About

Stad is intended to be a friendly Fediverse community that is professionally run by people with decades of experience building platforms that have hosted millions of users over the years. We want Stad to feel cosy, not industrial in scale, and feel like separate, distributed, interconnected communities is what makes the Fediverse special.

The name Stad comes from the multiple shared Germanic words for a place, kind of place, or town (sted (Norwegian), stad (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch), stadt (German), stead (English), and we hope it will come to evoke that feeling of small-town community

While we think it is great that the Fediverse is open, and that there are so many volunteer-run instances, we also think there are users who would rather pay to have a security that their services are professionally managed, and operations and moderation are handled by people paid to provide a top notch service.

We also hope that as we grow that we will in turn be able to help fund various initiatives that will benefit the broader Fediverse as well as our members.

What is the Fediverse?

You've probably heard about Mastodon, and maybe about Lemmy, Pixelfed or Peertube. Those, and many other services combined make up the Fediverse - a collection of services and pieces of software that unlike centralised social media like X/Twitter, Facebook etc. allows anyone to run their own servers which can talk to each other. With the Fediverse, just like you can have an e-mail account with Gmail and still be able to e-mail someone whose e-mail account is with Aplle, or anywhere else, if you have an account with one of STAD's services you will be able to follow or message anyone on any other Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed (etc.) server.

Which Fediverse services will Stad run?

To start with we will launch with Mastodon (a bit like X/Twitter), Lemmy (a bit like Reddit), and Pixelfed (a bit like Instagram), and we're hard at work integrating these services together to make it feel like one cohesive community to our users. We're evaluating other services on an ongoing basis, and will be open to suggestions. Additional membership tiers may also become available for services outside of the core.

What else will you provide?

If you're an organization or business who wants to have their own Fediverse instances, we will at some point provide services that may help. Note that we will only provide such services to organizations that are prepared to engage with the Fediverse in ways that take into account the nature of the relevant communities. We will not under any circumstance help people who want to spam, harvest data without consent, or otherwise engage in behaviours we consider unethical. We can afford to be better.

When will Stad launch?

When we're ready. We're testing with friends and a few volunteers now, but we still have quite a bit of work to do before we're ready to let paying members in. We're not beholden to investors, and can afford to take our time to get things right before we launch.

An e-mail list will be launched soon if you want to receive updates.

If you already have a Mastodon account, follow @stad@stad.social