We are now reviewing the fantastic responses from our 2024 Needs Assessment participants. Thank you to everyone who participated! A very special thank you to everyone for whom English is not your first language – we hope to offer the survey in additional languages next year, but we really appreciate all the people who took the survey despite any language barriers.

We selected 50 participants at random to receive a small thank you reward valued at $20 USD; recipients will be able to choose from a range of local currency gift cards including supermarkets, pet shops, rail travel, app stores and more, as well as an option to donate the reward to a number of global charities.

UPDATE: If you participated, please be sure to check your spam folder and inbox for mail from “[email protected]”

Although the final report will take some time, here’s a few quick hits…

We asked for input from any and all federating platforms. Along with 87 Mastodon operators we saw responses from a range of platforms. We count one of each per response – so this is the number of moderators who actively moderate a given platform, even if they operate multiple instances of the same platform.

Some of our participants noted that they also moderate as volunteers on Reddit and IRC!

Special personal treat: I was reminded that flohmarkt is a thing!

We heard from communities and servers of all shapes and sizes, including a number of single-person servers, some very large service providers, and everything in between. At first glance it looks like we have a very broad view of the Fediverse.

The communities that responded host a collective 4.4 million accounts, roughly a third of all known accounts. Their moderator teams identified being from 24 countries, including Costa Rica, Egypt, Slovenia and South Korea.

Based on the reported moderator team sizes, we are seeing one moderator for every 5,500 accounts. This is an increase in coverage from last year where we saw one moderator for every 6,200 accounts.

Contrast this with industry best guesses that X has one per 60,000, TikTok has one per 22,500, Meta has one per 17,600 (reference). A major piece of that finding is that the Fediverse predominantly moderates by hand with very little automation.

Almost a fifth of the services (not including single-person servers) provide 24 hour moderation coverage, a slight improvement from last year.

Keep an eye out for our full report, and in the meantime you can review last year’s findings. Once we have the data deidentified and aggregated we will share the overall findings with the community, and use the report to focus our resources going into 2025, and you’ll be able to track those priorities on our public Activity Tracker.

If you didn’t take the survey in time to be included in this year’s report, no fear! The survey is open year round, we value your input and feedback and will incorporate any new responses into our ongoing work. Take the survey today!