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mastodon

Mastodon, two years later

A continuation of Mastodon: a partial history

Jon

• 12 min read
A yellow stuffed toy: the elephant from the Mastodon logo
Image from Mastodon stuffed toy coming soon, April 2024
Work in progress!
Last update: November 1. See the update log at the end of the article.

Join the discussion on infosec.exchange, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and Bluesky!
"Mastodon is a free and open-source server software designed for communicating with and participating in the large, nebulous social-media network colloquially known as “the fediverse”; in very recent times, it has found itself the subject of a surprising level of journalism, hailed frequently as the (enlightened, doomed, sometimes both) successor to Twitter and its ilk."

– Allie Hart, Mourning Mastodon, April 2017
"I'm flashing! Five and a half years later, there's once again a flock of new arrivals to Mastodon – and a huge amount of media attention. "

– me, Mastodon: a partial history, November 2022

History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

Just as in 2017, many people who flocked to Mastodon after Apartheid Clyde's October 2022 acquisition of Twitter had great experiences on Mastodon ... but most didn't. Some (especially people of color) had really horrible experiences. Within a few months, optimism and excitement had turned into disappointment and frustration.

Why? Usability and onboarding challenges, racism and sexism and other cultural issues, a lack of tools for people to protect themselves .... Erin Kissane's, Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't (July 2023) is a great overview of reasons people didn't stay – frustratingly similar to the challenges people had encountered back in 2017.

"I REALLY liked Mastodon, when i started— really good community practices, decent conversations and genuine attempts at dialogue—but at this point sometimes it genuinely feels like this place gets more drama-filled, antagonistic, and snidely mansplainy by the day."

– Dr. Damien T. Williams, October 2023

Two years later, there's another exodus from Xitter and its "fascism as a business model" hellscape. This time, though, it's Bluesky that people are flocking to. And a good thing too! At this point, Bluesky's a better Twitter alternative for most people than Mastodon.

Still, there's more to social networking than Twitter alternatives. More positively, the 2022 wave once again highlighted something that Mastodon forks (variants) like Glitch and Hometown and the broader Fediverse are uniquely good at: a "networked communities" model, where autonomous instances (servers) combine local relations and interactions with the ability for people plug into broader conversations if and when they want to.1 And a lot of other good stuff is happening in the fediverses – including some encouraging progress from Mastodon.

So it's a complicated story, just like the rest of Mastodon's history. Fortunately, this is just a partial history, so I'm not going to try to be exhaustive. Instead, I'll touch on a few topics, and wrap it up with some thoughts about Mastodon's future.

This article is still a work in progress, and for now just includes the first couple of sections. As I publish new installments, I'll also update the links in the contents. You can get new posts as they're published by subscribing to the Nexus of Privacy newsletter, following @nexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange (or on Bluesky, via Bridgy Fed), and/or join the Nexus of Privacy community on lemmy.blahaj.zone ... or just come back and visit this page in a few days!

Contents

Mastodon could have leaned into what it's good at

Mastodon Active Users: a chart, starting with 500,000 in October 2022, peaking at 2,500,000 in December 2022, declining for a few months and then by another lower paek, follwed by a setad decline and ending at 1,000,000 in August 2024
From Why is Mastodon struggling to survive? by Existing_Process_151 on r/Mastodon

Mastodon and the Fediverse can be a very negative place.2 The title of the reddit post I took this graph from is a great example. OK, Mastodon has plenty of challenges; the author makes some good points and AvgGuy's comment is outstanding. But think about it for a second. Mastodon has gotten multiple six figure donations, enough that they've hired another developer. Release 4.3 has just shipped. There's funding from NLNet for some new projects and a new US-based non-profit.3 And with Flipboard, Wordpress, Vivaldi, Medium, Meta (Facebook and Instagram's parent company) and others getting involved, there's a lot more money sloshing around the Fediverse these days, and Mastodon's name recognition will help it get access to some of it. "Struggling to survive"? Come on.

Similarly, people often describe the "Twitter migration" to Mastodon as a "failure" ... but that's not how I see it. Don't get me wrong, I certainly wouldn't call Mastodon's last two years a success ... but reality's non-binary, and "failure" isn't accurate either. To me, it makes more sense to look at it in terms of ...

  • calibration: Mastodon wasn't ready for broad use as a Twitter alternative, but forks (variants) like Glitch and Hometown are good platforms for networked communities
  • missed opportunities: Mastodon could have leaned into what it is good at, focused on the networked communities model, and taken some straightforward steps that would have led to more people having good experiences (and fewer people having horrible experiences) ... but it didn't. Instead, Mastodon continued to position itself as a Twitter alternative, and still hasn't addressed most of the challenges people ran into in 2022 (and 2017). Oh well.

As a Twitter alternative, Bluesky's actually done a much better job of learning from Mastodon's challenges. They've put a lot of work into onboarding, usability, and giving people better tools: to protect themselves and others, to curate and find useful information, to find and build communities in a flat all-public world. At this point, it's going to be very challenging for Mastodon to catching up to Bluesky as a Twitter alternative.

  • Most importantly, a Twitter-wannabe without Black Twitter isn't really a Twitter alternative, and Mastodon's reputation for racism is so firmly entrenched at this point that it will be very hard to attract most of Black Twitter.
  • From a technical perspective, Bluesky uses the newer AT protocol (as opposed to the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon (and most of the rest of today's Fediverse uses), and AT is much better suited for large all-public social networks – like Twitter alternatives, for example
  • Bluesky's got a much bigger budget.4

And Bluesky isn't the only new corporate Twitter alternative with a big budget. Meta's June 2023 announcement that Threads (their new Twitter compitor) would enter Fediverse and be compatible Mastodon has sparked some intense differences of opinion in the Fediverse. Erin Kissane's outstanding Untangling Threads (December 2023), looks at the arguments in both directions. Still, for the hundreds of millions of people with Instagram accounts who want a Twitter alternative, Threads is a natural choice (as long as they're willing to put up with Meta's exploitative business practices and racist, anti-LGBTQIA2S+, and Islamophobic moderation). And like Bluesky (but unlike Mastodon), Threads has very good onboarding, so it's easy to get started.

There's a lot more to social networking than Twitter alternatives

"If they’re motivated, tooled up, and plugged into communities of support fediverse server teams can provide context-sensitive, high-touch local moderation for their members—while also connecting to a broad landscape of other well-governed servers.

No matter what policy changes they make, centralized platforms will never be able to do this."

– Erin Kissane, revealing the fediverse’s gifts, October 2024

Fortunately, even though a lot of people like Twitter alternatives, there are a lot of complementary approaches to social networking. ActivityPub's flexible (albeit complex) scoped visibility model makes it a good match for a "networked communities" model, where (unlike Bluesky) people don't have to share everything with the entire world, but can still plug into broader conversations if and when they want to.

Today, there are hundreds of those communities in the Fediverse – and most of them are on instances (aka servers) running Mastodon and its forks like Glitch and Hometown.

It's worth highlighting that Glitch, Hometown, and other forks are much better suited for networked communities than the official Mastodon release. For one thing, forks (like most other Fediverse microblogging software) have local-only posts, which allow community-wide discussions that aren't shared with the outside world (as well as helping with safety) – but as I discussed in Does Mastodon really prioritize stopping harassment? the official Mastodon release does not provide this functionality.5

Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers, co-authored by Kissane and Hometown maintainer Darius Kazemi, looks in detail at small-to-medium communities running Mastodon and Hometown. Their conclusion:

"We think it’s clear that the servers we studied offer real-world examples of governance that differ from centralized platforms not only in scale, but in kind—and that despite the network’s complexity and persistent opacity, many of the the structural possibilities the Fediverse offers allow for the flourishing of better and more humane ways of managing human interactions online."

A tale of two prototypes

It's not surprising that most people think of "Mastodon" as the official Mastodon project run by Mastodon founder and Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) Eugen Rochko (aka Gargron), CEO of Mastodon gGmbH. Rochko gets almost all of the attention in the tech press, has more followers than any other techie on Mastodon, and is often portrayed as "the man who built Mastodon."

But the reality's a lot more complex....

From that perspective, it's interesting look back at Mastodon 2017 and Glitch 2017 as prototypes of two different visions.

  • as a prototype of a platform to support networked communities, Glitch 2017 was a huge success.... Mastodon 2017 was less of a success, because it was missing some key features from Glitch, but it certainly wasn't a failure.
  • as a prototype of a Twitter alternative, Mastodon 2017 and Glitch 2017 were inconclusive.

Flash forward seven years ...

Continued in A tale of two prototypes

A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness

The millions of new users flocking to Mastodon in late 2022 reminded many people of Usenet's (misremembered) "Eternal September" back in 1993-4 – although as Smith describes, there were some significant differences. Of course, just like the old influx to Usenet as new college students discovered it every September, the initial late-2022 wave ebbed quickly. Mastodon Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) Eugen Rochko's March 2023 claim that "in fact it’s growing faster now than it was" was, um, in retrospect overoptimistic. By late 2023, growth had turned to flatness....

Continued in A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness

To be continued!

This post is long enough that I'm serializing it in multiple posts, and then will pull it together as as single post. A tale of two prototypes is the next in the series, and as more are published I'll add the links here and in the Table of Contents at the top.

To see new installments as they're published, subscribe to the Nexus of Privacy newsletter, follow @nexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange (or on Bluesky, via Bridgy Fed), and/or join the Nexus of Privacy community on lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Or just come back and visit Mastodon, two years later in a few days – I'll update the links at the top, and the sneak previews.

Sneak previews of upcoming installments

As always, these are from draft versions of upcoming posts, and the final versions may be different.

....

Of course it's over-simplifying to look at the history in terms of just two prototypes. Mastodon and its forks have also prototyped

  • A trans-led fork with a trans, queer, and non-binary-centric community
  • A consent-based culture that (while imperfect and intermittent) points to a very different path than surveillance capitalism
  • A real-life testbed for all the complexities of decentralized moderation and federated diplomacy
  • A protocol-based platform for (somewhat) interoperaable social media operations

....

I talked a lot about Mastodon's long-standing problems with race in Mastodon: a partial history, and things haven't improved since then – 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people has plenty of newer examples and links. And as Dr. Johnathan Flowers points out in The Whiteness of Mastodon, Mastodon is a metonym for the whiteness of the broader Fediverse....

And while the original partial history talked a lot about anti-Blackness and the complicated interactions between Mastodon and LGBTQIA2S+ people, I didn't really delve into sexism and misogyny – which are also big issues. And here too, Mastodon is a metonym for the broader Fediverse.

....

One or more hard forks still seems like the mostly likely outcome to me, perhaps combining a focus on networked communities (and a less friendly attitude towards Meta) with some of the ideas in Fork it! It’s time for a Mastodon hard fork and/or Ro's A Case for Community (both April 2024). Hard forks that start with Glitch or Hometown as a base would have significant advantages over Mastodon if it can get support from hosting companies, and if it also improves allow-list federation and adds support for federations of instances it could be a good fit for The Website League and other emerging projects. Then again, there's been discussion of Mastodon hard forks for years, and it's not as easy as it sounds, so maybe it won't happen.

Whether or not there's a hard fork, the same opportunities are there for the official Mastodon project if its direction and leadership structure evolves. The official project has some big advantages – including funding – so let's hope that happens. And it's not an either-or situation; forks don't have to be hostile, and there are lots of potential synergies if they can work together effectively (as well as challenges).

Terminology

I've written a lot about Mastodon and other fediverse software over the last few years, and the terminology I use has evolved somewhat over time. There are many fediverses reflects how I try to talk about it today:

  • a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs.
  • "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, change over time. and mean different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server

Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" as a synonym for a fediverse centered on the ActivityPub protocol, and that's how I'll use it here (and that's also how it's used in the original partial history). That may be changing; the tech press increasingly considers Bluesky part of "the Fediverse", and sometimes lumps in Nostr as well. As Marco Rogers says, the lines are gray and blurry.

There are many fediverses also contains definitions of fedi culture, corporate fediverse, the "free fediverses" (defined in opposition to surveillance capitalism) – and examples of how other people define "the Fediverse", as does Definitions of "the Fediverse".

Notes

1 I first saw the "networked communities" framing from L. Rhodes in an excellent thread on merveilles.town. Groundedness and community, on destructured.net, goes into more detail.

2 Although not everybody sees it that way. I mentioned the Fediverse's negativity in a post on discussions.thenexus.today, a NodeBB instance I run, and a Mastodon user I had never encountered before left a drive-by comment

are you kidding me? I have never used a non free, as in freedom social, where the **** do you find negativity in this place?

Really, you are probably on the wrong server, join us.

And as a bonus, he left me a link to an article written by Richard Stallman. Gosh I can't understand why people think Mastodon is unfriendly and filled with stereotypically sexist and condescending techie assholes.

3 The US 501(c)(3) non-profit started earlier this year after Mastodon gGmbH lost their German non-profit status. A big advantage of a 501(c)(3) is that it can unlock matching gifts from US-based corporations.

Encouragingly, the 501(c)(3)'s board includes Esra’a Al Shafei (founder of Majal.org, co-founder of the Numun Fund, and board member at Tor Foundation) and Karien Bezuidenhout (who has a wealth of non-profit experience), two incredibly valuable additions that really highlight the possibilities. Less encouragingly, the board also includes a lawyer whose day job is defending AI companies against copyright lawsuits, and a founder of Twitter who's now an investor and also on the board of the AI Foundation, a "dual commercial and non-profit organization." Yikes. So we'll see how it works out.

4 White Mastodon and ActivityPub supporters often put this as #1 on their list, and it's certainly a big advantage for Bluesky: they've been able to move much more quickly than Mastodon. But then again even if Mastodon suddenly got a windfall they wouldn't be a good Twitter alternative unless they address the racism and the protocol issue, so I put it at the end of the list.

5 I also talked about Mastodon's refusal to support local-only posts in Mastodon and today’s ActivityPub Fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default, and in Fork it! It’s time for a Mastodon hard fork, and in Steps towards a safer fediverse, and probably a few other places as well. I know I sound like a broken record on this but local-only posts also provide significant safety benefits and HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED IN MASTODON FORKS SINCE 2017 SO THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE FOR MASTODON NOT SUPPORTING THEM!!!!!

Update log

October 28: initially published, with first two sections, terminology, and notes.

October 31: add next two sections.

November 1: what was I thinking? Remove next two sections, and instead include a brief excerpt link to the separate post. This post is already over 3,000 words, which is plenty long! I'll combine them later.