Initial impressions of Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
What I’ve seen and read about the ‘Fediverse’ is quite promising, because I believe it could encourage something of a return to the kind of online communities that were common before social media, and that, I’ll argue, is objectively preferable. The ‘Fediverse’ is essentially a network of relatively small online communities, built on standards that enable the sharing of content between servers, and potentially those online communities could be designed to be superficially similar to the old phpBB-styled forums.
Like perhaps most others who started using Mastodon in recent months, I got in without knowing fully what it’s about, and it took a couple of days to grasp what it does. That’s not to say there’s any learning curve involved, but all knew is that it’s yet another decentralised platform (which actually isn’t entirely decentralised), but one of the few that managed to gain real traction.
Essentially how Mastodon works, for those not familiar with it, is the user registers an account, perhaps with mastodon.social, and can view and post to a timeline, just as we do with Twitter. Basically it does appear a lot like Twitter at first glance. However, the main difference here is numerous other servers are running Mastodon, and most (but not all) of them are ‘federated’ with mastodon.social. This means the users on mastodon.social have the option of viewing a timeline of posts aggregated from all the other servers, and can reply to them, without having to register additional accounts. Likewise, users on the smaller Mastodon communities are able to view all the posts made on all the federated servers.
A Mastodon address, e.g. @user@mastodon.social, tells us the person’s username and which server they’re registered with. Also, a user account is sort of portable, in the sense it can be downloaded and/or migrated to another server if we want to join another online community instead.
Under the surface, Mastodon uses something called ‘ActivityPub’, a specification for APIs and JSON objects returned by servers that implement them. There are a number of fringe examples of ‘social media’ that use this for federation in a similar way to Mastodon. Tumblr is also potentially going to join them, apparently.
A huge selling point for me is that Mastodon works almost flawlessly in the Tor Browser, and I was able to register an account that’s not linked to my real identity. This is critical, if Mastodon is to be a better alternative. Most the problems with social media are attributable to the practice of linking our real identities to our online profiles, and of not maintaining a separation between our social lives and the things we publish online. With Mastodon, it is possible to avoid being the victims of doxing, data breaches, surveillance capitalism and the other insidious ways our personal information is used against us. The only personal information that’s shared is what we explicitly decide to share.
Problems with Mastodon
Of course, there are a few things that need to be worked out. The first is the idea of ‘microblogging’, which isn’t really blogging. Trying to post arguments and counter-arguments, with context and reason, is near impossible with something like Mastodon or Twitter, which, I believe is a contributing factor to the animosity on social media. It’s why I completely ignore Twitter journalism, I should add.
Moderation is also an issue. It’s a bit chaotic and subjective, and mastodon.social has a huge list of servers that are excluded from federation, a couple of them excluded because they’re apparently promoting ‘conspiracy theories’. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is anachronistic in an age where Mainstream Media and authorities are so discredited, so mired in scandal and corruption, they need to pay ‘fact checkers’ to interject in public discourse. But I digress. Mastodon’s model is much better than allowing Silicon Valley to mandate the limits of free expression, and the servers excluded from federation still have the option to form syndicates. Likewise, we get to choose which servers to register with, and what content we want to view.
Another problem is Mastodon isn’t quite resilient yet, since a lot of communities are run by a single admin as private projects. Recently the admin of mastodon.lol announced he’s discontinuing his server because of harassment from activists who felt their ideological commitments justified shitposting unsolicited spoilers to everyone about a children’s wizard game. It’s understandable why the admin considered the harassment over something that petty was more trouble than it’s worth, on top of personally funding the VPS, taking on the legal and financial risks and putting in the effort to run the server.
So, that’s Mastodon, a small part of the ‘Fediverse’. I’m optimistic and interested in seeing how it develops.