"A guide to getting started with Twitter alternative Mastodon"
I continue to dislike the comparisons between Twitter and Mastodon, but it is a big deal for a major newspaper to cover how to migrate or start an account on Mastodon.
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Share to Mastodon
I started coding this yesterday and continued to today. I wrote a small bit of custom code that adds a Mastodon button in the entry footers when visiting the blog. Clicking one of them lets you click a button to share the entry to your Mastodon account.
The first time you use it, it prompts you for your Mastodon instance. It then saves your response as a cookie. Then when you click it, it confirms you want to share to the saved instance (in case you migrate instances, etc.) And then redirects you to the Mastodon "Share" page with a simple message of "Just finished reading [title] - [url]"
Required some adapting of my templating code as I hadn't prepped tags for URL encoded titles and post URLs. But, overall, nothing crazy.
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Mastodon is not a Twitter replacement
One of the worst things during this Twitter migration is that a lot of people (including technologists) have positioned Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. It isn't. The federated model means it can't be in a lot of ways, ever.
For example, this Mastodon thread highlights one of the big challenges when it comes to becoming a centralized emergency platform, the way Twitter has. Mastodon, quite literally by design, can't currently become that.
A friend of mine ventured into Mastodon this week and immediately was turned off by the inherently challenging UX from the start. Things that should be simple, aren't. (And this is something I've also highlighted before.) Like, the act of following someone when they are on an instance other than yours, is non-trivial, which is a huge issue for new users. Or liking someone's post when they are on another instance is shockingly difficult. These are the things which have to be solved for it to ever gain mass appeal. Even I, a fairly capable technology user and fan of Mastodon, grow tired of these issues.
Moderation is an ongoing issue and discussing how it will be handled. If you report a tweet, if they are on your instance, great the mods can deal and action accordingly. As it is, if you report a tweet of someone who isn't on your instance, it goes to your instance mods. They can discuss if they want to block this user from the instance, or if they are seeing a lot of users from a particular instance get reported, it could escalate to them unfederating with that entire instance. Imagine 4chan opened a Mastodon instance. Imagine those trolls letting loose on Mastodon. The network would simply block that server and refuse to work with them.
But that doesn't solve harassment and attacks. Another part of Mastodon's design is of minimizing exposure. People can't simply search for a keyword and find people to attack like on Twitter. You, the poster, have to choose to use a hashtag, doing so gives your post potentially more exposure to people who search that hashtag or who follow it. If you do then you're opening your self up to possibly random people engaging. But this is only a first-level defense. Someone is going to, eventually, build a bigger Mastodon search engine which does enable full text search, etc.
Scaling and malicious attacks. Handling attacks from malicious actors. There has already been a moderate scale attack by folks on a domain attempting to basically DDOS the network. Seeing this play out has convinced me that I don't ever want to run my own instance. It would seem fun to be on my own for branding and the act of owning my Mastodon identity, but things like this would put it very-much out of my skill technologically right now.
All of that said...
I continue to really like Mastodon, but that is because I've found a good instance with a strong overlap of my own interests. I don't know how much of that is because of Mastodon itself.
As much as social media relies on you finding and following the right accounts, I have come to believe Mastodon's success for each individual relies on them finding the right instance for them. Which is no different than finding the right forum, or discord, or just - community.
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#hachybots
I crawled into bed last night and checked my phone. Surprisingly I got notice of a post of mine on Mastodon being taken down. It turned out the instance has implemented rules for automated posts and I simply hadn't been aware of them. So they had taken down my automated afternoon blog post.
The change was simple enough, they simply wanted to ensure automated posts include the "#hachybots" hashtag so that individuals on their instance can easily choose to block that tag if they want to avoid seeing automated posts.
No sweat. My body ended up waking me up at 5:30 this morning, so after my morning shower I decided to quickly make the change. While in there though, I decided it was time.
I also made the decision to go ahead and disable the automated posting to Twitter. I only barely engage over there anymore, and the meager traffic I do get, Twitter is not a big driver. I'm creeping closer and closer to fully exiting there. We'll see.
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"I Was Wrong About Mastodon"
Having spent time on Mastodon, I now realize how hilariously wrong I was about how moderation would work. I was seeing Mastodon through the lenses of Twitter, rather than as a different culture with different technology. I'm now fairly confident in saying Mastodon is friendlier than Twitter and will remain so, regardless of who and how many join.
A good re-examination of expectations about how Mastodon would work, and realizing it is not a Twitter replacement.
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"Mastodon Isn't Just A Replacement For Twitter"
Scalability explains a lot of what seems wrong with social media. Content moderation at scale needs to be semi-automated, which often means applying universal rules without context or nuance. And when abuse, harassment and misinformation drive engagement, the incentive is to address it in a way that doesn't threaten business. Lacking local knowledge in their users' languages and cultures, platform companies have aided political interference and even genocide.
But how can genuine community self-governance work at the scale of a global social network? We believe that it is time to embrace the old idea of subsidiarity, which dates back to early Calvinist theology and Catholic social teaching. The European Union's founding documents use the term, too. It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have the power to address their own problems. Some decisions are made at higher levels, but only when necessary. Subsidiarity is about achieving the right balance between local units and the larger systems.
But the fediverse is not a utopia — it's just software. Though it facilitates community self-governance, it does not guarantee it. Most of the people entering the fediverse right now are flocking to a small number of popular servers. In effect, they are repeating the logic of scalability, except this time without a company in charge able to spend millions of dollars on large-scale moderation. Currently, many servers appear to be run top-down by people who have the technical skills to set them up, but not necessarily with the social and economic capacity to foster and sustain community self-governance and address online harm.
Subsidiarity is not a word I knew previously, definitely going to dig in on it. Below is its relevant Merriam Webster definition, not pulled from the above article.
Subsidiarity - n. - a principle in social organization holding that functions which are performed effectively by subordinate or local organizations belong more properly to them than to a dominant central organization
Edit: I found this evening, the author's own post on Mastodon.
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