I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next Twitter", it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook:
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users.
Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to Muskfugees because it’s essentially a playground for Trump and his supporters), is literally just a Mastodon instance with federation removed. It’s already happening
This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub. Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.
> 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.
> I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right now. It doesn’t look exactly the same, and they’re not doing it with technical standards but with additional features, but the framework is very similar. They’re on step 2.
Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support enabled).
This is a valid use case for a corporate instance of a server. If a big corporation did invite a mass of users to the platform, it would still be a win for the platform in my book. The platform itself doesn't specify any restrictions on big servers just because the owners of these big servers are bringing in new users that they have influence over. Deeming a valid utilization of a platform as a 'real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community' misses the point.
Everyone pointing out the examples to email are exactly right. If Google hadn't botched the Buzz launch, this would've been a perfect time to introduce it.
> The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn't think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that.
The OP lost me here. You posted your opinion to the public internet. Whether or not you didn't think your audience would reshare using the platform, they could have shared it in a myriad of ways, including posting it to sites like this one. It's even harder to moderate how your opinion gets spread around on the fediverse than on Twitter, where blocking and takedowns are possible. That's sort of the point of the fediverse.
I don't really understand the author's sharing preferences. They're upset that people didn't ask them for their consent before sharing a link to their post, but I'm having trouble telling what the norm is. Should people be asking before boosting (retweeting) posts? Writing blog posts replying to our referring to them?
The internet norms I'm used to have public posts as available for that sort of response: if you shared it to the general world and it has a URL that anyone can load then it's fine to link to and discuss. If Mastodon has a different norm here then (a) that's going to be a hard lift because it is so different from the rest of the internet and (b) I wish people would make it clearer what the norm they're going for is!
Twitter’s model is between an individual and their followers, which is bad for organisations because the individual leaves and takes the followers with them.
Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their server.
For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected. Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support. They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own plugins rather than being dependent on the API.
I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention, rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to hang out.
This post is fascinating- it uses "I" and "We" so interchangeably that it is almost dizzying.
I want to ask them: what do you want? If you run your own Mastodon server you have a large degree of control over how that is run and federates, so can customise your experience. To continue the analogy, you can stop people invading your house party.
Then there is the cultural lamentation and the "no-one asked if I wanted that" line, which is wild because cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.
The author is very quick to call Eternal September. It is entirely possible that a few months from now this will have turned out to be a flash in the pan.
More broadly though, I thought the main USP of Mastodon was that, if you don't like the toxic behaviour of a group of users, you don't have to endure it? Why then would this influx be an issue for anyone?
The post also seems very dramatic, bordering on hysterical, in the way it describes how "upsetting" it is that other people are joining Mastodon and the "grief" that has apparently struck the extant community there. Which, ironically, strikes me as very "Twitter" behaviour.
People whining about some Eternal September always remind me of people who moved to a city last year whining about newcomers. The internet is not usenet. You can have your own website (or mastodon server) and make it invite only. But a lot of us prefer "cities", not "villages"—or gated communities. And it seems to me that a lot of people like the city at some point and then want it to remain static and closed. When the fact that it is open is the only reason they were able to move there in the first place.
Mastodon could go either way, but i think as an experiment its sufficiently differentiated to warrant a rethink on how social media should be. Only a couple of years back Mastodon UX was too poor to be usable, but it has grown leaps and bounds now.
Mastodon might not be the next twitter, but maybe it has already succeeded as a refuge for people not wanting to be on twitter. The bigger problem mastodon has is that its servers are running full to take on new people.
We have been running a few instances of mastodon which now have more space for new users. Link in my bio if anyone wants to use them, but might run out anytime.
It’s worth checking if your instance accepts donations to defray running costs. E.g. mastodon.social gets funding from the Mastodon Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
Unpopular, there will be that "one" server, offering the same services twitter does, where everyone flocks to, breaking the concept of the federated servers, because the audience wants one public plaza.
the people fleeing twitter over Musk's dedication to the freedom of speech will find themselves at home at mastadon, where problematic instances are defederated from - sometimes for as little as refusing to ban a particular problematic individual, and where developers are bullied into blacklisting those in their apps.
even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
> even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
As a user of the network in general though, this doesn't have to matter to you. You can sign up on an instance that defederates according to whichever rules you like (or on an instance that defederates nobody at all). You can still talk to the rest of the network just fine, in addition to talking to anybody other instances want to defederate. There's no silo, you don't have to pick a side.
You can even self-host your own single-user instance (or rent one, from e.g. https://masto.host/, although they've closed signups due to demand right now) and control federation directly. With that, the only people you won't be able to talk to are people & instances that decide to block you _personally_.
> any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network
If you are getting defederated by 90% of the network, isn't that maybe a strong indication that 90% don't want to hear what you have to say?
Freedom of speech is a protection against the government censoring you. It doesn't mean you get to spread hate and toxicity freely without consequence.
> any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
That sounds crazy. If my instance did that, I would immediately consider moving to another, more politically tolerant instance or just run my own to traverse the censorship issue entirely.
And the good thing about the fediverse is that a user has those options and isn’t at mercy of other peoples limited tolerance for freedom of speech.
If it gained traction amongst the "general public" such niche ban reasons would probbaly become less common. And neutral federations would automatically emerge because at some point not every instance will bother to ban other random instances.
The amount of users joining the network daily already started to drop. I see no Eternal September actually happening if the trend continues. I'd give a week for that.
Honestly I don’t think mastodon will ever grow. The vast majority of Twitter users don’t even know what it is. And those moving will eventually begin to fall behind and miss out on what’s happening and ever silly end up on both platforms or just gravitate back to Twitter.
95% of those I follow are tech and prob about 10 are on mastodon and Twitter and no ones really talking about it.
The average user who is following a bunch of celebrities isn’t going to move because 1 celebrity moved. They prob won’t even notice the celeb moved.
> Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches.
Twitter gives people the means to express the attitude they already have. "Influencer Culture" didn't start or end on Twitter.
I've been on Mastadon for about a year now, on a small instance that's not accepting new users, and my experience has been great and hasn't changed. If you want to be inclusive and accepting of new users that's great, but that also means accepting their ideas and who they are.
I don’t think “ corporate publishing systems steer people's behaviour” to …. share things they find interesting.
I think that’s just a human thing.
A lot of what is described here just seems like human behavior, and I do not understand the authors description of it as “a violation, an assault”.
There’s a weird glorification of the current participants of the fediverse in that article and yet outright rejection of anyone new, and by the description of the article no interest in welcoming them.
Mastadon doesn’t ever need to become the twitter of 2022, and most people would rather it didn’t. It does remind me of Twitter in ~2008, which is arguably more fun anyway.
(Anybody who thought 2008 twitter would become what it is now would also have been called delusional)
It's absolutely beyond me how people believed (or still believe) that Mastodon will be a replacement for Twitter. That's a level of delusion I will never get behind.
I mainly used Twitter to see what was going on in tech & open-source and discuss development topics, and comfortably 50% of the tech people I followed on Twitter have now set up on Mastodon, either additionally (cross-posting to both) or in quite a few cases as a full replacement. I post the same thing to both and I get far more responses & engagement on Mastodon now. For me personally it _has_ replaced Twitter.
Depends which circles you move in and what you use Twitter for (it's certainly not useful in the politics & journalism scene yet, for starters) but there's already significant movement here in some areas.
y'know, this would be the opportunity for Google to gain some clout in the social network world.
Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance.
Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale.
(Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)
It will work out. There's been an initial bad reaction to a few things, like content warnings, but I think most of the new people will adjust. There will be some conflicts, but some features of Mastodon will prevent some of the worst problems with Twitter: the equivalent of "likes" doesn't cause things to spread, there's no quote tweets, and no algorithm trying to pump up the most outrageous content.
If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.
Eternal september only becomes bad when corporations start hiring positions to advertise on these new platforms. Otherwise, its an idyllic period of sharing information and cultural development, right up until media sinks their teeth into such a large market of consumer's eyeballs and attempts to shift the point of focus from interesting things that are genuinely interesting to profitable things that are often genuinely harmful, because its infinitely easier and far more profitable to engineer something that is harmful to a degree than to account for all the potential harmful externalities (In biology we see this as well; among symbiotic relationships, parasitic interactions are far more likely to evolve than mutually beneficial interactions that could take millions of years of evolutionary change to emerge in a steady state).
[+] [-] xg15|3 years ago|reply
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/
[+] [-] rolenthedeep|3 years ago|reply
Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
[+] [-] FormerBandmate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adrock|3 years ago|reply
I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept.
[1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g
[+] [-] cf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|3 years ago|reply
Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.
> I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
[+] [-] andridk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortformblog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MR4D|3 years ago|reply
Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.
[+] [-] croisillon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
[+] [-] coldacid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derangedHorse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acheron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djha-skin|3 years ago|reply
The OP lost me here. You posted your opinion to the public internet. Whether or not you didn't think your audience would reshare using the platform, they could have shared it in a myriad of ways, including posting it to sites like this one. It's even harder to moderate how your opinion gets spread around on the fediverse than on Twitter, where blocking and takedowns are possible. That's sort of the point of the fediverse.
[+] [-] jefftk|3 years ago|reply
The internet norms I'm used to have public posts as available for that sort of response: if you shared it to the general world and it has a URL that anyone can load then it's fine to link to and discuss. If Mastodon has a different norm here then (a) that's going to be a hard lift because it is so different from the rest of the internet and (b) I wish people would make it clearer what the norm they're going for is!
[+] [-] blowski|3 years ago|reply
Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their server.
For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected. Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support. They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own plugins rather than being dependent on the API.
I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention, rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to hang out.
[+] [-] elliotpage|3 years ago|reply
I want to ask them: what do you want? If you run your own Mastodon server you have a large degree of control over how that is run and federates, so can customise your experience. To continue the analogy, you can stop people invading your house party.
Then there is the cultural lamentation and the "no-one asked if I wanted that" line, which is wild because cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|3 years ago|reply
More broadly though, I thought the main USP of Mastodon was that, if you don't like the toxic behaviour of a group of users, you don't have to endure it? Why then would this influx be an issue for anyone?
The post also seems very dramatic, bordering on hysterical, in the way it describes how "upsetting" it is that other people are joining Mastodon and the "grief" that has apparently struck the extant community there. Which, ironically, strikes me as very "Twitter" behaviour.
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhoops|3 years ago|reply
Mastodon might not be the next twitter, but maybe it has already succeeded as a refuge for people not wanting to be on twitter. The bigger problem mastodon has is that its servers are running full to take on new people.
We have been running a few instances of mastodon which now have more space for new users. Link in my bio if anyone wants to use them, but might run out anytime.
[+] [-] robin_reala|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleEntity|3 years ago|reply
I see strong parallels between this and blender when I was active in the community around a decade ago.
Everyone nowadays takes blender seriously as a contender in that market now so keep the faith, peeps.
[+] [-] qikInNdOutReply|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BonoboIO|3 years ago|reply
I think you lost me there.
Best part was on the end: „All content © Hugh Rundle except as noted in Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0.“
That made me laugh.
[+] [-] throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago|reply
even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
[+] [-] pimterry|3 years ago|reply
As a user of the network in general though, this doesn't have to matter to you. You can sign up on an instance that defederates according to whichever rules you like (or on an instance that defederates nobody at all). You can still talk to the rest of the network just fine, in addition to talking to anybody other instances want to defederate. There's no silo, you don't have to pick a side.
You can even self-host your own single-user instance (or rent one, from e.g. https://masto.host/, although they've closed signups due to demand right now) and control federation directly. With that, the only people you won't be able to talk to are people & instances that decide to block you _personally_.
[+] [-] mike_d|3 years ago|reply
If you are getting defederated by 90% of the network, isn't that maybe a strong indication that 90% don't want to hear what you have to say?
Freedom of speech is a protection against the government censoring you. It doesn't mean you get to spread hate and toxicity freely without consequence.
[+] [-] josteink|3 years ago|reply
That sounds crazy. If my instance did that, I would immediately consider moving to another, more politically tolerant instance or just run my own to traverse the censorship issue entirely.
And the good thing about the fediverse is that a user has those options and isn’t at mercy of other peoples limited tolerance for freedom of speech.
[+] [-] tomlockwood|3 years ago|reply
In his first letter to staff he said they need to focus on "banning trolls". Oof ow.
[+] [-] Double_a_92|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignaloidas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
95% of those I follow are tech and prob about 10 are on mastodon and Twitter and no ones really talking about it.
The average user who is following a bunch of celebrities isn’t going to move because 1 celebrity moved. They prob won’t even notice the celeb moved.
[+] [-] tinalumfoil|3 years ago|reply
Twitter gives people the means to express the attitude they already have. "Influencer Culture" didn't start or end on Twitter.
I've been on Mastadon for about a year now, on a small instance that's not accepting new users, and my experience has been great and hasn't changed. If you want to be inclusive and accepting of new users that's great, but that also means accepting their ideas and who they are.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
I think that’s just a human thing.
A lot of what is described here just seems like human behavior, and I do not understand the authors description of it as “a violation, an assault”.
There’s a weird glorification of the current participants of the fediverse in that article and yet outright rejection of anyone new, and by the description of the article no interest in welcoming them.
[+] [-] rapsey|3 years ago|reply
Anyone who thinks Mastodon has any hope of being the next Twitter is delusional. It is the next Parler/Rumble.
[+] [-] ggm|3 years ago|reply
I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?
We haven't had "the next 8 track" or "the next Zoetrope" or "the next cutlass" -We do other things instead.
Maybe a hyperfocal single issue social construct, is what trainspotters actually WANT?
[+] [-] paulgb|3 years ago|reply
(Anybody who thought 2008 twitter would become what it is now would also have been called delusional)
[+] [-] xurukefi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimterry|3 years ago|reply
I mainly used Twitter to see what was going on in tech & open-source and discuss development topics, and comfortably 50% of the tech people I followed on Twitter have now set up on Mastodon, either additionally (cross-posting to both) or in quite a few cases as a full replacement. I post the same thing to both and I get far more responses & engagement on Mastodon now. For me personally it _has_ replaced Twitter.
Depends which circles you move in and what you use Twitter for (it's certainly not useful in the politics & journalism scene yet, for starters) but there's already significant movement here in some areas.
[+] [-] perlgeek|3 years ago|reply
Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance.
Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale.
(Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)
[+] [-] not2b|3 years ago|reply
If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply