Summary
This year’s report reflects responses from over 400 ActivityPub communities hosting about a third of all known ActivityPub accounts, as well as responses from ATProto operators and legacy platforms. 29% of participating communities are Mastodon services, 58 distinct platforms reporting in all, with most respondents active across multiple platforms.
The findings paint a picture of an ecosystem at a critical juncture. While operator domain expertise is higher than ever, the overall network continues to grow while volunteer capacity is stretched thin and confronting rapidly-escalating agentic spam, state-sponsored influence operations, and fast-moving global Internet regulations.
What’s Inside the Report
- Platforms: Examines ecosystem distribution across 58 distinct social web platforms (led by Mastodon, Matrix, and PeerTube). Details include instance hosting scale, showing that 87% of all known ActivityPub nodes host under 10 accounts, while 30 large instances serve nearly 80% of active members.
- Roles: Explores operational multi-tasking, highlighting that 65% of operators wear multiple hats combining sysadmin, content moderation, community management, and compliance. Analyses operator tenure and onboarding, revealing a growing veteran shift alongside a steep decline in new incoming moderators/admins.
- Business and Legal: Maps physical operator locations vs. server hosting infrastructure. Breaks down entity registration, legal notice volume, and a troubling legal exposure gap: nearly 80% of nodes operate with zero liability insurance despite facing DMCA claims, GDPR requests, and law enforcement demands.
- Sustainability: Focusses on node economics, funding mechanisms, and total server costs.
- Tools and Policies: Reviews formal governance structures and evaluates shared denylist usage and off-platform team coordination.
- Individual Experience: Explores frontline operator well-being, workload predictability, and mental health.
- IFTAS Impact Assessment: Evaluates the perceived value and utility of IFTAS resources, advocacy, and tooling across the participant cohort.
- Key Concerns: Operational pressure points such as the 260% surge in coordinated FIMI networks, agentic spam botnets, and rising instance shutdowns due to operator fatigue.
- Looking Ahead: Our forecast for 2027, including the shift toward smaller, community-focused digital spaces, regulatory threats, and the likely transition toward proactive and/or delegated moderation services.
Executive Summary
- The Social Web relies heavily on small, independent communities, with the vast majority of observed nodes hosting fewer than 1,000 active accounts, almost all operating purely on volunteer, unfunded labor.
- Operator multi-tasking remains critical: 45% of admins handle three or more distinct operational roles (system administration, content moderation, compliance, technical support) with minimal assistance, managing a collective 20 million accounts globally.
- Automated spam campaigns and LLM/GenAI agents have surpassed traditional moderation challenges and are now the primary daily operational drain.
- Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) campaigns and coordinated disinformation networks are forcing instances into reactive positions.
- Complex cross-jurisdictional rules (e.g., EU DSA, UK OSA, US Take It Down Act) create severe legal uncertainty for small operators who lack formal compliance teams or legal counsel.
Strategic Imperatives for the Social Web
- Interoperable Threat Intelligence: Platforms require automated, cross-node signals to filter malicious traffic prior to manual review.
- Automated Protection: Machine-assisted triage and automated threat-detection tools are essential to shield volunteer operators from industrialised spam and GenAI-generated campaigns.
- Plug-and-Play Policy Frameworks: Adoption of modular, plug-and-play server rules, moderation guidelines, and legal compliance templates will reduce friction for independent operators.
- Plain-Language Regulatory Guidance: Establishing accessible, plain-language guidance can bridge the gap between statutory mandates and non-commercial platform capabilities.
- Sustainability & Operator Care: Peer support structures, trauma-informed moderation practices, and shared workload models are vital to prevent volunteer burnout and stabilise operator retention across the ecosystem.
Needs Assessment
When asking operators to stack-rank their immediate priorities, legal compliance documentation skyrocketed in demand, while spam and disinformation tools dominated technical requirements.
Resource Needs:
Legal templates jumps 5 spots from #6 last year. Operators have moved from general regulatory awareness to needing concrete documentation for their infrastructure. Compliance & governance remain the top 3 priorities across both years.
| 1 ↑ (6) | Template legalese (ToS, privacy policy etc) |
| 2 ↓ (1) | Regulatory guidance (GDPR, OSA etc) |
| 3 ↓ (2) | Moderation Playbooks & Best Practices |
| 4 ↓ (3) | Shared denylists / allowlists |
| 5 ↓ (4) | Template community code of conduct |
| 6 ↓ (5) | Help responding to content takedowns, law enforcement, legal notices |
| 7 → (7) | Moderator training courses |
| 8 → (8) | Moderator wellbeing resources |
| 9 ↑ (10) | Help with business formation |
| 10 ↓ (9) | Resources in languages other than English |
Tooling Needs:
Spam detection remains the single most critical tooling need, staying at #1. Disinformation detection catapulted 5 positions from #7 to #2, reflecting heightened concern over elections, synthetic media, and coordinated influence campaigns. CSAM detection remains high-priority, sliding slightly from last year.
| 1 → (1) | Spam detection |
| 2 ↑ (7) | Disinformation detection |
| 3 ↓ (2) | CSAM detection |
| 4 ↓ (3) | Toxic / spam IP & Email Domain data |
| 5 → (5) | Phishing and malware detection |
| 6 ↓ (4) | Hate speech detection |
| 7 ↓ (6) | Non-consensual intimate image detection |
| 8 → (8) | Personal digital safety tools |
| 9 ↑ (10) | Registered agent / point of contact service |
| 10 ↓ (9) | Terroristic and violent extremism detection |
Individual Experience: Personal Well-being
When asked “Have you personally experienced burnout or mental health challenges due to your community responsibilities in the past 12 months?” over a quarter of operators report feeling close to burnout / overwhelmed in the past 12 months. 14% have faced full burnout within the year, underscoring that managing communities carries a measurable emotional toll.
Get Involved & Support the Work
If you’d like a one-on-one briefing, or have any questions about the survey data, please email [email protected]
