Tag Archives: Mastodon

Mastodon Survey

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A quick note: I’m conducting a survey with a colleague of mine, Dr. Diana Zulli. We’re interested in learning from Mastodon developers, admins, and users about “freedom of expression.”

I will post the link to the survey in Mastodon, rather than here. If you use Mastodon, I hope you see it there.

I wanted to note one thing about the survey: we’re offering a small bit of compensation for people’s time (at least, the first 75 or so people — after that, the funding runs out.) Because of where we work, we are using Qualtrics for the survey, and the only real way to compensate people and protect people’s private information is by using Amazon gift cards. We realize you may not share the same values as Amazon. We talked about this problem at length and decided to go ahead with the incentives. If you have interest in doing the survey but no interes in Amazon, you can skip the final questions of the survey.

If you have questions about this survey, hit me up on Mastodon (@robertwgehl@scholar.social) or via the email address listed here.

Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden

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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.

Continue reading Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden →

Presentation at the University of Calgary: Dark Web, Alternative Social Media, and Memes

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Robert W. Gehl

I am heading home from a great visit to the Institute of Humanities at the University of Calgary, where I gave a keynote, titled, “A Deep Dive into the Marianas Web: Surveillance, Information, and Mythologies of the Dark Web.”

This talk is based on a paper I’m working on about the Marianas Web meme, a meme that began in 2011 or 2012 and has circulated the Internet in various forms.

Along the way, the talk draws on a common event I saw happening on Dark Web social media (alternative social media that exists on Tor, I2P, or Freenet), where new users ask, “Ok, I’ve made it to Tor. How do I go deeper? How do I go to the Dark Web?”

While the meme has been debunked (most eloquently by Violet Blue), in my talk I took it seriously, uncovering the anxieties that the meme reflects. I argue that the meme associates spatial metaphors of the Internet, digital immateriality, and post-truth politics into a potent mix.

The talk was part of a larger conversation happening at Calgary about social media. The Institute of the Humanities put together an essay contest for undergraduate students on “Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The winning entries (by Lorianne Reuser, Daniel Huss, Bryn Waidson, and Max Kurapov) as well as the work of my co-keynoter Safaneh Neyshabouri, prompted excellent discussions of the problems of (corporate) social media: its consumerism, its addictiveness, its valorization of the sensational over the sober. To be fair, the discussion also touched on everyday resistance and deep discussions that can happen on corporate social media.

But one thing that bothered me about the conversation was: it was all corporate social media. It was mostly Instagram, a bit of Facebook, and a lot of Twitter. There’s so much more!

So, once again, I banged my favorite drum: if we have issues with social media’s centralization, distortion of sociality, and surveillance, then c’mon, people now: switch to a non-corporate, ad-free, decentralized alternative! These days, I’m liking Mastodon.

So I was glad that some of the anxieties I argued were reflected in the fake Marianas meme were also explored by the students, and I was happy to plug the alternatives once again.

#deletefacebook

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There’s furor over the latest revelation that the world’s largest corporate social media site, Facebook, sells personal data to those who want to manipulate its users. The story — this time — is about Cambridge Analytica, a psychographic analysis organization which claims to be able to drive voter behavior. Many people have weighed in, so I won’t say much here. But I want to pick up on a point made by Adrian Chen in The New Yorker:

Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not outrageous. It is unquestionably a bad thing that we carry out much of our online lives within a data-mining apparatus that sells influence to the highest bidder. My initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though, was jaded; the feeling came from having seen how often, in the past, major public outcries about online privacy led nowhere. In most cases, after the calls to delete Facebook die down and the sternly worded congressional letters stop being written, things pretty much go back to normal. Too often, privacy scandals boil down to a superficial fix to some specific breach or leak, without addressing how the entire system undermines the possibility of control. What exciting big-data technique will be revealed, six years from now, as a democracy-shattering mind-control tool?

His point about “the entire system” is precisely why I started the S-MAP several years back. Or more precisely, the “entire system” is why so many alternative social makers do what they do: make new social media systems that allow for the pleasures of connecting with others while staving off so many of the deleterious practices associated with corporate social media: surveillance, data mining, the sale (or leak) of personal information to third parties, and above all the manipulation of our sociality.

Surveillance capitalism — a system where every move we make through space and thought is tracked, analyzed, and sold — is the system we need to eradicate. There can be no other way. As Chen notes, the short-term answer to Cambridge Analytica/Facebook will be a “superficial fix,” but the real answer needs to be the wholesale dismantling of a system that sees you and me and everyone we love as objects to be cognitively and emotionally dissected.

For now, #deletefacebook will trend on Twitter (sadly, another corporate social media system), but it’s started to trend elsewhere: on Mastodon, the federated microblog. On Twister, the totally decentralized, peer-to-peer microblog. I haven’t looked, but perhaps it’s trending on Dark Web social networking sites.

It is only after we leave corporate social media behind and take on the work of socializing social media — making it our own, owning it, democratically administering it, democratically improving it — that we will even begin to address the system as such.

And then, or better at the same time, let’s move to the eradicate the fusion of money, media, and power that is our contemporary democratic form of governance.