Indieweb.social is a six-year-old. Launched only 3 years after Mastodon 1.0 itself did, give or take.Over the last two years, it was clear to me as the owner and admin that it was growing and would either need to find some form of new structure to take it to the next level, or, in some way, artificially cap or even have to find ways to shrink ongoing growth. Something I did not wish to do. One way or another, IndieWeb.social would need a new, bigger home. And I’m excited to announce this today.

For a server purely launched back then only as a labor of love—and one that I did not know would even get a couple hundred people interested—it has thrived beyond my hopes: growing steadily, year on year, the Patreon support has been rock solid to keep the lights on, and most importantly, the users here have grown to be a wonderful community. It’s now approaching 12K registered users, 1.2K monthly users, and almost 700,000 posts.And it has been—as was its mission—a great place for the IndieWeb, openweb, humanetech, and larger open social web communities to all commingle and cross-pollinate.

Over this same time, I’d been looking for a way to transition this from a small self-run server, admin-centric place—and to turn it into a more user-managed one, akin to some others that were born that way.

So I am grateful to have found a solution for all of these needs for this community:

As of April, IndieWeb.social will be owned and managed by the Newsmast Foundation, while they move its governance to a user-managed direction. So as of the end of March 2025, I will move from being an admin here to being a user—and an ongoing supporter of this Indieweb.social via Patreon. 

I’d strongly encourage everyone to stay with me there on Indieweb.social, and to support it on Patreon if you can; every dime goes only to this server.

And as this starts making moves towards being community managed, do recommend that folks who love it here join in.

Nothing could be in better hands, and Newsmast deserves great credit for enabling this. I owe them a great deal of gratitude and am delighted to be a member of this place now, where I can watch its evolution and cheer it on. This is how the fediverse SHOULD work—how communities can grow from a tiny glimmer to a stable and thriving community and then grow upwards. 

The fun part here is just getting started.

The FAQ about this next stage for  is here:  https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/faqs/

And the new admin account  for this server from Newsmast is: https://indieweb.social/@indiewebadmin

And Thor, our volunteer moderator remains: https://indieweb.social/@Thor