When thinking about supporting the #Fediverse, it’s important to understand that the current leadership model is closer to an aristocracy than democracy. This isn’t unusual – most open source projects work this way. A small group of core developers, often a “benevolent dictator,” make key decisions. This model can work up to a point: it enables speed, coherence, and technical direction. But it does not scale in any way easily into a broader public infrastructure.
From the outside, the #Fediverse can look chaotic, and in many ways it is. A useful metaphor is an elephant stampede with people throwing paper planes at each other. That messiness is not a failure; it’s a reflection of a genuinely distributed system.
Democracy is inherently messy.
Bureaucracy, by contrast, is tidy.
The tension between those two is at the heart of the challenge outreaching to public institutions faces. Traditional organisational models – especially those involving funding – tend to concentrate power. Once money and status enter the system, decision-making quickly becomes a focus of competition and control.
We have seen this repeatedly over the last 20 years: projects that begin open and collaborative gradually centralise, and in doing so lose the qualities that made them valuable in the first place. If the goal is to support a native Fediverse ecosystem, this pattern needs to be consciously avoided.
This raises a key governance question. How are decisions made once resources, funding, and institutional recognition enter the space? Without deliberate design, the default outcome is oligarchy – small groups making decisions on behalf of many. This is not a moral failure; it is a structural tendency of complex organisations.
The strength of the #Fediverse is that it is radically different from mainstream platforms. It is decentralised, diverse, and resistant to single points of control. The risk is that, in trying mainstreaming paths trying support it, we unintentionally reshape it into something more familiar, and less effective.
“Common sense” approaches, based on traditional institutional models, push in this direction. If European institutions want to invest meaningfully in this space, the challenge is not simply technical. It is cultural and organisational:
- How to support infrastructure without centralising control
- How to enable coordination without enforcing uniformity
- How to fund development without creating capture points for power
The opportunity is significant, but it requires seeing and recognising that the #Fediverse works because it is different – and ensuring that support mechanisms strengthen that difference, rather than smoothing it away.
