- Mastodon’s userbase milestone;
- I am once again asking you to move to Mastodon.
I don’t care if tooting on Mastodon sounds like a Nickelodeon tween sitcom’s answer to posting on X. On an internet full of undead platforms – killed through enshittification, yet they amble on anyways – Mastodon’s vital signs stand apart as a vibrant spark. If a recent milestone’s anything to go by, it’s alive and kicking (re: Erik Uden):
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/112116625558034989
15 million users does not a “Twitter clone that’ll be forgotten about in 2 months” make. By the same token, this has not been an overnight sensation. Of course the Wario cosplayer’s buying Twitter had people flying for the exits at fever pitch; Mastodon’s growth plodded along at a snail’s place for the better half of a decade. But, in my opinion, what’s caused this acceleration more than anything is how well Mastodon works in building communities – and how it fails.
You, reading this; you, still stuck on that one platform with your friends and have to deal with more odious content than you ought to; Mastodon is your platform. You don’t have to put up with that shit on Mastodon. To understand why, let’s turn back the clock to the old, good internet, and then revisit X, since it’s Mastodon’s closest privately-owned equivalent.
Contrary to what we might expect nowadays, one of the founding principles of the World Wide Web – a truth which it held to be self-evident – was to promise a network where willing senders could cast their creations, and have them stick around long enough that potential willing receivers may find it after the fact. At its most basic, this is the end-to-end principle.
I’m not old enough to remember when most forms of communication were captured by powerful, near-monolithic middlemen. When the web first hit the scene, it promised disintermediation, and openness. There was nothing else like it. That’s what made it so good.
As always, I must rely on Cory Doctorow’s 30-year knowledge advantage on Shit Big Tech Thinks It Gets Away With:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/
As a system, the web intended to disintermediate. Like all systems, if an attacker can find a flaw, it can be exploited, and thus, the system can be hacked. On the face of it, a system designed to disintermediate is not immune to reintermediation. There is a flaw in the end-to-end principle, outlined in a wonderful way by Aaron Cope:
https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful
Importantly, being present on the web was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all.
As more and more people put things online, the value of the web as a tool for knowledge, communication, etc. increased. There comes a point, however, where there’s so much stuff out there that it becomes too cumbersome to sort it out yourself. Enter social media siloes. They proffered a solution: sign up for our service, tell us who your friends are, and we will ensure that your posts reach their eyeballs (and vice versa). The best part? You don’t have to host a thing. It’s free.
Free as in, gratis, sure. But free as in liberty? Libre? Not on your nellie. I said platforms today are undead. They’re very much like vampires – once you invite one in, try evicting it. The dewey-eyed promises of free platforms to find your audience have given way to platform design that lumps everyone in with everyone else, and makes it as difficult to leave as possible without sacrificing all of your connections.
The worst part of this reintermediation is that Big Tech platforms haven’t been particularly good at upholding their end of the bargain. You’d think that, with all their money and eyeballs, you could throw enough of each to solve problems like, “Why am I not seeing videos from creators I’ve subscribed to on YouTube2?” Or, “Why is my For You tab filled with shit?“
This is a very real problem, despite every ounce of cynicism in your body telling you it’s made up. If you’ve ever woken up, checked Twitter, and immediately thought, “God, I hate this platform, but I can’t leave,” you have been struck by a collective action problem:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/14/wash-that-x-site-outta-our-hair/
Simply put: It’s so hard to leave a platform because you and your followers hold each other hostage. When it’s you and a group of strangers eyeing the next bus, everyone expects each other to act in reasonable fashion, and a queue is formed without much hassle. Collective action seems easy here. But when it’s your friends – say, trying to make consensus on where to eat – it’s a nightmare. It’s collective action on Dante Must Die mode.
Yet, as I outlined in the previous Brologue above, statisticians can determine how easy it is for your group to pivot based on its size, and how densely connected everyone is. Even if you’re one out of a handful, declaring your departure does make a difference:
https://fediversereport.com/study-on-the-twitter-migration/
The strongest argument, in my opinion, for why you should move to Mastodon, lands us squarely in the hotbed that is the online debate over free speech. Federation lets you reach the people you want to reach, and also denies others from reaching you if you don’t want to hear from them.
Mastodon is software, and not a platform: anyone can host their own instance with time/resources, and anyone does. As an example, Donald Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, is built on Mastodon. That said, I’ve never seen a single Truth from a Truth Socialite, because geekdom.social, AFAIK, blocks Truth Social. If a user of geekdom.social disagrees, they can export their posts and list of followers elsewhere, with nothing else being sacrificed.
On X, all of this is impossible. Whenever someone is banned, regardless of their political alignment, there always follows cries of deplatforming, censorship, and so on. Even if it’s someone whose politics we totally disagree with, the worst thing one can do is fall into the trap of schismogenesis, and say that the ban was a good thing. A jailor should not become your vanguard just because they have the unaccountable power to ban someone you don’t like.
You can’t say “orange” to Elon Musk if you continue to use his platform. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Or Jack Dorsey, or or or or… But you can certainly say “orange” to 4SS_P4NC4K3S_DICKSNSHIT for banning any hot topic because they don’t like it, and move your business elsewhere.
X is one intermediary – Mastodon is many. By design, you can’t get deplatformed on Mastodon the same way you can on Twitter. Your posts will always reach those who want to hear from you. If you, say, run an instance for fans of the Harry Potter books, with a zero-tolerance policy towards transphobia, anyone who disagrees and says their opinions are simply being ‘gender critical’ can establish a rival instance where such views are tolerated. Everyone wins. No-one’s being censored here.
Maybe you jumped the trend and gave Threads/Bluesky a try, and perhaps you’ll agree when I say that they are the same shit from the same asshole. It’s federation in name only:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon
It doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads, for instance, and you can’t move your account between services.
Read: “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be federating to let our own users leave:”
“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying [Instagarm] to prevent them from competing with us.”
Mark Zuckerberg, caught in 4K saying that competition is for losers.
We’ve been burned on this before. Apple’s iChat (the precursor to iMessage) used to support open-source, non-Apple protocols like Jabber and XMPP. Then they pulled the rug on developers and gave them the Inward Singing rant:
It’s called ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,’ and it’s described here by Mike McCue as a tragedy in three acts:
https://flipboard.social/@mike/110002535044533438
If pivoting is a matter of argumentum ad populum, as it’s so often framed, then I’m sorry, but 15 million tooters (and counting!) can’t be wrong. I have friends who are still on Twitter who can’t move because their friends are on Twitter:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/
You’re no fans of how the Wario cosplayer has speedrun the enshittification of X in 0.5x A presses. I just want to know what it is I need to do to help get you all set up on Mastodon. I like the idea of a Web that isn’t dominated by five giant websites, each filled with screenshots and text from the other four:
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
I think you might, too. Look, this isn’t a massive deep-dive on Mastodon – there’s so much more I’d like to say – but whatever queries you might have, I’m here to help. I think it’s a better solution to the big issues in social media spaces today, and a step in the right direction towards a fairer internet.
Here’s to another 15 million!
- Image credit: https://geekdom.social/@mastodonusercount@mastodon.social/112116814836144770 ↩︎
- I briefly move away from the mic to breathe and tell you that, on Android, NewPipe solves all your problems by being a not-shit YouTube client. It pulls directly from Google’s video API. How Google stops this, I’m not sure. DRM, probably? If it starts twiddling with an API, there will be furore. ↩︎
Fifteen Million Tooters is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.