Individual nodes of the Website League are run and moderated by volunteers. All nodes adhere to the Website League Community Code as a baseline. Some nodes may have additional guidelines on top of the Community Code.
The Website League as a whole is governed by the Stewardship, a collective decision-making body of moderators, node operators, and other users with expertise or valuable perspectives. This body works on a consensus basis to assist each other with moderation and administration workloads, maintain the allowlist, resolve issues raised by users, and address any larger-scale issues within the League.
Nodes wishing to join the Website League will be reviewed by the Stewardship for conformity to League guidelines, and voted on for admission afterwards.
To see the League governance in action, please feel free to drop in on Coordination to see discussions about operations and development or leave feedback, and Consensus to see the decision-making process in action.
The short answer: it runs on the same technology as Mastodon.
The longer answer: the League is built on ActivityPub, but it is not part of the wider Fediverse. Instead, it is a close-knit island network. League nodes currently run our forks of Akkoma and GoToSocial. There is also Pillbug, a frontend interface that was started alongside and is affiliated with the League.
No—the League is not the same as Mastodon and the Fediverse at large, and you should think of it as a different place with different aims and norms. If you've used the Fediverse before, we invite you to see the League as a new place that doesn't have to work the same way. The centralized democratic control of the island network means that everyone is on the same page about community standards and moderation. Developers can work closely together on new features and technical standards for the network.
The overall technical user experience is similar to other Fediverse projects; most information and guides written about Mastodon will apply to the League, for example, even though League nodes currently only run Akkoma or GoToSocial.
As for GoToSocial and Akkoma, they are quite similar. Both work roughly like Twitter or Mastodon but have much higher character limits for longform writing, are able to handle uploads of most high-quality media, and support Markdown formatting rather than just plain text. (Akkoma also supports basic HTML and BBCode.) At the moment, our changes to them are fairly subtle and are focused on healthier design patterns, such as the removal of post metrics and reordering of quote-reblogs. There are currently hopes to support more advanced post tagging and to enable users to use custom HTML and CSS in their posts.
Akkoma comes with a built-in interface to use, while GoToSocial does not. Pillbug is an alternative interface and League-affiliated project inspired by Cohost that a lot of users like; you should try it out! See our “choose your interface” section for more information on that.
In the future, we may make other Fediverse software League-compatible. You could, for example, be able to eventually join a node that is designed for photography and works like Instagram, requiring a photo with each post. Some people might choose to run nodes for themselves that work like a traditional blog site, but with posts that can be shared and commented on by people in the Website League. There are many, many possibilities.
The League is currently made up of 17 nodes, of which 7 are open for public signups. At the last count in early October 2025, there were around 330 accounts and a rough estimate of 180 monthly active users.
Website League member nodes must, to the greatest extent technically possible, disable any visibility of post metrics, the federated timeline, and the ability for users to access each others' lists of following and followed users.
We will, to the greatest extent socially possible, work according to the Zapatista principles of good governance. These are:
No.