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Experiment over; FT Alphaville shuts down Mastodon instance

Today FT Alphaville announced that they will shut down their Mastodon instance, only a few months after it launched in November 2022. `“It was awful,” says a headline that leaves little to the imagination. The reasons for shutting it all down again are described as a host of compliance and legal uncertainties. So, what happened in the few months? Let’s dive right in!


In November 2022, during the peak of Musk-is-killing-Twitter, FT Alphaville decided to set up a Mastodon presence. It was to be an experiment, see how it all works out. Already in the announcement post, it was clear there was a hesitancy:

Alphaville, owned by the Financial Times, is clearly thinking about regulatory and legal compliance from the beginning. In the beginning though, there definitely seems to be a potential match between Alphaville and Mastodon. Alphaville is a non-paywalled financial blog, mainly providing financial commentary and context. Furthermore, it has ‘the Long Room’, a pseudo-private community for experts to share their views and expertise.

So squint your eyes a bit, and you might indeed see a vague match: both Alphaville and Mastodon are blogging platforms, and both want to build a specific community around a specific topic. So why didn’t it work out?


In the post announcing the demise of their project, Alphaville list out their reasons:

Notably are two missing reasons, which both seem likely to also have played a significant role:


All in all, it seems like Alphaville had an interesting idea, but took the slightly wrong tools for the job. It wanted to build a community, but without having to be the main instigators of the community. Now, this is possible, there are fediverse instances where the admin of the instance has a more low-key role in the background. But getting such an instance off the ground is hard, even more so if you do not provide an example of how you want such a community to function.

It also did not make clear what its participants can expect. If you’re interested in finance, there is the active instance of econtwitter.net. What did Alphaville offer over that?


On the other hand, figuring this all out is hard. Most other news outlets have just started looking on from the sideline. Taking the leap, experimenting, and figuring out how things work as they go is a great attitude that we can only commend Alphaville for.

Even more so, the entire fediverse is still in the process of figuring it all out. What would be the best way of an organisation to interact with the fediverse? There’s examples of Vivaldi and Medium experimenting, as well as Mozilla in the near future. But those are quite different organisations with different goals and expectations. There’s not a great example of a news outlet to point towards of how to interact with the fediverse yet.

There are certainly developers experimenting with how websites, blogs and the fediverse can interact. theverge.space provides an early example, as reported on here. But those are unofficial and still in prototype, and not something that Alphaville can easily use right now.

All in all, it seems like a combination of factors led to the shutdown of the Mastodon experiment for Alphaville: large compliance and regulatory costs, low usage, and simply being too early. We hope Alphaville will keep experimenting in the future.