Thoughts on Mastodon and the Fediverse

Response to Mastodon Discussion

In response to the post quoted below

“So what’s the deal with Mastodon anyway. Is it the prospective post-Twitter Musk-hater meeting place? Why would anyone choose to name their company after a prehistoric animal that humans hunted to extinction?”

The short and quick answer to that is that Mastodon is an open source program that provides Twitter like functionality. It’s something that you can use to set up a social media website of your own.

It is possible for different instances of Mastodon to talk to each other but this highly depends on how the particular administrators have their instances configured and it is fairly common for instances to refuse to communicate with each other often for trivial reasons or just the administrator’s personal preference.

So I would call Mastodon at best a semi-decentralized system because the general assumption of Mastodon is that most users will join an instance that’s ran by someone else and that most users won’t run their own instance. There is very limited portability of accounts between instances. Identity on Mastodon is completely tied to the individual instance.

It is possible to run your own instance just for you, and get some other instances to talk to your instance, but most people use other instances. The software isn’t really built for one user instances, and generally assumes that an instance has a lot of users. Managing a Mastodon instance is relatively complicated compared to a lot of other server software.

The protocol that allows Mastodon instances to talk to each other kind of sort of resembles RSS but it’s push based so an instance will notify other instances of new posts instead of pulling a list of posts from the instances. This results in a pretty different ecosystem because content tends to propagate from one instance to another and the usual configuration of a Mastodon instance is that it will mirror the content of the instances that it is connected to, and in some cases give users a feed of that content.

Mastodon instances usually have much heavier handed moderation than other social media.

Mastodon.social is probably the most popular Mastodon instance and when you hear people talk about Mastodon it or instances under similar management are what people are talking about.

Truth Social and Gab are also Mastodon instances, but probably aren’t what people who talk about “Mastodon” mean. Most other Mastodon instances are very left-wing in their management.

My take on Mastodon is fairly negative. I think it’s a system that somehow manages to reproduce kind of worst of Twitter but also has none of the benefits of true decentralization.

Most of what Mastodon is good at can be fundamentally done by other ways. My opinion on this type of thing is that the protocols of the old open blogosphere fundamentally worked. The reasons why the old blogosphere kind of died out are unrelated to the things that Mastodon is optimizing for.

Thoughts on Mastodon and Avoiding Content Silos

I recently set up a Mastodon instance (username @theo@theopjones.com)

The 500 character text limit on Mastodon does seem a lot better than Twitter’s shorter character limit.

500 characters amounts to about 100 words, which is in the good middle range between really short content, and the longer form content that is good on WordPress and similar full-featured blogging engines. This is a type of use case that Tumblr is really good at, as Tumblr is gradually becoming a dying site, this does mean that Mastodon may be a suitable replacement.

In my ideal world, most people on the internet would use open source software running on commodity infrastructure. I want a world in which where you decide to host your content fundamentally doesn’t matter and there is competition in content hosting.

I want a world where people can just drop their current hosting provider without too much difficulty.

A world where identity isn’t tied to a particular host. The internet does have a way to do decentralized identity – DNS. But most people don’t have a domain name that is the home for their content.

The big thing that worries me about Mastodon from a structural perspective, is the fact that Mastodon simultaneously:

• is generally structured in a way that means the vast majority of users won’t run their own instance or at least hire someone else to run an individual instance for them
• has a primary mode of content moderation built around instance administrators blocking other instances.

This could easily replicate the situation with email where there are very much first-tier email hosts. With email, Google and Microsoft have by far the best email deliverability. It seems possible that there could be similarly dominant instances of Mastodon that eventually turn it into a de facto centralized service.

It is possible to come up with ways to design a decentralized platform that doesn’t have this issue.

Spam, harassment and other similar ubiquitous problems in the social media ecosystem are fundamentally due to the fact that it’s way too easy to get your content in front of someone who has not opted into interacting with you.

Sending someone a message on a Internet service is usually effectively cost free. And it is similarly easy to get on someone’s activity feed.

If I were designing things, content filtering would be user based – and split in the three categories.

• There are the people that the user has directly opted into seeing.
• There are the people who are trusted by a user that the user trusts.
• And there’s the rest of the world.

The first two categories would be allowed to pass through fairly effortlessly.

The rest of the world, would have to do something costly, like a digital stamp or proof of work or something else that acts as a limit on excessive posting.

This is pretty far from Mastodon.

Additionally, one of the more fuzzy and hard to put exactly in to words issues with Mastodon that I have noticed is the nature of the people running things. I’m definitely not sure I have high faith in the judgment of the typical person who runs a Mastodon instance.

I’m just seeing a lot of people who revel in the idea of the tech industry throwing around its weight to reshape society.

A lot of the mindset I am seeing just feels like the same part of the tech industry that got social media into this mess. It feels entirely possible that a lot of power is in the hands of people who could be a lot more fickle and arbitrary then the people who run Twitter or Facebook.

And also a lot of people for whom their main objections to the way that Facebook and Twitter are ran is that these platforms are not exerting enough control over their users.

In a ideal world the judgement of where the lines of acceptable behavior in public discourse are would also be decentralized and democratized — instead of decisions being handed down from above.

From a bird’s eye design and ideas perspective, I like what what I see in the Indieweb project (as mentioned before) https://indieweb.org/ The emphasis on personal domains instead of shared instances is good. There is also an emphasis on trying to build software that works on commonly available infrastructure like LAMP stack hosting. And also the idea behind the Vouch anti-spam protocol https://indieweb.org/Vouch But all of the actually existing software here has been a pile of half-working kludges in my testing. While Mastodon actually works.

See also: switching-from-apple, blogging-engine-research, censorship-public-trust, cryptocurrency-web3