Thoughts on Mastodon
While I have used Mastodon^ before, it never really caught on for me, for some reason. Either I didn't yet follow the right people or I was too fed up with social networks in general to dig in.
A few weeks ago, that changed for me.
Mastodon makes me feel kind of hopeful, because it reminds me of what social networks used to be, _sans_ the toxicity and the constant polarizing defensiveness that is so common these days. In other words, it feels a lot like Twitter in 2013, when people where still excited about having genuine conversations with each other.
Perhaps the world was also not the same back then but at least for now, the community on Mastodon does a pretty solid job of replicating that environment.
Thoughts
By now, I am starting to get a better feel of things and the wider Fediverse ecosystem and as such, I jotted down a few thoughts. These are not really edited much from their raw form, as I wanted to convey a "first impressions", more than anything.
Note: some topics such as privacy, moderation and the use of CW's have been covered many times by lots^ of people^ who can explain it better than I can, so I won't be going into that here.
How Social Media Changes Us
Spending time on Mastodon made me re-evaluate how I approach social media. I realized that there is often this strange dynamic going on where, as time goes, I started to care about what kind of posts my followers would like to see. It started off with a true representation of self, and evolved into a performance of sorts. The more followers I got, the worse this became.
Not only that, but there was an element of defensiveness to the whole experience as well, as if with every interaction, I would expect snarky reactions, extreme responses, people taking things out of context, and so on.
This altered the way I was on social media to such a degree that I'm not sure if some of my friends would recognize the social media version of me. It felt like a stage performance, but one where I was afraid to be myself. I'd be too neutral and careful not to say the wrong thing.
**In other words, bland.**
If anything, I vowed to change this on Mastodon and be more true to myself. Drop the defensiveness, the irony, and just be who I am. Not everyone will like that but you know what: that's fine.
As Steve Yegge^ once said:
(...) to be successful in writing, you should pick one person and write just for that person. Forget for the moment that other people will be reading what you write, and just write as if you're talking to that one person.
He was talking about writing blogs but imho, the same goes for writing content on a platform like Mastodon. Luckily, Mastodon makes this easier in a number of ways:
- Mastodon is anti-viral, by design. There is no timeline algorithm, there are no "quoted" posts, no full-text search. Favoriting or boosting posts does nothing to the ranking of that post.
- The people who have been on Mastodon for a long time, have established a culture of anti-virality, actively blocking features that would promote amplifying speech.
- Culture and rules are determined by the instance you choose. Pick a good instance and you'll likely get along with the people on that instance.
- Very customizable notification options, where you can choose to be notified for only mentions, or also boosts and favourites, or anything in between.
- A UI (both on mobile and on web) where you can choose to ignore favourites and boost counts. This all helps to make the experience less driven by what others think of you.
I guess this is more of a reflection of the way we tend to deal with social media in general; or how social media has shaped our behaviour. It feels like Mastodon can be a force for good in making the entire experience a bit more genuine and enjoyable.
(De)centralization
Mastodon, or rather the underlying protocol called ActivityPub^, is built with decentralization in mind.
However, it seems that social networks often gravitate towards centralization. This is clearly visible with instances like mastodon.social, where its size already posed a number of problems related to moderation.
However, bigger instances are not beneficial to the network. For one, too many users on one instance puts a strain on the (often already limited) resources of the moderators. Additionally, there are a number of scaling issues^ related to large instances (the sidekiq queue, which is responsible for pushing messages out to connected instances, obviously gets busier as the users increase).
Smaller instances are healthier for the network. There is less risk, it makes sense from a scalability point of view and it genuinely does feel like the conversations are nicer on the smaller instances. People can actually get to know each other, the local timeline is still manageable, and it feels more like a community.
Content Silos
One of my initial thoughts was that by choosing an instance - especially one that caters to a specialized niche - you might end up in an echo chamber of sorts.
This has turned out to be a non-issue for me. I noticed I followed people from a variety of instances, even though the local timeline does give the people on your own instance a bit more visibility.
And after all, Mastodon makes it very easy to migrate your account (and followers) to another instance. The experience is more like choosing to live in a neighbourhood you like, but being in touch with people from all over the world.
Fediverse + IndieWeb = ❤️
First, a brief intro. The IndieWeb^ is a community of people who aim to bring an alternative to the "corporate web", in the form of independent websites and by maintaining their own social data, rather than putting everything on large and centralized social networking sites.
The fediverse, meanwhile, is a way to interact online through federated servers that can be used for web publishing, microblogging and more. Mastodon and many other services are part of this fediverse, using a protocol called ActivityPub to provide interoperability between the different platforms in the network.
The goals for the two projects are not completely the same so the protocols with which they achieve this are different (the fediverse mostly settled on ActivityPub and the indieweb generally uses a collection of micropub, webmentions, indieauth and a few other things) but they do share a lot of what they stand for.
The meltdown of Twitter has made one thing clear for me: you can never trust any social media as being a permanent storage for your content. Not even mastodon.
The alternative is what the indieweb calls POSSE^: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Many platforms like Wordpress^ or WriteFreely^ can already implement ActivityPub, which allows you to follow a blog from Mastodon.
In other words, write on your own blog, share the links on platforms like Mastodon. That way, you're in control of your own content, even if yet another platform goes down.
I'm currently in the process of implementing this for my own website, and I will keep you posted on how it goes :)
Reply via email: ghostzero@ghostze.ro
⁂
Source