Problematic new default TOS for Mastodon

Eliot Lash Public Seen by 50

I recently became aware of an upcoming change to the default Terms of Service for Mastodon.

How this would apply to existing instances is a little bit unclear at the moment but may require manual action by an admin. Here's a thread where we were discussing it:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114699201989866226

And a GitHub issue which goes into the change in more detail and why it's not great:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

I wanted to post this to the legal working group forum but I don't seem to have access so I am posting it here.

I don't know if there is any specific action we need to take right now but I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of this change so we can track it. And ultimately I think we should ensure that this new default TOS is not applied to our instance.

Dan Phiffer Wed 18 Jun 2025 3:04PM

I have a couple things to add to the discussion about the 4.4 ToS, but my broader view is that having clear ToS is better than not having them. My understanding is that these are the terms from Mastodon.social (the service) and not Mastodon (the software), although these terms will be available optionally when instances upgrade to 4.4.

It's up to social.coop to choose our own terms of service. If we think termination of license is important, we can choose to include something about that. I do wonder, though, what that looks like in a federated environment, where content is stored across many servers each offering their own ToS. The question there being: "but is it enforceable?"

I'm curious how other instances have approached this? Does legal.social have ToS?

Sieva Thu 19 Jun 2025 1:16AM

@Dan Phiffer The terms of service in question are a part of Mastodon the software, and while instnces seemingly don't have to adopt them, many will. If people want to include these clauses into their instance's ToS, they should be able to, but this must be an opt-in instead of an opt-out.

I think we should make a statement as a co-op, urging to remove problematic parts from the default ToS.