"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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"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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A fascinating thread of an antifascist researcher looking at the bonkers "Nazi" list circulating on Twitter
The person's summary for what to do if you find yourself in possession of a "Nazi list."
- as a general rule of thumb, don't post even edited Nazi content unless you know what you're doing or have talked to someone who does
- warn privately. Don't post Nazi lists to Twitter don't tag people for them, don't amplify lists. Warn via mutuals if you must
- practice humility (researchers, this is for us). No one gets it right 100% of the time, not even the pros. Be real about your experience level, ask more experienced folks to vet your work regularly.
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A very compelling theory and narrative about the lead up and current situation for Musk & Twitter
Included the original tweet by @drskyskull, but in case the thread disappears, I captured it in the text below.
So here's my hypothesis on the whole Musk twitter deal. 1/
Dude LOVES Twitter. As a narcissist, he can't get enough of the adulation of the right-wing mouth-breathers. But Twitter keeps banning the people he loves, so he becomes convinced that Twitter is a liberal SJW organization. 2/
He decides to teach them a lesson, and make an offer to buy the company. Absolutely convinced that it is a left-wing political site, he's sure they'll refuse his offer, even a ridiculously good offer. Then he can say "aha! they're so woke!" and his fans will cheer. 3/
But Twitter is actually governed by businesspeople who see his offer as absurdly high, and they jump at it. Musk freaks out, tries to get out of the deal, but he's already locked in solidly. 4/
Now his Dunning-Kruger kicks in to protect him from his panic, and he says, "heck, it's not that hard to run this site; I'll turn it around right quick!" He's not completely stupid, so he cons investors into going in with him. 5/
Dude has fundamentally never understood how Twitter works, and what it takes to make Twitter work. To him, it's a company filled with a bunch of lefties who just sit around censoring everyone. He can dump that dead weight and everything will run fine. 6/
He goes into it with the same bluster that he used to boost his car and space companies: act like the genius "disruptor" that can fix anything. But those companies are not ad-based, and advertisers immediately become spooked by his approach. 7/
He is utterly baffled; don't they see how he's going to make Twitter better than ever before? He fundamentally doesn't understand how much effort Twitter put into protecting brands. He's high on his own supply of "free speech," which he also doesn't understand. 8/
He clearly thinks that the value of twitter is entirely in the number of users. That is important, but the quality of users matters, too, which he doesn't get. He starts his ill-advised (stupid) change to the blue check system. 9/
With the blue checks, again he's high on his own supply. He see the check as a status symbol (which it is), but thinks that he can sell that status, which he can't. People are verified because users need to be able to separate real people from scams. 10/
Elon also thinks that everyone is just as addicted to Twitter as he is. He's a narcissist; he NEEDS Twitter just like Trump needed it. But relatively few people are that addicted to the site, and the real blue checks know that they bring value to the site. 11/
So more advisors leave. Elon is desperate to turn things around quickly, so he just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks. Nothing does, because he has no concept of how actual human beings experience reality. 12/
I think he's in a panic state, because he knows that his mystique is evaporating quickly. He's the golden boy who had "made 3 companies worth a billion dollars." He can't afford, mentally, to be seen as the guy holding the company losing a billion a year. 13/
He probably can't financially, either, which has got to be intense pressure on his psyche. He keeps trying to turn things around by doing things exactly like he does at Tesla and SpaceX: he's got a hammer, Twitter is the nail. 14/
But Twitter's corporate culture is very different from those other companies, so most people aren't interested in his appeals to going "hardcore." And his immediate layoffs trigger company-wide resentment, which means almost everyone is ready to bail. 15/
He assumes that he can make things so shitty for workers that only the best, "hardcore" workers will remain. But pretty much the opposite is true: the best workers can jump somewhere else instantly. So his plan backfires 100%.
Now, he's left with a company with no advertisers, massive debt, and a toxic work environment that will struggle to find new employees. Institutional knowledge has walked out the door. 17/
Overall? I think he is a victim of being a legend in his own mind. He felt he understood twitter well enough that they would never sell. They did. Then he thought he understood it well enough to slash it in half to improve efficiency. He didn't. 18/
He thought he could appeal to some sort of macho tough guy work ethic that he probably has never experienced himself. He probably sleeps in his office, but he probably has a very comfy bed in it. 19/
To summarize: he thought that Twitter was run by a bunch of left-wingers, who were therefore inferior to him. He was wrong on both counts, and now he's stuck with a company that may not function at all within days. END/
This was a bit of a ramble, but just putting together my impressions of watching him work. PS his tough guy snarky comments? That, to me, is another facade. The sort of thing that someone does to hide the fact that they're panicking and don't know what to do.
PPS this was my thought as well. Saudi and other investors may have recognized that Twitter was a bad deal, but by investing they're hoping to leverage control of his other companies.
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Behemoth
A few weeks ago, I began thinking about a tool that integrated all my various online feeds. At the time I was thinking about integrating:
- RSS
- Podcasts
- Reminders / Notifications
I've abandoned this idea for primarily two reasons.
- Writing my own RSS reader would be a big task. Thus the project's codename 'Behemoth.' Dave Winer's concept of RSS is great, but the realities of it is that there are a LOT of corner cases and things to take care of, etc. I read a blog entry about it a few months ago that cemented how much I was going to be facing and that really turned me off the idea.
- Twitter was going to absolutely dominate the feed. My Twitter account followed hundreds of people and it was really going to be a problem for this structure.
The first remains a massive project and undertaking. The second though has changed. I've been stepping back from Twitter. I'm not off it, but I am using it far less. And I think that the Fediverse would actually be a better usage here. The underlying nature and 'inefficiency' of it, the "content warnings" which are really subject lines, etc. This could really prove to be a better integration aspect.
Along with this idea, I am reminded of my custom Twitter client from back around 2007. I can't remember what I called it, but the defining feature I had come up with was that I hid any post a user made after their three most recent ones.
Back then we were pre-threads, and we were dealing with people going on massive tweet storms about topics. I got frustrated when they dominated my feed. So I decided to collapse any of these extra posts. You knew they were there, but it didn't fill your feed. I could see something similar here.
Ideally, another aspect of the Behemoth RSS portion would be combining RSS posts about similar topics. I subscribe to a number of feeds which overlap and so I can get a half-dozen entries on a news item. Having a system which groups based on topic and keywords would be a huge benefit.
So I guess saying I abandoned this idea isn't true. It continues to sit in the back of my mind as something I'm thinking about. But still, no immediate plans to work on it.
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