(crossposted from a public post on my Patreon)
Okay, so, Mastodon.
I’m “on Mastodon” now.
What’s that mean? Damn, I wish that was an easy question. “On Mastodon” is not the right way to describe it, but bear with me. I have to start somewhere.
I’ve had my account** on Mastodon dot social for a month, which in no way makes me an expert, but the way I process new information goes like this:
- Discover new thing, by which I mean “Dive in heedless & headfirst”
- Research new thing exhaustively
- Write. Everything. Down.
I’m in stage 3, which means so I need to hammer out my thoughts for myself to organize them, & that means leaving them lying around where anyone can stumble across them. Lucky you, huh?
I’ll be doing more than this one post. It’s a BIG new thing. This time around, I’m offering meandering general impressions.
Vital Disclaimer: These are all my impressions & mine alone. YMMV. (Your Mastodon May Vary) All my information sources come from the internet & thus suspect. Some of the data might be wrong. I hope not, I’ve done due diligence, but no guarantees.
Also, there’s no particular *point* to this. I’m just moving the new mental furniture around in my head until it fits better. So. Here goes.
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The main thing that’s intriguing me about Mastodon is this: it isn’t what many people seem to want it to be. It definitely isn’t what most people think it is.
It isn’t a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook, or an online blogging community like Tumblr or LiveJournal, or even “an interconnected, interacting collection of individual online communities,” which is a mouthful of a description I remember seeing somewhere but unhappily forgot to bookmark for later linking.
Mastodon isn’t a thing at all.
There is a piece o open source server software named Mastodon that can be used anyone with the hardware, the know-how and the energy to make an online community (hereafter called an instance) and also connect with people in other such communities if you want.
There are also several such servers that use the word Mastodon as part of their address/name.
A lot of the think pieces I’ve read about people leaving Twitter for other places use “Mastodon” as shorthand to describe the collective internet presence of Mastodon instances/servers & other servers using compatible open-source software.
This is driving me buggy because they’re WRONG, “Mastodon” isn’t what that world-wide collection of interconnected servers is called. It’s called “the Fediverse,” and it’s been around lots longer than Mastodon software. Check Wikipedia for a fairly decent if technical history and a list of other server software types supporting Fediverse communities.
I get why media explainers are conflating the two.
Mastodon is a fun word, while Fediverse is clunky. “Mastodon is the new Twitter” makes a catchy headline even though it’s wrong from every possible perspective.
It’s still driving me buggy. Any time people jam square words into round holes, it grates on my nerves.
So to me, what I’ve joined is the Fediverse not “Mastodon,” and the Fediverse is too sprawling, too complex, too multi-systemic, to be encompassed by the word “platform,” too active to fit under the umbrella term “media,” social or otherwise.
Even if I only look at the instance where I’m currently roosting, Mastodon.social (one of the largest) it’s nothing like Twitter. Or Facebook. It’s not even like even LiveJournal or Usenet, which at least share neighboring evolutionary branches.
This is a whole, huge, new WORLD. My address is just where I’m standing in it. I can connect with anyone anywhere in the Fediverse–as long as it’s connected to where I am.
I picture Mastodon.social as a cyberpunk megalopolis spaceport, all neon & noise, flashy crowds, 24/7 parties, trash, and clutter. But! The Fediverse is a whole world, remember? There there are also quiet neighborhoods in the same city, and farms, and communes, and even little homesteads of one person alone (if you have the hardware & a domain address, I’m told you can self-host your own little “instance” aka server) There are party islands & mountaintop retreats.
And! I can connect with people in those other places!
Best of all, it’s easy for me to close my doors & windows, so to speak, and not have to see anything. There’s nothing encouraging me to click one more thing, no trending topics being pushed at me, no suggested posts, no damned algorithims or unstoppable endless scroll. I have the tools to find quiet even in the city.
I’d like to move somewhere quieter in the Fediverse, where I can talk tea & books & cats with likeminded souls locally and not have to hide my home feed & the local instance to avoid overwhelm, but that will come.
(Next post will be about how I set up my account so it would NOT be the pointless, empty timesuck Twitter & Facebook were. Sorry, friends who found friends & community on Twitter, I never felt like anything but a rejected, shunned, & unvalued nobody there. And Facebook was fine when I followed 50 people or less, but that made it useless for connecting, and that’s the reason I go to online spaces full of people. To donnect. If I want news or information, I go to news & information spaces. DO they overlap? OF COURSE. But that isn’t the point here.)
ANYway. I comprehend, intellectually, why many new arrivals to the Fediverse don’t like it. Setting up an account is simple, but it isn’t frictionless the way getting started & finding people on Twitter & Facebook is easy. Very little is immediately obvious or familiar. There’s a reason for that, though.
Twitter & Facebook are corporate-owned worlds, to bend my own analogy a little. Everything is tightly controlled, because their success is measured in users, data gathered from users, and ad revenue generated by users. They profit from making things simple & doing everything they can to keep people from leaving. It takes a lot of energy to escape those gravity wells.
The Fediverse isn’t about profit, it’s about existing. Humanity is complicated.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who’ve been on their servers for YEARS. Servers have their own cultures. People have developed community standards & traditional Ways Of Communicating. Some of these are shared by most or all servers. Some are not.
It’s worth mentioning that lot of early servers and the core norms of the Fediverse were established by queer, disabled, and otherwise marginalized members of the tech community. Inclusion is A Thing.
Are all these cultures and traditional norms healthy? Ha. No. Truth.social is an instance, for example. It’s an island practically no one else connects to/federates with, but it exists. But there is a foundation level commitment to trying to make space and center marginal voices.
But.
When any existing inhabited space gets flooded with new arrivals who have their own ways, their own needs, their own ways of doing things, friction is bound to result. When the influx outsumbers the existing population by multiple orders of magnitude…there’s all kinds of culture clashes going on in the Fediverse right now.
Grief makes us crave the familiar, the comfortable, the known. Many people arriving from Twitter are grieving, involuntarily bereft of connections and communities they spent years building, escapees from a walled city being torn apart at the whims of an asshole billionaire.
Problem is, in the Fediverse, there is no One True Way & it isn’t all One Big Place. What’s acceptable behavior on some servers is unwelcome on others. That’s disconcerting. It’s frustrating. It’s not “welcoming,” the same way new destinations in The Real World feel unwelcoming & confusing until you get your bearings.
That brings up another factor of discontent: all the pains and frustrations of being in a strange new online space get amplified for people who start off in instances that are not a good fit for them or the way they want to interact.
Differences in communication norms shouldn’t lead to flaming rows over fragile, institutionally racist liberals silencing marginalized voices, but those fires are already lit. It’s happened multiple times, in multiple instances, large & small. Some high-profile newcomers have declared with conviction that “Mastodon” is not a good community and may never be safe for them.
Which is…a conclusion I am not qualified to judge.
There are some seriously robust protocols for reporting bad actors locally & across the Fediverse, but it’s hard to tell whether they’re enough or not when there literally aren’t enough moderators to keep up with the incoming flood in many instances right now, and when mods only human, are new, make mistakes — or in some instances may indeed be intolerant bigots.
Bottom line, there’s no effective difference between hostile fire & friendly fire when you’re the target of it, and people are finding themselves targeted when they are at their newest and most vulnerable.
I expect there will be a lot of instances slamming defensively shut and others being defensively blocked in the days & months to come. I hold out hope it will all settle in time. A lot more listening & work needs to happen, that’s for sure, and there’s definitely room for changes and improvement.
But. Um. I still like it here a gazillion times better than any online outlet for creativity I’ve used since LiveJournal. (I still miss LJ, sigh) I’ve gotten more response & feedback in my 3 weeks here than in two years on Twitter. Not even joking. And I don’t get sucked into depressive doomscrolling here either. It’s the weirdest sensation to reaching satiety and think, “okay, I’m good, gonna log out now.”
I suspect a lot of Twitter migrants will migrate right back out as soon as they can find a singular platform that’s more like the social media they’re accustomed to, one offers them the safety and comfort features they know, want & need.
Me, I will keep hunting for a little house somewhere far from the Big Server noise and clutter here in the Fediverse. I like it here. People say nice things about my cat pictures.
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** Minor disclaimer/digression (because I am made of digressions) I am not exactly new to the Fediverse. See, I opened an account way back in 2017, invited by a friend who was on a very small Mastodon-based server. I never did much other than set up an account & follow that server’s local feed, though. The friend died later that year, I never logged in again, & sometime between then & 2022 the server went dark & took the account with it. So, I’m starting over, and the Fediverse got a LOT bigger in the interim.
