounts. So if I'm seeing people on my Mastodon, right, in my feed, that have Flipboard or Pixelfed or something, are they, are they considered Mastodon users or a Mastodon account or no?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  No, we, we don't care. For our statistics, we don't count them because we don't want to say like, you know, we don't want to count Pixelfed users.

• 24:59Rebecca Bellan?

  Right, okay. That's what I, I wasn't sure how it worked exactly. I'm still, I'm still learning.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  So the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon. So the nine million, it's just the Mastodon number. The Fediverse number is bigger.

• 25:09Rebecca Bellan?

  So it's on your server?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Not on our server, but we do basically run a stats aggregation service that tries to collect the public data from Mastodon servers and then combine them together. And so all of the public Mastodon servers that exist combined have nine million registered users.

• 25:25Rebecca Bellan?

  I see. Okay. And just one last thing before we go. I'd love to hear, you know, what other decentralized platforms are you watching, are you using, do you think are getting it right, that, you know, people should be paying attention to?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  That's an excellent question. I think that Pixelfed is promising. And I know that developer of Pixelfed is also working on a TikTok alternative called Loops. So so far I haven't seen much from it because it's behind a beta, but I think it's promising. And I think it shows the potential of the fetters as well, that you can build all sorts of applications on it as long as, you know, it has the basic foundations of it has users and they can follow each other and they post stuff. That fits so much stuff that we see on other social media platforms from TikTok to Vine, YouTube and so on, that you can build all sorts of things on this platform and have it be compatible in interesting ways. So I think that's really promising.

• 26:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Cool. Yeah, well, look out for Loops. That's an interesting one. Looking forward to seeing what that's like. And I am going to sign up for Pixelfed actually soon. I want to see what that's about. Okay. Well, I think that we're just about out of time. Where, you know, on Mastodon, where can our listeners find you? What's your handle? What's your at?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  My handle is [email protected], gargron with two R's, which is first R then G then R. Lots of people misspell that, so I have to clarify. And I post my photography on there. I shoot analog as well.

• 26:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Lovely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Our listeners can find me on Blue Sky and on Equity and Equity Pod. We'll talk to you Friday.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 26:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.