Once More 'Round The Sun

Welp. It happened. Our favorite bird site was purchased for $44B by our favorite Bond villain wannabee. So, I figured maybe I would focus on that.

[A version of this appears in the latest Chaos Lever episode if you prefer filling your earholes (eww) more than your eye holes (eww, again)]

First off, I am barely going to talk about Elon, mostly because he is a petulant man-child whose ego is only dwarfed by his towering insecurity and deep-rooted desire to be cool. All I have to say is that 1. He entered the Twitter HQ holding a sink for the lulz. 2. He asked the software engineers to print out their code for him to review with them and other senior engineers from Tesla. Then later the same day told them nevermind. Presumably after the story leaked and he was worried about his reputation as a super-cool guy. This is a man who clearly doesn’t understand how code works or how memes work. Christ, what an asshole.

And that’s it. That’s all I’m going to say about ole Musky. Of course, at this point you might have concerns about the bird site in question and I’m not talking about the habitat of the blue footed booby. Stop snickering. That’s its name. Will Twitter become a blighted hellscape of hot take garbage, incendiary goading from the alt-right, and racist trash from neo-nazis? I mean, more than it already is? Unlikely, since he-who-should-not-be-named now owes a lot of banks a lot of very real money and needs the Twooter to be profitable. You know what advertisers don’t want? A toxic, hellscape of unwelcoming garbage. We’ve got eyeballs to reap people!

So, while I don’t believe Twitter is destined to get measurably worse for the moment, I also thought it might be nice to explore an alternative. I am talking about an experience similar to Twitter, but not owned by Twitter. In fact, not owned by any single individual. A decentralized platform, if you will, and you might! We are going to look at Mastodon.

Mastodon is an open-source, micro-blogging platform like Twitter, but it has some key differences. The biggest of which is that it is decentralized. If you want to think of it kind of like email, that’s actually an excellent analogy.?

Email, after all, can be sent and received by anyone who sets up a mail server and a DNS record. There’s no central governing body that oversees the whole of email (except perhaps DNS?, and you could get around that if you really tried). Your email is hosted on a server managed by you or - more likely - someone else. Messages are sent via a commonly agreed upon protocol (SMTP), and you can use filtering rules to decide where you will accept messages from and send messages to. The administrator of the email server can set policies regarding retention, backups, message content, usage, and more. They also probably have the ability to read all of your messages if they really want to, so you better trust your email provider, or just accept that they will scan every message with AI to improve their targeted ads, thanks GMAIL! All of this is quite similar to Mastodon, as we’ll see shortly - yes, even the snooping part.

Decentralized and Federated

Getting back to the software in question, Mastodon is a decentralized and federated architecture. Unlike Twitter, which is centrally run and managed, a federated decentralized service is made up of lots of deployments connected through some shared protocol, like email or phone networks.

The shared protocol that Mastodon uses is called ActivityPub. And just like in email and SMTP, where you don’t all have to be running postfix to send messages to each other, with ActivityPub, not everyone has to be running Mastodon. As long as the software implements ActivityPub and federation, then Mastodon sites can interact with those services. Because naming things is hard, the larger constellation of sites that support ActivityPub are called the fediverse. And if you’re getting flashbacks to the early 2000s, you’re thinking of Kevin Federline, and I’m sorry.

Among the other fediverse sites - which is not capitalized for some intangible reason, but I’m sure has to do with the author reading too much e.e. cummings, and hey we’ve all been in 9th grade and trying to find our individual voice by borrowing others and trying them on. I mean, I had the all-lowercase pen name “the hermit” for three or four years, until I grew up and realized capitals are fine, they're FINE - woah, blacked out there for a second. Where was I? The fediverse, right.

So other fediverse sites out there are Pixelfed to share images, Peertube to share videos, and Plume for long-form articles. Wow, that sounds a lot like existing services that are centralized today! How about it?

The fact that Mastodon is software and not a service means that you don’t sign up for Mastodon, you sign up on a server that is running Mastodon. And that means the people running the server get to set their own acceptable use policies. Servers tend to get launched for particular interests, regions, languages, really any type of community that’s out there. Kind of like sub-reddits.

Running a server is going to cost some amount of money, and that gets into the realm of how does one get this money? In the Twitter realm, the platform is supported by advertisers. Which means Twitter is incentivized to increase engagement by whatever means necessary, collect as much data about you as possible, and blast your eyeballs with ads right up until you cease using the software.

Mastodon services do not have ads, so instead they tend to be personally funded for funsies, company funded for “beneficent” reasons, crowd funded either directly or through Patreon, or they might even have *gasp* paid accounts.

Each Mastodon server is free to have its own policies regarding posting and behavior on the server. Run afoul of the admin and they can boot you from the server and all your datas are gonez. It also means that you are relying on the server admin to properly maintain their architecture, have reliable uptime, backup content on the reg, and have emergency admins. Admins are on the hook to patch, upgrade, and configure the server to avoid security and stability issues. Maybe you don’t really care about any of this and you just want to post to the fediverse. Great, pick a server listed on joinmastodon.org and you’ll get the bare minimum included in the Mastodon Server Covenant, which includes policing hate speech, taking daily backups, and giving notice three months before shutdown so people can take their account and go elsewhere.

If you do care, you can find a server that claims to adhere to higher standards, or host a Mastodon server yourself.

Can I run it myself?

100% you can. You’ll just need an HPE Superdome and a storage array with a minimum of 150PB, although the pros have a sweet Exabyte.

I kid, I kid. This is kind of like firing up an email server. You can start small and scale up. The application itself is a Ruby on Rails app with a React.js front-end and a PostgresSQL backend. It also uses Redis for caching. The app is available as a container, vagrant box, or you can build it from source. You’ll need a machine to host it on, a public domain, an SMTP service, and optionally an S3 compatible provider for media storage. If you're looking for something a little less DIY, there are services out there that will host the machine for you with Mastodon pre-installed.

While you can host it yourself, the practical need to do so at first is very low. Unless you want to get to know the admin side of Mastodon for some masochistic reason, stick to an existing server while you dip your toe in the water.

How do I sign up?

Some servers allow anyone with a valid email to sign up, while others are a bit more choosy. You can go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers and pick a server that looks good to you. You’ll choose a username which will be appended with the @ server address that you picked and that is your Mastodon identity. It exists on that server, so if something happens to the server, your account is gone as well.

How do I get started?

This is just like any other social platform in the sense that you have a profile to fill out, people to discover and follow, and posts you can make. You can use hashtags in your post and follow and search other tags across the fediverse. Most people start by posting about themselves with the tag #introduction, which is also a good way to find others that are new to the platform.

Other than that you can treat it just like the bird site at first. There’s some nuance there in terms of how you connect to the larger fediverse, different post types that are available, and how you filter and block others. The good news is that tools to block assholes are much more robust on Mastadon. You can filter out certain keywords and phrases, hide/mute/block user accounts, block an entire server, or force follow approvals. Overall, it seems like Twitter could learn a thing or two from what Mastodon has put in place. Will they? HA HA HA HA. I am laughing so hard I could shit.

No, dear listener. No they will not. Because Twitter doesn’t give a crap about you, only what they can advertise to you.

How big is the fediverse?

Great question! Short answer is not big. As a basis of comparison, here's some numbers on other platforms.

Twitter has about 278M daily active users

LinkedIn has about 900M members of which a third are active monthly

Facebook has 1.9B daily active users and is shrinking

TikTok has 1.8B monthly active users and is growing

The fediverse has about 6M users of which about 800K are active in the last month

It’s, um, it's not very big. If you’re someone trying to build your brand, sell a thing, or reach a vast and wide audience. This isn’t it. Go peddle your crap on TikTok, which - and I can’t stress this enough - is 6.5x bigger than Twitter and growing. If you want to reach a wide audience and get engagement, TikTok is probably the way to go. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. I’m not going to even mention Facebook and Insta b/c f*** Mark Zuckerburg.

But if you’re looking to spin random ideas into the ether and possibly get engaged in an interesting conversation, then I hear Slack, Discord, and Reddit are alright.?

Honestly, I’m not sure what Mastodon is for, aside from running screaming away from Twitter. Despite their man-child in chief, I expect I’ll keep using Twitter to promote stuff for a while, at least until it descends into complete and utter chaos. According to Tech Crunch, Mastodon app downloads appear to be at an all time high. But many people are either not quitting Twitter or will come skulking back eventually, like most rage quitters do.

Personally, I have joined the Hachyderm.io server hosted by Kris Nova. She’s a cool cat and I trust she’ll be a good steward of my data while I feel this whole Mastodon thing out. If you decide to sign up, shoot me a toot! @[email protected].