by Rusty

NB: This is a cross-post from the Rhizomatix blog, a blog that can be found as a Tor Hidden Service [onion link] as well as a Gopher page [Gopher link]. That’s right — an old school Gopher Page! The post was written by Rusty, and was promoted on scholar.social, an academic-oriented instance of Mastodon, a Twitter alternative. Rusty kindly let me repost it here on the S-MAP. It is part primer to Mastodon, part retrospective on one person’s engagement with that system, and part critique of Mastodon; great material for the S-MAP. Some of it has been edited for clarity.

[Also, let me promote the S-MAP’s extensive collection of Mastodon instance terms of service and sign up screens for study.]

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. For many folks, these names are synonymous with the internet. For many teenagers and adults, not actively using these big tech platforms would create the eerie sensation that you don’t exist. And that’s a real problem. We invest so much of our identities in platforms that see us as data points to be studied & marketed. The crux here is the user’s lack of control. Popular social media platforms function as “walled gardens,” or restricted zones in which the company controls how the platform functions & all the data is archived on centralized servers.

I won’t rehash the sins of Facebook or Twitter here. That project has already been done by folks smarter than me. Good resources for how walled gardens perennially abuse their users include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BoingBoing, & Motherboard.

Instead, I explore some newer alternatives to walled gardens. These alternatives center their missions around the issues of data, both who controls it & where it is stored. They also adhere to principles of open-source development, consentful interaction, & data protection. While many alternatives exist, here I want to focus on Mastodon.

Mastodon is by far my favorite name for a social media platform. The whimsicality extends beyond the platform name too. Rather than “tweeting,” users send out “toots,” which appeals to the part of me that still loves fart jokes. Mastodon also harbors a syndicate of active communities in which smart & irreverent opinions are freely shared & toxic trolls are, for the most part, legislated out of the communities or, failing that, chased away by users protective of their “instance’s” social dynamics.

Mastodon’s especially appealing for folks needing to detox from Twitter’s outrage-of-the-day culture or folks who’ve been bullied or abused on other social media platforms. Since it was birthed in Germany where Nazism is illegal, Mastodon clearly states that white nationalism is not tolerated (this, of course, is not always successful). Many communities on the platform also explicitly state their wish to provide safe harbor for LBGTQ+ & disabled folks as well.

Supportive social culture aside, Mastodon can also be confusing for folks used to the ways of big tech social media. It’s the most active part of the Fediverse, a loose syndicate of servers that support various platforms & communicate through a number of open standard protocols. In order to understand how the Fediverse operates, let’s break down some of those key terms.

First, let’s talk about servers since they are foundation for the entire ecosystem. When you use Facebook, you access the company’s software platform & store all the data you enter on the company’s servers. The Fediverse’s architects had another idea: what if someone could use a platform, but choose which server they wished to store their data? Users could select from a number of servers independent from the platform’s designers or even host their own server. This is the Fediverse’s idea behind decentralization: data & control are fractured among independent participants. In the Fediverse’s lingo, these servers are often dubbed “instances” or “pods.”

However, these independent servers nonetheless remain syndicated by sharing the use of a particular software platform. Some of the more popular platforms include Mastodon, *diaspora, Friendica, Pleroma, Nextcloud, & PeerTube. This creates the intriguing sensation of simultaneity: users can both pay attention to all the activity on their own instance, but they can also peer into what’s happening on other instances that use platform as well.

The communication protocol is intriguing because it actually allows multiple platforms to communicate with each other as long as they share an agreement for data transmission. For example, when I log into my Friendica server, I can actually see posts from folks who use the Mastodon or *diaspora platforms too. This is because Friendica uses the Diaspora protocol, which *diaspora employs, & the OStatus protocol, which Mastodon uses.

This is long way of saying that Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon facilitate sharing & even thrive on it. They disdain the walled garden’s isolating nature & instead wish to have a number of semi-autonomous gardens communicating with each other.

The first big challenge for someone using Mastodon is finding an instance to join. When I first joined Mastodon, I didn’t understand just how important an instance would be. I understood the concept of an instance being the place where your data would be stored. However, I looked at instances as merely portals to the Mastodon community as a whole. And portals they are, but they function in an unusual manner.

So I haphazardly navigated https://joinmastodon.org, seeking to join an instance that didn’t require an invitation, primed to select the first one that vaguely appealed to my interests. I found one. I saw the server was in France, but I figured that wouldn’t be too big of an issue. Well, you can guess my first issue: the majority of the posts on that instance are in French, a language that I’m not very versed in.

I then discovered the structure of Mastodon’s user interface. You navigate between 3 different feeds: “home,” which includes everything posted by you & folks you follow; “local timeline,” which includes everything posted by folks on your instance; “federated timeline,” which includes everything posted by everyone followed by folks in your instance. After joining that first instance, this is what I found: an empty home feed, a local timeline mostly in French, & a federated timeline that confusingly mixed porn, anarchist politics, newsbots, & bizarre shitposting. Yup, I had a headache.

I spent some time building my home feed. I found folks & organizations I used to follow on Twitter: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Ernie Smith of the Tedium Blog, Cory Doctorow, etc. So my home feed began to feel less lonely. However, I became disappointed that many of the first folks I followed were either merely crossposting from Twitter or generating updates through bots. Doctorow, in particular, employs an exhausting army of bots on Mastodon that I’ve had to control with extensive filtering. Folks like Doctorow peeve me: they write & talk about the dangers of Big Tech, but refuse to leave Twitter; they only dip their toes in Mastodon’s waters, but don’t commit. Rip that band-aid off, motherfuckers!

Mastodon began to feel alienating to me, to say the least. However, I didn’t want to give up on the platform completely; I realized that the instance I chose wasn’t a good fit for me. So I went hunting again, but in a smarter fashion. I then found https://scholar.social, an active home for academics to share ideas. As a community college writing instructor, this looked like where I needed to belong. So I jumped ship. I quickly became invested in the posts on my local timeline & the federated timeline led me to discover interesting folks on other instances that I soon would follow. My home feed became a rich collection of ideas from academics, tech folks, & political activists.

The instance holds so much power because it influences how you find other folks. This, of course, is the most obvious with the local timeline, but it’s also true on the federated timeline. At first, I thought that the federated timeline was showing me everything everyone posted on all Mastodon instances. After more carefully reading about the platform’s structure, I realized that the federated timeline only shows the folks followed by other folks on your instance. If no one in your instance follows any solar punks on an off-grid farm in England, your federated timeline won’t show any solar punks’ posts. That is, unless you somehow find those punks & start following them yourself. The instance is indeed a portal to all the other instances, but it remains a skewed one.

Once I became integrated with my instance’s community & started following other folks, I saw what makes Mastodon so distinctive from platforms such as Twitter. Most instances harbor communities that are manageable in size. For example, while scholar.social has 3,550 registered users, only 490 are active. This means that your feeds don’t avalanche you with information. I remember my Twitter feed would update quicker than I could read. My brain would just vomit out the information it absorbed, leaving me as blank as a zombie.

A reduction in the info-avalanche equals an increase in how users engage with your posts. While Mastodon replicates Twitter’s structure with “favourites” & “boosts,” folks are much more apt to offer you written replies. They’re also remarkably generous with sharing their knowledge & expertise when I ask questions or solicit recommendations. I feel that my voice is small, but it somehow gets heard.

The self-selecting nature of instances means that it’s quite easy to fall into echo chambers. While Mastodon promotes diversity of opinions, there are some opinions that are clearly not welcome. Now I’m not referring to hate speech or trollish alt-right tactics. No, I’m referring to less terroristy worldviews. For example, I’m not sure a Google advocate would last very long on most instances. One of my most popular posts proclaimed that copyright is the devil, but considering the large proportion of open-source champions on the platform, I know I was only preaching to the choir. Now collective affirmation is important, but I do wonder if Mastodon only appeals to folks with certain kind of worldviews.

Since Mastodon allows for extensive filtering of posts, one can build a protective ideological shell, only seeing what they wish. Yes, this can reduce what a person is exposed to, but one can also interpret this activity through the concept of consent. There’s a lot of odious shit out there & Mastodon is no exception. You should be able to control what you’re exposed to. That federated timeline can be wacky, y’all! A lot of things you don’t wish to see may appear: porn, mundane shitposting, commentary on current events. You have to shape that federated timeline by filtering phrases & blocking certain individuals & domains.

Mastodon is definitely a rewarding social media experience & I highly recommend it. It does require some patience, but if you are willing to work with it, it’ll yield results.