mastodon – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Meta Launches Threads, And It’s Important For Reasons That Most People Won’t Care About
from the though-they-should dept
As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to this is the microblogging equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying “how do you do, fellow kids.”
Clearly, lots of people were willing to check it out. Mark Zuckerberg (on Threads) claimed that 2 million people signed up in just the first few hours.
Of course, I got that screenshot on the web (which lets you see things, but not login or post to Threads). When I tried to get a copy of it from the mobile app where you can actually post, I got this:
So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.
By this morning, Zuck was saying Threads had 30 million signups in its first day.
I mean, that’s what you get for bootstrapping on a social network and social graph that already has over 2 billion users. Some are complaining that this is an example of Meta leveraging its “dominant” position to enter a new market, but as I explain below, I don’t think this is so bad, because the open protocol nature of this means it’s actually resistant to the worst potential exploitation.
I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop. I have no real crystal ball on how it will do, and people who are insisting that one outcome or the other is inevitable are just guessing, so they can claim they knew it all along when whatever happens, happens.
What Meta does have, though, is the ability to scale this. While there is a relatively small team working on it, apparently just “a few dozen” Instagram employees, Meta does have the infrastructure in place to scale if it does catch on, which still remains a challenge for basically everyone else.
And, it’s not just the technical infrastructure, but the trust and safety infrastructure as well. Not that I think anyone is going to say that Meta has been particularly good at handling trust and safety challenges, but they have people and they have technology… and (importantly) they have experience.
But, still, the bigger, and more important part here, is just the fact this is built on ActivityPub. Back in December, I talked about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment,” where a big company steps in and offers a better UI, better features, and a simpler onboarding setup.
While a bunch of mid-sized companies have embraced ActivityPub, including Mozilla, Medium, and Flipboard, Meta is in a different league altogether. And that has both advantages and disadvantages.
But, the important point to me, and the one thing that matters, is that this shows that big companies can make use of interoperable protocols to build on, rather than building up silos. While Threads does not currently interoperate with the rest of the fediverse, the company has made clear that it intends to do so at some point, and even included this fact in the splash screen when you first setup Threads:
And that’s important. For the last two decades, the big internet companies have mostly focused on building their own proprietary silos, rather than using open protocols and interoperating.
Now, it’s true that some of the new European regulations coming into force put pressure on tech companies to interoperate more, but it remains to be seen how well that actually works (and notably, Threads is not available in the EU, as they found it impossible to currently comply with GDPR requirements). What is clear and is notable, is that this is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a “big tech” company embrace an open protocol.
And, yes, some people fear that the goal is to “embrace, extend, extinguish,” to use the old Microsoft playbook. But the nice thing about protocols is it actually creates incentives against doing so. Because of its open nature, if you don’t like where Meta is going with threads, you can go elsewhere. But you can do so without losing your ability to communicate with those in your network who remain on Threads.
That’s powerful and it’s how the internet was always supposed to work, but which we’ve gone away from.
Indeed, one way to look at this is that it’s Meta bringing many millions of new people to the protocol-based decentralized social media world. And even if plenty stay within Meta’s private park, it will allow those outside the network to communicate with those inside, and also to highlight how they can get the same basic thing without having to cough up data to Meta.
So, I’m personally not that excited about Threads as a product, nor am I all that worried about it doing something bad for the fediverse. I am excited that it shows how big companies can make use of open protocols in a manner that keeps the internet more open, enabling communication not just within a single silo, but where the users have more control, rather than a single centralized company.
Having more of that is a good thing.
And, while I know a bunch of Mastodon instances are planning to defederate from Threads as soon as it connects to the wider fediverse, I think the statement put out by Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is actually quite thoughtful about all this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
I agree completely. This is validation of open protocols and pushing power to the ends of the network, rather than just another silo. That, alone, is a good thing that should be celebrated.
Filed Under: activitypub, fediverse, interoperability, mark zuckerberg, mastodon, microblogging, open protocols, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media
Companies: meta, threads
Mozilla Wonders What Social Media Could Look Like If It Started With A Clear ‘No Assholes’ Policy
from the experiments-are-good dept
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. And, contrary to what most people believe, a huge part of content moderation is not “we have to suppress this content that scares us,” but just an attempt to “stop people from being jerks to others.” Unfortunately, too many people get confused, and think that “free speech” means they get to commandeer private property to be assholes to others, which results in confusing fights over people claiming their “free speech” is under attack when the reality is that a private property owner has decided you need to stop being an asshole.
But what if a social media network came along and just said upfront: our policy is no assholes and we’re not ashamed to say we’ll kick you out if you’re being a jackass?
As I’ve been discussing lately, I’m excited about the various new experiments with decentralized, protocol-based social media, because it allows for much more experimentation, and because it enables both services and users to opt-in to what they feel comfortable with. More competition can mean both more innovation (perhaps leading to new insights!), but also more communities trying different things and taking wildly different approaches, allowing users to opt-in to the situation they want.
One thing I’ve been talking about for a while is how the Fediverse/ActivityPub model allows for the possibility of companies to come in and provide much better experiences, that might improve on the core “Mastodon” approach that most (but definitely not all) people on the Fediverse use. And while some people were nervous about “companies” moving into the Fediverse, I was excited to see more corporate interest, because I hoped it would lead to some more interesting approaches.
Mozilla, which announced months ago its intent to enter the Fediverse with some sort of ActivityPub-based instance, recently laid out more details of its private beta plans. Their key differentiator? They plan to be more aggressive in moderating. Rather than presenting themselves as a “neutral” platform, they’re admitting upfront that their moderation plans have an opinion:
Today, we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta. We’ve put a lot of work into getting to this stage, but there is a lot more to do before we open it up more broadly. We’re making a long-term investment because we think we can contribute to making Mastodon, and social media generally, better.
You’ll notice a big difference in our content moderation approach compared to other major social media platforms. We’re not building another self-declared “neutral” platform. We believe that far too often, “neutrality” is used as an excuse to allow behaviors and content that’s designed to harass and harm those from communities that have always faced harassment and violence. Our content moderation plan is rooted in the goals and values expressed in our Mozilla Manifesto — human dignity, inclusion, security, individual expression and collaboration. We understand that individual expression is often seen, particularly in the US, as an absolute right to free speech at any cost. Even if that cost is harm to others. We do not subscribe to this view. We want to be clear about this. We’re building an awesome sandbox for us all to play in, but it comes with rules governing how we engage with one another. You’re completely free to go elsewhere if you don’t like them.
Now, you might not agree with that approach. But the cool thing about ActivityPub/Mastodon is that… you don’t have to. You can just join another instance that takes a more “free speech” type approach.
Letting a lot of communities all figure out how their own norms and rules will work, and letting users choose which ones to support and take part in, seems to function more like the analog world, where social norms, and local communities actually matter. One of the great things about social media has been its ability to connect people across the globe.
But the idea that there could be one single space, with very few rules, where everyone all meets together, has always been… a difficult concept to believe could work. The Mastodon/Fediverse setup of different communities, each with their own set of rules, where some servers agree to communicate across servers, is an interesting one that creates some really interesting incentives.
Mozilla has decided that they’re going to be upfront with how their instance will run, and they think that creating a welcoming community, rather than a shitposting battle royale, makes the most sense for them:
What’s most important to us is that the people who use our instance feel like their experience brings back more of what makes social great – and reduces the muck that has made it horrible.
Who knows how it will work? I think even taking such a strong stance won’t solve the impossibility problem, and they will still face very real moderation challenges should their instance start to scale. And, I think they’ll likely realize that figuring out who is violating these policies will still take a lot of very tricky line drawing, and people will get mad about where those lines are drawn.
But seeing more experiments and more attempts to make Mastodon useable for more people seems like a good experiment to try. And, I’m curious to see what a professionally run social media with a clear “no jackasses” policy looks like.
Filed Under: activitypub, content moderation, fediverse, mastodon
Companies: mozilla
Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options
from the the-decentralized-world dept
Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over again he makes ridiculous choices that have made the entire platform less welcoming for speech, more willing to obey government demands, and even when he finally comes around to realizing that what Twitter was doing before was a sensible approach, he reimplements it in the dumbest possible manner. It’s uncanny that one guy could be so bad at this.
There have been a bunch of attempts at filling the void left by an unstable and untrustworthy Twitter, and it’s been fascinating to watch how it’s all played out over these past six months. I’ve actually enjoyed playing around with various other options and exploring what they have to offer, so wanted to share a brief overview of current (and hopefully future options) for where people can go to get their Twitter-fix without it being on Twitter.
The Decentralized Leaders
Back in December, as I got comfortable with Mastodon, I was somewhat confused as to why anyone would spend the time and effort to invest in building up a new social graph on another centralized social media platform, which would just become subject to all of the same issues that Twitter and other centralized social media platforms had faced.
I still stand by that today, though now I think there are three really interesting decentralized social media protocols worth paying attention to. A decentralized protocol-based system is interesting for all the reasons I outlined in my paper a while back, so I won’t repeat them all here. But, it creates much better incentives, and avoids the possibility of one random jackass controlling everything. Some of them may have to deal with jackasses who have influence, but none can control the overall system, and just that fact alone is incentive for anyone prone to jackass-tendencies not to go full jackass, or people will… just route around them.
Here are the three most interesting decentralized projects:
ActivityPub/Fediverse/Mastodon: Over the last six months I’ve spent more time on Mastodon than anywhere else, and the community there is fantastic. I understand why some people complain about the onboarding process, or the lack of some features (text search and quote tweets being the two biggest). But, honestly, if you spend 15 minutes playing around with stuff, and follow a reasonable number of active accounts and (most importantly) start interacting and actually talking to people, it quickly becomes a very fun place.
Obviously, that only works if the communities you want to interact with are there, and for me, there’s definitely a critical mass of the kinds of accounts I find most interesting. There’s plenty of tech news, tech policy folks, and computer security folks. And, the conversations are much more engaging (it sucks up way more time than I used to use on Twitter because something about it seems to encourage more conversational setup than Twitter).
That said, the limitations are real. The learning curve aspect of it really seems to anger some people, and some of the early decisions, while there were reasons given for them, clearly are limiting some ability of the fediverse to reach that next level. It still can get there, and I’m excited about the companies who have embraced it, as well as the variety of really amazing clients that are now being offered, such as Elk and Phanpy both of which provide a more Twitter-like experience for those who want that, or Mastodeck, which provides a Tweetdeck-like experience.
There are also ActivityPub-compatible platforms that are not “Mastodon” but connect with Mastodon and actually fix some (but not all) of Mastodon’s limits. But, some of the concern is that people so associate the wider Fediverse with “Mastodon” that they don’t even realize you can sign up for services that interoperate with Mastodon, but which include tools like quote tweets and search. So, services like Calckey, for example, are building out some more user friendly features. It’s not Mastodon, but it feels like Mastodon with a better UI and interacts seamlessly with Mastodon.
Another “limitation” to Mastodon is its cultural norm against “algorithms.” I think this is somewhat misguided. I get why people don’t like the algorithms on centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but when done right, algorithms are super useful in making it easier for you to find more signal over noise. The problem has been who controls the algorithm and what are they tweaking it to do.
With Mastodon there are some 3rd party algorithms, and some of them are really useful. But a few others were shouted down, and shut down, by people who believe that there should never be any algorithms in Mastodon at all, and that’s unfortunate. In the early days, I would talk about some of the cooler Mastodon algorithms I’d been finding, but after a few them then were yelled at by a bunch of Mastodon users, I’ve generally decided it’s not worth promoting those useful tools, for fear that people yell at them to shut them down.
Bluesky: I started writing this post last week, and at the time, I was talking more about the theoretical possibilities for Bluesky, and why I’m really excited about where the project is heading. But over the last week, really, it went from being a tiny obscure platform a few people were testing to “the new hotness” and has been repeatedly trending on Twitter, as lots of people are checking it out, including some big names.
I’ve written a bunch about the project from when it launched, and when Elon completed his takeover of Twitter, I had jokingly sent someone at Bluesky a note asking if they might be able to code a little faster…
There’s almost no learning curve, and it does provide a very Twitter-like experience, though with some limitations, as you might expect from an early beta offering.
There are also a ton of misconceptions about Bluesky, which can be a little bit frustrating, but that is part of today’s ecosystem. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, it’s not a blockchain and is not built on a blockchain. Also, while Jack Dorsey provided the seed funding for it, Bluesky is not run by Dorsey, and both Dorsey and Bluesky CEO, Jay Graber, have been somewhat public about where they disagree on where they expected Bluesky to go, with Graber sticking to her vision and Jack focusing more on a different protocol (that one’s up next).
Also, while there are a growing number of folks joining it, it’s still an invite-only beta, and that’s deliberate, not to “build buzz” as some people assume, but because there still is a bunch of functionality that hasn’t been built yet, which the team knows they need to have before really opening the doors.
The team has been working like crazy on those features, including its federated setup, so that it’s truly decentralized (right now you can only use it through Bluesky’s own service). I’ve seen some people complain that making it federated will “ruin” it, but that’s almost entirely based on their experiences with ActivityPub federation, which does have some limits and is presented in a manner that confuses at least a certain segment of people who encounter it.
But there are ways to build federated systems that aren’t confusing. Anyone who uses email already recognizes this, perhaps unconsciously, because that’s a federated communication system.
Most importantly, the team at Bluesky know that this was a serious weakness of Mastodon, and are designing to make the federated part be less pronounced and something that the average user won’t need to care about, but which will allow for some really interesting developments.
The Bluesky team has also been quite open and upfront and willing to engage on these issues, and trying to find the right path forward. I know that some people remain annoyed that Bluesky built their own protocol, the AT Protocol, rather than adopting and building on ActivityPub, but the team behind Bluesky has been quite clear from the beginning that they considered all options on the table. Before she became CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber wrote the definitive exploration of decentralized social media networks back in 2020, and has laid out the pros and cons of nearly every approach.
While people may not understand why certain decisions are being made, it’s often because they haven’t deeply thought through all the pros and cons of every approach. Bluesky, from the beginning, has tried to build a setup that takes the best concepts of a distributed social media system, and build them in a way that minimizes the problems, limitations, and pain points that some have had with something like Mastodon.
Just as an example, Bluesky has been clear why there were limitations with ActivityPub that would limit how useful Bluesky could be:
Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user’s previous data.
Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).
Finally, I’ll just make quick notes on two “controversies” that have already hit Bluesky, and both of which I think are misguided. First, the service does not yet have a “block” feature, which is generally considered an important first option for safety of users on a social media platform. I’ve seen a lot of anger over this, and even people insisting to me that it proved that Bluesky was ill-prepared to run a social network.
But, that’s not true. Graber explained in a long thread that blocking will be introduced very soon, and the reason it wasn’t yet had nothing to do with them not prioritizing it, but rather because the underlying system is designed to be decentralized and federated, there are a ton of questions about how block works across multiple servers, that couldn’t be answered until the federation setup was ready, and that hasn’t been released just yet (though it will be soon).
They’re figuring this stuff out, and trying to do it right, rather than rush something half-assed. It’s a good approach and one that I find encouraging. Update: On Friday evening, a few hours after this article went up, Bluesky rolled out the block feature.
The second “controversy” that has popped up a few times in the last week is that their terms of service are full of scary-sounding boilerplate legal language that people regularly misunderstand, and then attribute the worst possible motives to the company. I mean, we’ve done posts on this exact thing before. It always happens.
No, Bluesky hasn’t banned screenshots. It’s not planning to take your artwork and sell it. Admittedly, some of the terms of service are clunky (and I think there are a couple of the terms that, in their present form, will run into trouble with the EU if they’re left in place). But, the company came out publicly last week and admitted these were quick boilerplate terms, and they had already begun working with lawyers on a complete rewrite that will be user friendly.
nostr: On this one, I can already hear some people groaning. If people thought Mastodon was too confusing, they’re not going to like nostr, as it seems to confuse people a lot more. In some ways, this feels ironic, because the amazingly cool part about nostr is just how freaking simple it is. From a technical standpoint, nostr is kind of beautiful in its simplicity. In talking about it with friends, I’ve had multiple people say that they were tempted to build tools (clients or otherwise) for nostr as an afternoon project, because it was just that simple.
Nostr isn’t federated like Bluesky or Mastodon. There aren’t distributed servers. Instead, it’s just a bunch of clients and relays, and using standard public/private key infrastructure (I know, I know, but keep reading), you can just publish and the content travels across relays to various clients.
It’s elegantly simple. And… it works. Mostly. It’s heavily dependent on what clients you’re using, but as noted above, it’s so easy to build a client that lots of people are, and some of them are proving to be quite featureful.
Of course, the differences in clients can also be confusing. Some let you delete, some don’t. Some have “likes,” some don’t. Some let you upload images, some don’t. Basically the simplicity of the protocol means that all of the features have to come at the client level, which can be a blessing and a curse. For a few months I was using one client, which looked nice, but really didn’t have many features, and it was confusing. Then I started playing around with some others, and began to realize why some people really like it.
And, there’s lots more development happening these days on it, including from some very thoughtful people who have been thinking about how to build a good decentralized social media app.
For most (especially non-techie) users, it’s probably not worth figuring out nostr yet. But the simplicity of the protocol, combined with the pretty active development going on, and some fun features I’ve seen on some of the clients, makes me think there could be something pretty cool there that shows up in the future.
This is the protocol that Jack Dorsey seems most interested in these days, and he spends a lot of time there (and, also just convinced his parents to join nostr as well), so even as he helped kick off Bluesky (and Twitter!) if you’re following where his interest lies, it’s clearly on nostr right now.
All three of these are fascinating to watch, as we’re seeing real efforts to build a decentralized/distributed social media ecosystem. I don’t think one of them has to “win.” I’d like to see all three (and others?) thrive, and they can learn from each other. Eventually we’ll see bridges linking them all together as well (some early versions of that have shown up with things like nostr-ActivityPub bridges, and there will be more).
There are, of course, a bunch of other attempts at such systems out there as well, with a bunch taking the “web3” approach with cryptocurrency and tokens being a big part of the deal. I’ve yet to see one that’s been all that interesting to me. There was Secure Scuttlebutt, which always was interesting, but also had some serious limitations, and it seems that nostr (which was partially inspired by Scuttlebutt) may just be a better overall approach to such a system.
I’m not big on prognostication as to where all this goes, but at a first pass, Bluesky seems to have the elements to become the most “mainstream” of these options, and the team does seem focused on that as a goal. Mastodon has been going through some changes, and I think that enough folks involved there realize that some of the earlier decisions may have turned out to have been wrong, and more hostile to new users, but I think they’re trying to fix some of that, not by copying what other services are doing, but implementing them in a more Mastodon-like way. Nostr is the most “out there” approach, but the enthusiasm and development still has me excited to see what unique solutions come out of it.
Centralized offerings: As I said, I’m a lot less interested in putting in the effort for another centralized offering. There are now a bunch, but they… all have real limitations. Post.news got lots of attention early, but… just feels too focused on news content to actually be all that useful. T2, by some former Twitter employees, is nice, and works, and looks like Twitter, but… is just another centralized clone. If I were them, I’d be looking to make use of Bluesky’s AT Protocol as soon as they can. People keep talking about Spoutible, but… the company has made some very odd early choices that make me not trust them to handle a social media system. Substack has its “Notes” feature of course, but I’ve written about that already.
Just sticking with Twitter: This has to be at least mentioned, as many people remain on Twitter, and certain communities don’t seem motivated enough to move. It still remains possible that somehow Twitter will stop making ridiculous decisions. But, the last six months is… well… not encouraging. Still, inertia is a powerful force and it can win.
Either way, this is a rapidly evolving space, and I’ve been really fascinated and encouraged by what’s happened over the past six months on Mastodon/ActivityPub, Bluesky, and even nostr. For all the talk of a lack of competition, we’re now seeing a ton, and competition leads to experimentation, and experimentation leads to innovation.
When we hit the one year mark of Musk’s Twitter takeover, I imagine the world of decentralized social media will have continued to evolve and improve, and I’m really excited to see where it all goes. For folks who are still on Twitter, you obviously can do what you want, but I will say that none of these services are that complicated, and it’s worth exploring the world out there. You just might find you like something.
Filed Under: activity pub, at protocol, decentralized social media, mastodon, nostr, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: bluesky, twitter
Lazy Reporters Claiming Fediverse Is ‘Slumping,’ Despite Massive Increase In Usage
from the lies,-damn-lies,-and-statistics dept
There’s been this weird series of articles lately, trying to frame the rapid growth of the fediverse (mainly Mastodon), as somehow now failing. It started last month, with the Guardian’s Josh Nicholas leaping in with a provocative headline: “Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around” and now Wired has a similar article, by Amanda Hoover, declaring “The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump.“
The issue, according to both articles, is that because a ton of people signed up to check out Mastodon in November and December as Elon Musk began his program of Musking up Twitter, and not all of them decided to stick around, that proves the site is a failure. Except, that’s wrong on so many levels.
Any site getting a big influx of users is going to have some number of them choose not to engage, especially something that’s new and different. But if you look at the actual retention rate for the fediverse, it’s astoundingly high. Looking at sites that track actual usage of the fediverse, we see that it went up quite a lot in November and December, and while it’s dipped in January, it’s still way above where it was pre-Musk takeover. Also, it’s worth noting that these stats apply to the entire fediverse, and not just Mastodon. While it’s common just to talk about Mastodon, the 1.4 million number that people discuss is just those on Mastodon, based on Mastodon’s own stats. But, many users move on to compatible platforms that don’t end up in that count, like Pleroma, Pixelfed, Misskey, Calckey, and the like. So, the numbers here show a topping off of active users around 4 million, and it currently being around 2.6 million, way, way above the ~600k before Musk’s takeover:
I’m not sure how going from 600k to 2.6 million in just a couple of months can be deemed “a slump.” It sure looks like pretty damn good retention overall. I mean, if we just look at Twitter, there is somewhere around 1.3 billion accounts, but only 368 million active users per month (or, 238 million monetizable daily active users) according to the last numbers pre-Musk. Would anyone say that those numbers prove Twitter was “slumping” because somewhere around a billion accounts are inactive on the platform?
Either way, actual usage of the fediverse continues to increase month by month, including through January, meaning that while some people signed up and never used it, those who are using it, are using it more and more. These are the kinds of things you’d think a journalist would cover in these articles, but they’re taking the lazy way out and simply looking at the topline number of how many people checked in once or twice and then didn’t stick around, while ignoring just how much the platform continues to grow and thrive.
There are plenty of things that the fediverse can do to improve, and the crazy thing is that many of those things are… happening, and happening quickly. Lately, there have been a lot of discussions about making the onboarding process much better, because too many people find it cumbersome. That’s fixable. And more and more developers have been moving over to Mastodon, and the launches of tons of new, easier to use clients is an exciting development as well.
Meanwhile, as EFF’s Ross Schulman rightly details, the comparisons to just Twitter are similarly misleading, as part of the value of the fediverse is not that it’s a “Twitter” clone, but that it can provide tons of useful services:
Where we disagree, is that Mastodon (as part of the Fediverse) does offer that in the form of a truly interoperable and portable social media presence. Characterizing Mastodon as a mere Twitter-clone overlooks this strength of the fediverse to be or become any social platform you can imagine. That’s the power of protocols. The fediverse as a whole is a micro-blogging site, as well as for sharing photos, videos, book lists and reading updates, and more.
Of course, inertia is always an issue. Getting people to move from one site to another never happens overnight. MySpace was so dominant that Facebook could never overtake it… until it did. Digg was dominant over Reddit. Until it wasn’t.
The fediverse might not ever get as big as these other sites, and it doesn’t need to. It’s already hit critical mass to be an extremely useful site, and the rate of development of new offerings and services to make it more useful over the last couple of months has been eye-opening. But the infatuation by the media with the belief that because it only retained a huge portion, and not all, of the people who jumped over to check it out… seems weird.
Filed Under: fediverse, mastodon, statistics
Elon’s New API Pricing Plan Seems Perfectly Designed… To Help Send More Users And Developers To Mastodon
from the thanks-Elon dept
Huh. It had actually felt like quite some time since Elon Musk had last done something so stupid as to send a new bunch of users to Mastodon. But, apparently he can’t go that long without helping to do so. Last night, I had actually started working on a story about how developers were increasingly moving from Twitter to Mastodon, following the ridiculously, poorly communicated decision to shutdown API access for companies building Twitter clients (from which many original Twitter innovations arose).
However, the API was still working for tons of other projects that relied on it, including various useful bots and services that rely on Twitter for sign-on. But, late last night, Elon’s Twitter announced that was all over, and there would no longer be any free use of the Twitter API:
This sudden announcement, with one week’s notice (which, I guess, beats the no notice at all given to client developers) has thrown a ton of projects into pure chaos. There are tons of useful tools that rely on the API. For a long time I used Tweetshelf to follow news links on Twitter. I’m wondering if they’ll be able to survive. BlockParty, which is one of the most useful tools on Twitter to enable users to avoid harassment and abuse, makes extensive use of the API, and I’m curious how they’re going to be able to handle this. There were all sorts of other useful bots, things for reporting earthquakes, for example, that aren’t likely willing to pay. Other tools, like various thread reader apps will also likely be impacted.
Twitter has had an enterprise paid version of its API already, but way more projects relied on and used the free API, and helped make Twitter way, way more useful. And most of those seem likely to shut down.
This may also include tools that use Twitter for sign-on. GovTrack, for example, is already warning users to change their login if they were using Twitter’s login on that site:
But, perhaps an even bigger impact may be on a vast array of academic and journalistic research that relied heavily on the access to the API. Just a few weeks ago, we had reported on a really useful study, done using the Twitter API, that found that Russian trolls on the site hadn’t really done much to impact the 2016 election.
One of the authors of that study had pointed out that this change by Elon is going to create pretty massive “collateral damage” for important research.
Of course, there’s a question as to how much of this is really “collateral damage” and about Elon’s crazed desperation for any new revenue stream he can find behind the couch cushions, and how much of this is actually about closing up the windows, and continuing to make Twitter less and less transparent… all while pretending he’s doing the opposite of that.
In the meantime, this should drive a lot of those developers, who were previously making Twitter more useful for free to move elsewhere. I’ve already seen multiple bot developers (the useful kinds, not the spammy kinds) say that they’re now in the process of moving those over to Mastodon.
And, already, many other developers had started to make the move. The decision to cut of third party clients had already done a lot to create this incentive.
Now, the developers of some Twitter clients are turning their attention to another upstart platform: Mastodon. This week, Tapbots, the studio behind Tweebot, released Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its longtime Twitter app. Matteo Villa, the developer behind Twitter app Fenix, is testing a Mastodon client of his own called Wooly. Junyu Kuang, the indie developer behind Twitter client Spring is working on a Mastodon app called Mona. Shihab Mehboob, developer of Twitter app Aviary, is close to launching a Mastodon client called Mammoth.
And it’s not just the tech press that’s noticing. The Houston Chronicle recently had a similar article about developers ditching Twitter for Mastodon.
Both of those articles were focused on client development, which has really exploded in the last month or so. But there has also been tremendous new development elsewhere that is making Mastodon increasingly useful (and user friendly). There are some great tools for algorithmic recommendations for posts, there are better and better tools for finding new users to follow. There have also been some cool new web clients that have shown up recently, including Elk and Mastodeck. There has also been tremendous new development on Mastodon-compatible alternatives, with just yesterday the latest version of Calckey being released (Calckey is a Mastodon-compatible alternative that has a really clean UI). And I know that others are working on more development in that area as well.
And all of that has really shown up in the last few weeks and months… while many other developers had stuck around on Twitter. But with Elon now closing down free access to the API, it makes you wonder why those developers would want to keep helping Elon when they can move over to Mastodon and continue to make it way more useful. Already, since Twitter announced these changes last night, there has been yet another influx of Twitter users to Mastodon, which seems to happen whenever Elon does something to drive people away.
Once again, this really does go completely against what Elon promised. He insisted he was going to “open source” things, but this is actually closing up shop. Jack Dorsey had directly told Elon that the best thing Twitter could do was to be more open to third party developers, as they’re the ones who help make Twitter better. Instead, Elon is driving them away. You could argue that he also promised to get rid of bots… and this seems likely to do that, but it’s quite a statement that he doesn’t realize just how many fun and useful bots there were on Twitter. His loss and Mastodon’s gain.
Filed Under: api, developers, mastodon, pricing, third party developers
Companies: twitter
Financial Times Sets Up Mastodon Server, Realizes Laws Exist (Which It Was Already Subject To), Pulls Down Mastodon Server
from the huh? dept
Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will serve up its own content, and also offer accounts to any of the company’s employees, should they choose to use them. Medium, the publication tool, has similarly set up its own Mastodon server as well. At some point, Techdirt is going to do that as well, though we’ve been waiting while a bunch of new developments and platforms are being built before committing to a specific plan.
However, recently, the Financial Times posted a very bizarre article in which it talks about how it had set up a Mastodon server for its FT Alphaville back in November, but has now decided to shut it down because, according to the headline “it was awful.” What’s kinda bizarre is that they clearly set it up without much thought, and admitted as much in their kickoff blog post, admitting they didn’t quite know what to do with it, and asking people if they had any ideas. They also clearly recognized that there are some potential liability questions about running your own social media platform, because they described it this way (note the strikethrough, which is in the original):
If you have a smart idea about how we could use our newfound
moderation liabilityplatform, please let us know.
Which is kinda why the reasoning for shutting down the platform… is somewhat incomprehensible. They basically don’t talk about any of the problems with actually running Mastodon. They outline all of the stupid policies in place (mostly in the UK) that make it scary to run a social media network. The “awfulness” seemed to have nothing to do with running the server, and a lot to do with how the UK (and other parts of the world) have really dreadful laws that suck if you want to setup a site that hosts third-party speech.
If anything, the decision to shut it down is a primary lesson in how important Section 230 is if we want social media to survive (and allow for smaller competitors to exist). While they say that running the Mastodon server was “more hassle than it’s worth,” what they really seem to mean is that the UK laws, both existing and those on the way, make it ridiculously burdensome to do this:
The legal side is all that again times a thousand. Take, for instance, the UK Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Diligent people have spent years figuring out how its imprecise wordings apply to media organisations. Do these same conclusions hold for a sort-of-but-not-really decentralised silo of user generated content? Dunno. The only place to find out for sure would be in court, and we’d really rather not.
Seems like the kinda thing that, I don’t know, a publication like the FT might have spoken out about in the years and months prior to the Investigatory Powers Act coming into effect?
Then there’s the defamation liability thing. Which, you know, is a big part of why Section 230 is so important in the US. This one paragraph alone should make it clear why the UK will never become a social media powerhouse:
Do Mastodon server owners wear any responsibility for their users’ defamations? It’s unlikely but, because libel involves judges, not impossible. Again, the value in finding out is outweighed by the cost of finding out.
They name some other laws as well:
What about GDPR? Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns? Electronic Commerce Regulations? CAN-SPAM? FTAV treats user data with a combination of disinterest and uninterest, but that’s not enough to guarantee compliance with all relevant global laws and regulations.
And laws to come:
And, look, it’s absolutely true that there are legal risks to running a Mastodon instance. EFF has put up a really fantastic legal primer for anyone looking to set up their own Mastodon server. And there are, certainly, some technical and logistical issues in doing it as well. And, basically all that says is that you shouldn’t set up a server on a whim.
But, what this really seems to demonstrate is the importance of good regulations like Section 230 that help make it possible for anyone to set up just such a server, as well as the horrific nature of UK laws like the Investigatory Powers Act and the upcoming Online Safety Bill, and how they make it next to impossible for there to ever be a UK-created social media platform.
But, in some ways, it’s even dumber, because… most of these laws already apply to FT and its website, because the FT… allows comments. Anyone who allows comments on their website already has a kind of social media offering already. And, indeed, some people raised that very point in the comments on this story.
The response by Bryce Elder… doesn’t make much sense. Yes, managing comments and the like can be somewhat painful and expensive, but that doesn’t respond to the simple point that all of the same legal concerns put forth as reasons to take down the Mastodon server… also apply to the comments. So why name all of those laws as making it “awful,” when your publication has already figured out how to deal with those same laws.
It really seems like the reality was that Bryce just didn’t want to run the Mastodon server any more, and rather than just say “I didn’t want to do this any more,” he decided to falsely claim “it was awful.” Yeah, maybe some UK laws are awful, and we can talk about that. But it’s not running a Mastodon server that’s awful.
Filed Under: alphaville, intermediary liability, investigatory powers bill, mastodon, online safety bill, section 230
Companies: financial times
Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started
from the time-to-go dept
Summary: Elon Musk has demonstrated contempt for free speech in general, and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter. He is also demonstrating why it is foolhardy for anyone to rely on centralized platforms to create and distribute vital information. Journalists — among many information providers and users — should move to decentralized systems where they have control of what they say and how they distribute it. And philanthropic organizations have a major role to play. Here is a way forward.
Near the end of 2022, Elon Musk issued an edict to the journalism community. Obey me, he said, or you will be banned from posting on Twitter.
This should have been a pivotal moment in media history — an inflection point when journalists realized how dangerous it is to put their fates in the hands of people who claim to revere free speech but use their power to control it. It should have been the moment when media companies decided to take back control of their social media presence.
A few journalists — principally the ones whose Twitter accounts were suspended or otherwise restricted — understood the threat. And several of the Big Journalism news organizations issued (feeble) protests.
Beyond that, thanks to a combination of journalistic cowardice, inertia and calculation, business as usual prevailed. The journalists whose accounts were fully restored are back to tweeting, though some remain banned and/or restricted. Their organizations never stopped using the platform even when their employees were being restricted.
Based on current evidence, then, Musk has won this battle: except for a few individuals, Big Journalism has acceded to his edicts.
Many journalism organizations and public entities, such as local governments, believe Twitter is essential because it’s a place people know they can turn to when there’s big news — and find information from “verified accounts” that (barring a hack) ensure the source is who it’s claiming to be. So, they tell themselves, they have to stick around. This isn’t just short-sighted. It’s foolish.
Musk’s antics could easily lead to the worst of all worlds for anyone who’s come to rely on Twitter distribution. If you have the slightest concern for the future of freedom of expression, he’s already shown his hypocrisy, such as his capricious decision (since rescinded, at least for now) to block even links to some competing social media services. And advertisers have appropriately fled a service where right-wing extremism has been given a major boost; where mass firings of key employees threaten the site’s technical stability; and where at least some formerly avid users (like me) have moved on.
It will be ironic, to put it mildly, if Twitter disintegrates despite journalists’ refusal to exercise their own free expression rights — forcing a mass, chaotic migration rather than the obviously better answer: Develop a Plan B, and use it as an escape hatch sooner than later.
All of which is why I implore the journalists and journalism organizations, above all at this crucial point, to rethink what they’re doing — and move starting today to reclaim independence. I also ask well-resourced outsiders to help make this happen, especially when it comes to the many journalists and news organizations that lack the bandwidth or money to do this themselves.
Even a “Good” Twitter is Risky
Suppose, against all odds, that Twitter somehow survives Musk’s predations and becomes a clean, well-lit place for respectful discourse. The risks don’t disappear. They’ll only grow. And they’ve been apparent for years.
The risks are endemic to the mega-corporate, scalable-or-nothing, highly centralized version of the Internet that has emerged in recent years, and we need to keep them in the forefront. At the top of the list: Any centralized platform is subject to the whims of the person or people who control it. This isn’t news to those who’ve been paying attention, and some of them have been warning about the dangers for years. In a way, Musk has done us a favor by making it crystal clear.
Mike Masnick, who’s been on the case for a long time now, recently spelled out in chapter and verse why it’s crazy to rely on centralized platforms. He looked at the current alternatives, with a major focus on “federated” systems like Mastodon, where many people and organizations can run servers that talk with each other — and, this is key, where users can’t be locked in. In the “fediverse,” we users can’t be controlled because we can move, anytime we wish, to a different server — and take our relationships with us.
I joined a Mastodon server (called an “instance” in Mastodon jargon) called “mastodon.social” — you can find me there at this URL: https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor — and my full username is @dangillmor@mastodon.social if you’re already in the broader community. Others in the journalism world have signed onto instances such as “journa.host” and “newsie.social” — and there are many, many more.
It’s way too early to know whether Mastodon and its underpinning, a protocol (technical rules of the road) called ActivityPub, is the ultimate way forward. There are risks with any online system, and the Mastodon community will face their share. I’ve been impressed with, and Mike Masnick’s thorough analysis highlights, the resilience Mastodon has demonstrated already.
But at least two things are clear. The risks of giving up your autonomy to billionaire sociopaths are in your face at this point. And it is not remotely too early for those who rely on Twitter to find alternatives they control.
How Journalism’s Migration Should Proceed
Habits are tough to break. Inertia is one of the most powerful barriers to progress. But we can, and we should, realize that making this transition is well worth the time and effort. The rewards will be so great that we’ll wonder one day how we could have gotten ourselves into a situation that required such a shift.
Fear of the unfamiliar feeds inertia. And Mastodon is — emphatically — not a clone of Twitter. It has some flaws, from my perspective, that I trust will be addressed sooner rather than later; and in part because it’s based on open-source software, the pace of improvement already looks spectacular to me.
Journalists have to overcome their own trepidation. If they give it some time, not a lot by any means, they’ll be more than comfortable enough that the somewhat understandable early-days urge to retreat back into the Twitter comfort zone will go away.
In other words, please just get on with it. You’ll be fine. Here’s a basic plan of action:
First: Organizations with sufficient financial and technical resources should create their own Mastodon instances. At the same time, smaller journalism organizations — especially the rapidly expanding collection of non-profit sites — should set up a co-operative network. (More on this below).
Second: Verify the identities and bona-fides of the journalists. One of Musk’s more ill-considered interventions at Twitter — turning the verified-user system into a giant swamp — made Mastodon an even more obvious refuge. I won’t get into details here, and maybe I’m missing something important, but it appears to be trivially easy to verify Mastodon accounts by connecting user accounts on Mastodon servers to the news organization’s existing web presence.
Third: For the time being, keep posting to Twitter (and the rest of their social media accounts). But journalists should be actively using those accounts to let their audiences know that the best places to find rapid-response posts also include their Mastodon accounts and, of course, their own websites — and that, someday in the near future, the Twitter feed will be replaced by Mastodon.
Fourth: Set a date for the cut-over — ideally in collaboration with their peers — not longer than six months from now. And when the day arrives, do it.
That’s not the end of the process, of course. Journalists will need to help their audiences use Mastodon, just as they themselves learned. Again, while there is a learning curve, and it isn’t the same as Twitter, it won’t take long for people to adjust. (Let’s be real: If people can use their computers after a massive operating system “upgrade”, Mastodon will be a snap.)
The word “collaboration” is key here. This is a job for the entire journalism craft/industry, which created critical mass on Twitter over the years by just showing up randomly and, at a certain point, turning the site into something resembling a central nervous system of news.
De-emphasizing Twitter, and ultimately leaving it, needs more organization. Musk is surely counting on media companies to stick around on the principle that, well, there’s no other game in town with the same critical mass. This is no longer true, if it ever was. (I’ve been told by news people that Facebook, in the days when it actively promoted news in users’ feeds, drove vastly more traffic to their sites than Twitter ever has.)
Collaboration in journalism is growing, but it should become second nature. If ever there was a time to get together and take back control of the craft’s work, it should be now. Not collaborating will give Musk and people like him leverage to divide and conquer. Even if it was difficult to make this transition, and it isn’t, the alternative is ceding control to sociopaths.
A Major Opportunity for Philanthropic Investment
I shouldn’t have to say this, but the leadership for a migration off Twitter to Mastodon should come from the organizations whose editors complained about Musk’s treatment of their journalists. It’s pathetic that most of them didn’t follow through with actions, not just words.
So who will? The obvious candidates are major philanthropic foundations and civic-minded wealthy individuals.
Last month, I sent a note to people I know at several philanthropies. I wrote, in part:
This would be the perfect time to fund what could easily be a self-sustaining cooperative that sets up and operates Mastodon “instances” (servers) on behalf of journalism organizations that could verify their own journalists. That would solve a lot of problems, and restore (some) genuine independence to the craft at a time when capricious media owners like Musk are challenging it.
We can debate whether the co-op business model is best-suited for a project like this, though I believe it’s ideal. What we shouldn’t debate is whether journalism and its defenders need to move, right away, to deal with an immediate problem in a way that would have major long-term benefits. Helping journalism regain the control it misguidedly gave away — and do it in a way that increases the supply of easy-to-find information that benefits the public — is plainly beneficial for everyone but media monopolists and misinformation purveyors.
Foundations, please step up now, while people still understand the need — and before journalists, whose attention spans are notoriously short, settle back into their short-sighted patterns.
Critical Masses
As noted earlier in this piece, it isn’t just journalists who’ve come to rely on Twitter. Birds of a feather on various social and professional topics have flocked together there. We all need to help ensure that “Black Twitter” and “Science Twitter” — and so many more — have a way forward, too. They have become a vital source of information not just for the wider public but within their own ranks (or that relatively small part of the public that uses Twitter, anyway). As Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis wrote recently, “Science Twitter needs a new home.”
Meanwhile, countless government agencies also use the birdsite as a vehicle for messaging of all kinds. In situations where people want the vital news — such as forest fires, storms, etc. — Twitter has become one of the default places to check.
They, too, can and should migrate to services like Mastodon. They should plan collaboratively to cut over to their own verified instances, in an orderly way that gives their constituents notice and time to get adjusted to the new system.
The federal government could lead, given its greater resources, but it will take a lot of work by a lot of people to get smaller governments and agencies to turn off the “free” websites they now support and migrate to places that have setup costs, however modest, and maintenance requirements.
Which makes the need for collaboration just as great, if not more so, when it comes to public agencies. Happily, governments at all levels have associations which they sometimes call “conferences” — such as the National Conference of State Legislatures — that might be appropriate organizers and hosts of collaborative Mastodon instances.
Philanthropies — especially community foundations — could play a vital role in re-creating critical masses beyond journalism. It would be a dazzling display of civic spirit, for example, if the Silicon Valley Community Foundation funded Mastodon installations for local governments and agencies. And what if American Association for the Advancement of Science offered support for moving that community, and its burgeoning audience, from the risky, centralized Twitter to more decentralized environs?
Get Started, Soon
The best time for journalists and others to have recognized the threat of centralized systems run by unreliable, untrustworthy dictators would have been years ago. The next best time is tomorrow.
Filed Under: control, elon musk, free speech, journalists, mastodon, social media
Companies: twitter
Serious Investors And A Web3 Takeover Have Come To The Mastodon World: Is That Good Or Bad?
from the Gmail-moment dept
In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.
That’s not the only danger for the Mastodon world. The sudden emergence of Mastodon as a popular alternative to Twitter has inevitably attracted the attention of people with lots of spare money looking to invest in the Next Big Thing. The German software developer Eugen Rochko, the person who created the Mastodon software, told the Financial Times (non-paywalled version on Ars Technica) that he had received offers from more than five US-based investors who were keen to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into his project:
But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”
Rochko runs one of the biggest Mastodon instances, mastodon.social (disclosure: it’s the one I use). Another big instance is pawoo.net:
Pawoo, operated from Japan since 2017, is the second largest instance of Mastodon. It has drawn users from all over the world including illustrators, anime fans, novelists, and music enthusiasts since its inception. Accumulating around 800K users, Pawoo has become a “place to enjoy creative activity and unfettered communication.” The Pawoo acquisition marks another milestone of the Mask team towards the building of a decentralized social network and a free, open internet.
That description is in a press release from Mask. Few people in the West have heard about pawoo.net, even if they use Mastodon. That’s because on mastodon.social and many other instances, access to pawoo.net is “limited” as a result of “inappropriate content”. The complex saga of why pawoo.net is mostly disconnected from the rest of the fediverse is described in a long post on the Ansuz blog, written by Matthew Skala. As the blog post explains, the “inappropriate content” of pawoo.net involves sexualized drawings of children, which are unacceptable and probably illegal in much of the West, but largely unproblematic in Japan, where the majority of pawoo.net’s users are based.
Rochko may not be interested in selling some or all of Mastodon and mastodon.social, but the purchase of pawoo.net underlines the fact that those running other servers may be willing to do so. Pawoo.net has been bought by Mask Network, which describes itself as bringing “privacy and benefits from Web3 to social media like Facebook & Twitter – with an open-sourced browser extension.” The roots of Mask Network are in the world of cryptocurrencies – it even has its own native token, Mask – so we may be about to see an infusion of Web3 ideas on this particular instance.
The federated nature of the Mastodon means that it is hard to stop this kind of experimentation and commercialization, even if bans are imposed by other instances that are against this shift. How all this works out over the coming months and years is one of the key issues facing the burgeoning world of Mastodon and ActivityPub.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon or Twitter.
Filed Under: activitypub, cryptocurrency, eugen rochko, fediverse, japan, mastodon, tokens, web3
Companies: google, mask network
Some Tricks To Making Mastodon Way More Useful
from the a-non-beginners-guide dept
It’s been interesting to watch over the last few months as tons of people have migrated from Twitter to Mastodon (or similar compatible ActivityPub-based social media platforms). I’ve noticed, however, that some people keep running into the same issues and challenges as they discover that Mastodon is different than what they’re used to with Twitter. There are a few tips and tricks I’ve been sharing with various people that seemed pretty broadly applicable, so I figured it was worth doing a post laying them out.
A couple of quick things to note: these are unlikely to be universal. It’s just a few of the things that I’ve found that take the Mastodon experience to a new, better, more useful level. In other words, yes, this is highly subjective. Also, some of the tools I’m discussing are relatively new, often developed by users who saw the need and decided to build something (again, this is something that’s nice about the open platform that enables anyone to see something that they feel can be improved… and improve it). This also means that it’s highly likely that there will be even more of these kinds of tools and add-ons from others in the near future, and they may surpass most of the suggestions here. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list.
Separately, there are a million “how to get started with Mastodon” posts and articles out there. If you’re brand new to Mastodon, I highly recommend checking those out first to get the basics down. This post is more about taking your Mastodoning to a new level. Perhaps the most comprehensive guide is found at Fedi.tips. A few other good beginner posts are Adam Field’s post on Medium, Dell Cameron’s guide at Gizmodo, Tamilore Oladipo’s guide at Buffer, Amanda Silberling’s guide at TechCrunch, and, finally, Noelle’s wonderful GuideToMastodon.com, which kicks off with the same advice I’ve given tons of people: DON’T PANIC. You’ll figure it out. Lots of people have and so will you.
All of those should give you a pretty good basis for understanding Mastodon, and (in particular) some of its differences from Twitter, which seem to be the things that trip people up the most.
Finding people to follow
My biggest “beginner” suggestion is to find and follow a few fairly active accounts, and then when they “boost” someone interesting, follow those people as well. If you’re trying to “migrate” from Twitter, there are a bunch of tools to try to find the people you follow there, including Fedifinder and Debirdify, but the one I found to have the cleanest interface, and the most useful (and allows one-click following) is Movetodon.
If you’re looking for new people to follow around a particular subject, there are a variety of lists out there, including Trunk, Fediverse.info, Fedi.Directory, and PressCheck.org (which verifies journalists, specifically).
A very cool tool I only recently discovered is Followgraph. You put in your Mastodon handle, it looks up all the people you follow and all the people they follow, and then recommends to you the people who lots of your followers follow, but you don’t… It’s pretty useful in surfacing people I might want to follow (though it also surfaces some people I know about but deliberately don’t want to follow).
I also, generally, recommend not cross posting between Twitter and Mastodon, but there are perfectly good reasons to ignore this suggestion. My thinking on it is that this is somewhere different, and you should learn to use it “natively.” Also, it feels like many people set up a cross-poster and then go off and ignore Mastodon, so their accounts are sort of zombie accounts.
Advanced view
This is probably the tip that is most well known and most commonly suggested for going from Mastodon beginner to expert. If you go into settings and click the box to “enable advanced web interface” then you end up with a multi-column interface.
For people who are familiar with Tweetdeck, the unfortunately long-neglected, multi-column Twitter app that initially made Twitter super useful, was purchased by Twitter, and then basically languished, that’s what you effectively get with the advanced web interface.
There are a few tricks to making this interface more useful as well. The left most column is for search (more on that in a bit) and posting. The right most column is basically the “active” column. This takes a little getting used to, but once you figure it out it makes sense. It can be the “getting started” menu (this is what it is when you first log in):
However, if you click on a particular post to see a thread or replies or whatnot, the post you click on takes over this column. This is a bit different from Twitter/Tweetdeck, but kinda makes sense once you get used to it, as it leaves your other columns in place. To get back to the menu, you can click the “hamburger” menu button that is in the left-most column. It may be a little confusing to have to click something in the left-most column to get the right-most column to go back to the menu, but (again) if you think of the right-most column as the “active” column, it makes sense.
Make use of lists
This is a useful feature whether or not you use the advanced view on Mastodon. If you follow enough people that there is a relatively active flow of new posts, I’ve found that lists are a super useful way to focus in on more interesting stuff, without it becoming overwhelming. This is the same thing that I did with Twitter in the early days, creating a series of “lists” of users, so I could narrow down what I’m following for specific purposes.
In my case, I’ve created four lists: “must read,” “journalism,” “law,” and “tech.” These should be somewhat self-explanatory, but I put the accounts I want to make sure I don’t miss into “must read” and those are usually the first thing I’ll check when checking in on Mastodon. Then I’ll bounce between the other lists and the home feed (of everyone I follow). I do not use either the federated feed or the local feed, as they are (for me) firehoses of noise. On some smaller, more focused, servers, I think the local feed can be quite useful, but for most major servers, it’s mostly useless.
I have seen some new Mastodon users focus on the local and federated feeds, and then get frustrated. I think it’s generally best to ignore the federated feed entirely, and only use the local feed on more tight-knit focused servers.
In the advanced web view, lists are even more powerful, as you can pin them and see all of them next to each other. This is also a little confusing at first, but if you create a list, and then access it (via the “getting started menu” where you click on “lists” and then the list of your choice), you then need to “pin” the list to have it show permanently in the advanced web view. You do this by clicking the slider settings button, followed by the “pin” button:
Once “pinned” you can then move the column left or right in the advanced view with the arrow buttons:
The list interface in Mastodon isn’t the best, and I highly recommend the Mastodon List Manager app, written by Andrew Beers. It has a somewhat simple interface, but it works so much better than the built in list interface. Beers’ app shows all of the people you follow in a giant list, and then puts any list (and you can create new ones directly in the interface) as a kind of grid next to the names of those you follow. You can then check off what lists (if any) you want to put the people you follow onto. It’s very simple, and it just works (for what it’s worth, I ran into a few bugs with it, and Andrew was quite helpful in getting them sorted out and fixed).
This setup makes it super easy to create lists and assign people you follow to various lists. It’s way easier than Mastodon’s built in setup.
There are some limitations to lists. Currently, (unlike Twitter) there really isn’t a way to make your list “public” or to share it. You can export the list as a CSV and in theory share that, but it’s much more complicated than Twitter’s ability to make a list public and have other people follow it. Also, I’ve seen a number of people complain that (again, unlike Twitter) you can’t add users to lists who you don’t follow. I’ve never used that feature on Twitter myself as the people I put on lists are always people I already follow, but some people like to do that to keep tabs on certain people/topics without having to “follow” them in their main feed.
Better UI options
Even as useful and helpful as the advanced web UI is, there are alternative interfaces as well. Most of the really unique efforts are on mobile, and not with the “official” Mastodon apps. I highly recommend checking out a few such apps to figure out what works for you. I use Tusky on Android and find that it works for me, but I hear good things about many other options. And, it sounds as though a bunch of developers are working on even nicer iOS apps as well (the folks who made the popular Tweetbot for Twitter are working on one called Ivory that lots of people are talking about).
However, for regular desktop use there are some additional options as well. I’ve played around with Sengi, Whalebird, TheDesk, and Hyperspace, and none of them really did much for me, to be honest. The advanced web interface struck me as better for me, personally, than any of those apps.
However, there is one other interface that I really like: Pinafore.social. It is not a downloadable desktop client like those above, rather it’s simply an alternative web interface for your existing Mastodon account, that is very clean, and very simple. It has a Twitter-like feel to it, and the site is quick and responsive. If you like a very clean interface better than a more cluttered one, you may like Pinafore quite a lot. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my account:
You can access your notifications or your lists (via the “Community” tab) and it’s all quite nice. I use it probably 30% of the time, though I still use the advanced web interface more of the time. However, when that gets overwhelming, sometimes it’s nice to just switch over to Pinafore and have the cleaner interface.
In an ideal world, I’d love to see what Pinafore’s developer, Nolan Lawson, would do if he created an “advanced web view” version of Pinafore, but on the site he claims it’s not on the roadmap to create a multi-column view version (though I still wish someone else might take the idea and run with it).
This is another area that I’m hoping we’ll see a lot more development in over the next few months, as it’s a wide open space, and the nice thing about such an open system is that anyone can design an interface or app for it.
Extensions
There are some really useful browser extensions that make Mastodon much more useful. I know that some people shy away from browser extensions, especially as they may represent a security risk. But if you’re okay with it (and the main one I’m recommending makes its source code available for people to review), they make things quite useful.
The main extension I recommend is FediAct. One complaint I’ve seen from some users is that if you end up on a Mastodon post on a different server, it’s a little bit complicated to interact with it. This is where the nature of federation feels a little complicated, though it’s not that difficult once you understand it. If you view content from other servers through your own server, you can easily interact with it, because that content has effectively been copied over to your server, and your interactions link back with the original.
However, if you end up on a different server entirely, that server doesn’t know you’re logged into a different federated server, and therefore can’t interact directly. Instead, you have a couple of choices on how to interact, with the most basic one being that when you click to do something, it will ask you to indicate your own Mastodon instance address before effectively moving you over to interact with it on your own server. It’s clunky and a little bit of a nuisance.
Apparently, there was a period of time where Mastodon had built in tools to get around that, but people quickly realized that’s a pretty big security problem, as you’re effectively opening up a cross site scripting hole.
FediAct, however, allows you to do this while controlling it directly in your browser, and making Mastodon work the way most people think it should work. You plug your own instance into the extension, and then if you end up on a different server, you can still like and boost posts just like you could on your own server. It works and is nice and solves one of the bigger headaches people have with Mastodon’s federated setup.
There’s a separate extension called Roam that some people have recommended, which does some of the same things as FediAct regarding interacting with people on other servers. It also has a bunch of other features, including making it easier to post to Mastodon from anywhere, and to schedule posts to show up at a later date. It’s got a very clean interface and looks nice, but I haven’t really done much with it so far.
Hashtags
One of the things people often remind newbies on Mastodon about is that there is no text search: just users and hashtags. Some people find this frustrating (perhaps for good reason), but it does encourage people to make better use of hashtags (something I often still forget to do). That said, there is a nice (relatively new) feature on Mastodon: the ability to follow hashtags. If you find a hashtag that you want to follow, you can follow it just like you would follow a person:
This can be useful if you want to follow a particular topic more than just a few individuals who tweet about that topic. Unfortunately, it appears you cannot yet add hashtags to lists, which would be really helpful and hopefully will be an upgrade at some point soon.
Alternative platforms
As lots of people will remind you, Mastodon is just one implementation for ActivityPub, and there are lots of others. Some of those are designed to create totally different services (like PeerTube and PixelFed), but some of them are just alternative, but usually compatible, takes on creating a microblogging setup. Some of these are forks of Mastodon’s open source code, whereas others appear to be built separately from the ground up, but still made compatible (somewhat) with Mastodon, so you can still follow and communicate with the folks rushing to Mastodon while potentially actually not using Mastodon at all.
There are some forks that are more minor changes to Mastodon, like Hometown and Glitch. Hometown makes very minor changes to Mastodon with things like better list management and better rendering of rich text. Glitch adds a lot more like, better formatting tools, hiding follower counts, a better threaded mode and more.
Then there are just generally alternative takes on microblogging that either are built on or cooperate with ActivityPub. Some of these are more lightweight than Mastodon, and many have more features. This includes things like Pleroma, friendi.ca, and Misskey (which also has forks like Calckey and FoundKey). There are a bunch of other ones as well, and each has some different features, including some features or UI options that people feel are missing from Mastodon.
If you’re finding that Mastodon just isn’t doing it for you, it might be worth looking at the feature sets and UIs of these other platforms to see if they’re more your speed. For the most part, you’ll still be able to communicate with everyone on Mastodon… just via a non-Mastodon server (though sometimes they still call themselves Mastodon, just because).
There are, also, instances that have changed the feature set directly. For example, while the default Mastodon post is limited to 500 characters, there are a bunch of servers that have expanded that. For example, I’m pretty sure that infosec.exchange (a popular instance for the infosec crowd, obviously, that I believe is running the Glitch fork) allows for posts up to 11,000 characters. Or there’s qoto.org, which basically would let you post a novella with a limit of 65,535 characters. It has also implemented quote tweet functionality (all of the “key” forks have this as well), rich text, and actual full text search.
In short, even if there are features you think are missing from Mastodon itself, there may be other instances that have already implemented them, or if you’re technically proficient, you may explore setting up your own alternative instance.
One thing to note: there are (reasonable) complaints from people on smaller instances that some of those may not function as well, as the federated nature of Mastodon means that certain content is effectively excluded from those servers. This creates some problems, and while there are some attempts to solve them (with things like relays) there definitely are some downsides to joining a tiny instance. Of course there are some downsides to joining a giant instance as well. Once again, hopefully these are solvable problems, but did want to flag it for people rushing off to join different instances.
Conclusion
Again, this is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but it does show a bunch of tools, features, and services that I’ve found useful in getting around some of the limitations of Matodon that seem to frustrate some users, and to make this open, federated, social network much more useful.
Filed Under: activitypub, guide, mastodon, tips and tricks, tools
Elon Musk’s Biggest Success Story: Convincing People To Try Out An Open, Distributed Social Network
from the Elon-Musk-is-underpants-gnomes dept
A few months ago, I attended a wonderful conference put on by the “Global Freedom of Expression” program at Columbia University discussing decentralized social media and regulations around social media. One of the speakers, Alison McCauley from Unfinished Labs, gave a very interesting presentation on the first day of the conference, October 3rd, (which kindly praised my Protocols, Not Platforms paper), talking about how the world world would eventually move to decentralized social media. I found one slide in the presentation particularly interesting:
Even as it showed exactly what I think would be good for the world, to move away from the internet giants to a more open, decentralized, protocol-based world, I’ve spent years thinking through all the reasons that seemed unlikely to happen. So this chart seemed a bit too… underpants gnomes for me.
It’s great to put “events that trigger disillusion” into the slide, but they certainly felt like that giant Phase 2 “**?**” in the underpants gnome project.
Lots of people had been saying for years that privacy scandals or other scandals would trigger the grand awakening, but I’d yet to see anything actually happen, and so I thought that if you were to put that into a slide, it seemed like we needed a deeper discussion on what would actually make people get disillusioned. Because very little seemed to have worked to date.
The very next day, while we were at the second day of the conference, Elon Musk announced that he was no longer trying to get out of the deal to buy Twitter, and would go forward with the acquisition.
And while that prompted an immediate hallway discussion with some other conference attendees on what available alternatives there were that could handle an influx of folks, I still didn’t quite expect things to play out as they have. I’ve already wrote about how I’ve come around to now realizing that I’m just not that interested in centralized platforms, after seeing (1) how much worse Elon has made Twitter in just a short while and (2) how quickly Mastodon grew and adapted.
Others are noticing as well. NBC has a somewhat snarkily titled article, noting that Elon Musk is growing a social network — just not the one he expected. It highlights how Mastodon’s recent surge in growth is almost entirely driven by Musk’s whimsically stupid (and quite often hypocritical) decision making. From the article:
Basically, each time Musk does something stupid, such as banning links to Mastodon, it just… drives more people to Mastodon.
Elon Musk has become a one-man “events that trigger disillusion.” And it’s kind of incredible given all of the previous events and nonsense that failed to do so.
Mastodon-powered sites averaged about 130 new sign-ups an hour from Oct. 1 to Oct. 26. The number jumped to 2,000 an hour after Musk took control of Twitter on Oct. 28. Sign-ups rose to more than 5,000 an hour after Twitter began mass layoffs a week later, and they peaked at almost 10,000 an hour after employees resigned en masse following an email ultimatum Nov. 17.
New sign-ups spiked again in mid-December, when Twitter suspended journalists who had been reporting on Musk and the company, and again when Twitter abruptly banned users from sharing links to their profiles on other major social networks.
It makes you realize just how random some of this is. Obviously, it’s not over yet. Many, many people still believe that Musk will right the Twitter ship and everything will be fine. Or that Mastodon’s growth will hit limits in the near future. But, the service has grown by leaps and bounds and has become incredibly useful. I’ve almost entirely stopped checking Twitter when just a couple months ago, Twitter was my main way of keeping up with the news.
This isn’t the kind of “disruption” we usually talk about in Silicon Valley, but it certainly is… disruptive.
Filed Under: disruption, elon musk, mastodon, underpants gnomes
Companies: twitter