This is my article that was published in Polish at MyApple.pl four years ago. I am republishing it here for sake of better sharing, and I still believe the text is still up-to-date.
Social networks have dominated the current web. For many, the internet ends with Facebook and Twitter, which the owners and administrators of these websites use or try to use to their advantage. In the case of the former, sometimes I get the impression that we, the users, are just a kind of farm animals (not to use a more blunt word), which are milked not from milk, but from personal data and fed with specially profiled fodder composed of advertising pulp. In recent years, it has turned out that Facebook users’ experts have skillfully added appropriate political messages to this mush.
Twitter was a very different service for me for many years. First of all, as I wrote many times on the pages of MyApple, it was built by a community of enthusiasts, although from the beginning it was a private property. Simple and direct way of communication encouraged the exchange of opinions, quick discussions. Developers were building new applications with new features, which were later adopted by Twitter itself. Twitter’s problem from the beginning was that its management didn’t know how to make money on it — investors, who put their funds in, wanted and still want to take more out of the service. So Twitter had to start making money from ads. I think the community that actually created the service would have successfully adapted to this.
Twitter, however, has longed to be Facebook. Recent limitations in the API make largely useless many applications whose creators for years have actually created this social network (the authors of some have already ended their development and removed them from the stores). You can no longer preview activity in Tweetbot and other programs (although this feature is available in Twitter’s mobile app), there is no live streaming of tweets (which you can still do without). I’m convinced that soon Twitter will limit its API in such a way as to eventually kill all third-party applications. Of course, management explains that the features that were culled were only used by a handful of users. If it was indeed a handful, Twitter could have shut down on these external programs years ago. Clearly they are still a sizable group, though they are certainly in the minority. The problem is that the people who made up the Twitter community five or more years ago are no longer the target audience. The Internet itself is something completely different and — as I wrote — for many it is limited to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, where the number of followers counts (which some bloggers and politicians like to brag about sometimes). For enthusiasts, creative people who don’t think only about promotion, there is no more room on the Internet. At least it would seem so at first glance. Even I, who felt very comfortable on Twitter for years, some time ago started thinking about moving to a more neutral and free place on the web, where users are not just the aforementioned farm animals.
I was obviously looking for a place similar to Twitter, where I would feel almost like I was in my online home, where I would find similar features, news, etc. It turns out that there is such a place in this social galaxy that is the current web. If Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are the center of this galaxy, the place in question is its definite fringe. It reminds me a bit of Star Wars, where rebels, free people, but also all sorts of smugglers and criminals hid on the outskirts of that distant galaxy.
It is on these fringes of the social internet that Mastodon functions. And while it resembles Twitter, it is not simply a social network in the sense that Twitter or Facebook are. Mastodon is just an engine and applications dedicated to it and still being developed. You can put this engine on your own site and create a new instance of it, being an independent social network similar to Twitter. It’s a bit like Wordpress, which is a blog engine that you can install on your server and start publishing your own content on it.
Mastodon instances tend to focus around selected topics, e.g. technology, language, etc. There are also more general instances like mastodon.social, where you can find me. Each of these instances is like an alternative Twitter.
Yes, but if everyone can create an instance, and therefore such an alternative Twitter, which one to choose and on which of them are our friends? What’s worse, some of them may be empty. I admit that I also found it hard to grasp at first, and even alienated myself from Mastodon for a while. Instances like planets in the SF world can form federations. This allows a user registered in one instance to follow users registered in other instances (planets), just like on Twitter. Of course, this does not mean that all instances belong to such a general federation. There are some that don’t belong to it or create their own, smaller ones. Often the rules and moderation policy of a federation determines which instance does or does not belong to it. Many of the large federations and instances block hate speech, far-right or even neo-fascist content, while others allow it. There’s a lot to choose from in the SF world on the edge of the galaxy.
Each instance is a planet of sorts, so it has its own Local timeline. This can initially be difficult for a Twitter expat to understand. On it, you can see all the messages (toots, or trumpets — a mastodon is, after all, a variety of mammoth, which like any elephant has a trunk) sent by users registered in a given instance. For the larger ones, where thousands or tens of thousands of users are registered, these are usually unusable. For smaller, themed instances, they are a kind of agora, a discussion club. We don’t have to keep track of all the users from a given thematic instance, it’s enough to look at its local time list, where we are rather sure to find the news (toots) that interests us.
Due to the independence of these instances, even those belonging to a federation, a user is described in Mastodon not only by a nickname, but also by an instance. This also implies something that Twitter expats will certainly not like — each instance can have its own user with a given nickname (nickname). And so mackozer@mastodon.social and mackozer@mastodon.technology are two separate accounts (both belong to me, of course). Mastodon is also often compared to email services — no matter if our email account is Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or maintained in our own domain, we can still communicate with each other. Again, mackozer accounts on Gmail or on Yahoo are two completely different entities.
So it is difficult to build an account on the edge of the galaxy with a very unique nickname and tens of thousands of followers. Certainly it is worth registering accounts under your nickname on several instances that interest us. However, there is no need to try to do it all. Instances are hundreds, if not thousands. This of course raises a problem, someone can impersonate us by registering an account on another instance, which administrators treat such behavior quite loosely. Unfortunately, these are the glories and shadows of the edges of the social Internet.
Of course, there is Twitter’s well-known private timeline, where messages only appear from users you follow. I have to admit, there’s already starting to be a lot of activity on mine.
There’s also a notifications view for when you’ve bumped or liked a particular message, and for when we’ve been mentioned or replied to publicly. Mastodon offers more choice when it comes to the reach of the messages you send. They can be public — visible to everyone and available on an instance’s local timeline, unlisted — public but not visible on the local timeline, private — visible only to people who follow the author (the equivalent of private Twitter accounts), and targeted directly to a given user and visible only to that user (direct message). Mastodon messages, however, offer much more. You can add a content warning to them — for example, if you publish some controversial material or photos.
Mastodon also offers other features well known to Twitter users, such as blocking or muting selected users, and the ability to create thematic lists.
nteresting is also the fact that the whole project with these main as well as other instances is maintained by user donations. It is not a company, there is no special development strategy here. Each instance is a different administrator and its own funding strategy, usually based on various forms of patronage. However, there are instances that can be accessed by users who pay a kind of subscription. I also encountered an attempt by some administrators to plug in copiers using the power of users’ computers, but these attempts aroused and will certainly raise a lot of controversy in the future.
Mastodon also does not analyze its users. There are no trackers, ads or plugged-in traffic analytics, as is the case with Twitter. The growing number of users will also increase the cost of maintaining servers of particular instances. I wonder if crowdfunding will be enough to do that.
Of course, the success of this project is primarily determined by the strength of its user community. If a potential Twitter emigrant doesn’t have someone to talk to and someone to follow there, they’ll go back to where they came from pretty quickly.
Of course I’m not going to leave Twitter, there is still a huge group of people who follow me and who I follow. My social media activity is now divided between the center and the fringes of the galaxy.
