Happy to have joined Mastodon
My experience getting started on the federated social network
It’s been around one week since I joined Mastodon, the federated, alternative, social network that you might have heard about. So far I’m happy I did.
Mastodon received a flurry of attention since Elon Musk announced his desire to acquire Twitter on April 2022, with more and more accounts created as the Twitter drama unfolded. Recently Mastodon beat the 10 million users mark and keeps growing.
So in case you’re curious if Mastodon is for you, I’ll describe my onboarding experience and will share my opinions of its advantages and potentials drawbacks.
Important thing to consider: Mastodon is a bit different from other popular social media.
All mainstream social networks this far are centralized, mostly closed systems, where you’re only supposed to interact with users inside the same “server” and all the data is owned by a single entity, a for-profit corporation (I’m using quotation marks because these are massive distributed systems, not a single machine server of course). With Mastodon, you have very many independent servers, run by volunteers or organizations, non-profits or for-profits, each of them keeping their user’s data. They communicate with each other to create a useful service for all Mastodon users.
This is where the “federated” part comes into play. Federated means that a bunch of independent servers collaborate together to create a service. The most cited analogy is email. With email you as the user of the Gmail “server” can write to a user of the Yahoo “server” and receive replies from her. Aside of what you shared with your Yahoo friend, your data and the ultimate control over it remains within your server. Actually, if you are a courageous person, you can even try to run your own email server (something that has become increasingly difficult over the years) and then you’ll be the ultimate owner of your data.
It’s something similar with Mastodon. If the instances are configured for it, you, as the user of one instance, can follow another user from another instance. So when they post new content, you can see it in your feed. In the same way, you might have followers from all other instances. I’m not a 100% sure about the details, but I’ve heard that, unlike email, up to this point is quite easier to run your own server and be the owner of your own data.
In terms of look and functionally, Mastodon resembles Twitter the most among social media. Maybe that’s why Twitter users have shown a particular interest on it. But to me the most intriguing is the governance/ownership model. Mastodon the network, is based on Mastodon the open source software https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon. But actually the Mastodon network doesn’t require that all the servers run the Mastodon software. In fact a server doesn’t know which software another server uses. Instead, they use an open protocol called ActivityPub to communicate among them. So, in theory any software capable of talking the Mastodon dialect of ActivityPub could connect to the Mastodon network as a server.
Altogether this means Mastodon is quite much more decentralized than any other mainstream social media. It’s basically an open source software than anybody can read and modify, running in servers that anybody can create and talking an open protocol for which anybody could create new compatible software. Innovation possibilities are astounding in this new space.
What triggered me to join?
For months I’ve heard repeated mentions by Michael Kennedy at the Talk Python To Me and Python Bytes podcasts. Then I heard an episode of the Changelog podcast titled “Into the Fediverse” that was a very good talk with one of the creators of ActivityPub and I felt like the Fediverse was worth trying. I joined the Fosstodon.org instance because its about FOSS (you know, Free and Open Source Software), which it’s very important to me, and also because Michael Kennedy was there, so I guessed, if it’s good enough for him, it’s probably good enough for me.
Things I enjoy this far
It has been a very short time, so this might still be the enthusiasm of the beginning, but there are some things I really like about Mastodon.
The feed
In all mainstream social media the feed is created with secret, sophisticated, machine learning based, algorithms. The goal of these algorithms is “engagement”, which means that you see more content, interact with more content and create more content, so that you spend more time on the app, so that you watch more ads. To me, the feeds built this way are addictive and they provide little bang for your buck. You might spend hours watching entertaining stuff (and ads) just to realize you haven’t learned much or done something of value with your time.
In contrasts, the Mastodon feed has no clever engagement algorithms and no ads. The feed is just a time sorted log of all the accounts you follow. It feels more transparent and lightweight. You don’t feel lured to spend hours on “engaging” things that, if you stop to think about, are not that significant to you. For instance, currently I can check my feed in just a few minutes a day and get a glimpse of all the activity from the accounts I follow. This might change in the future, of course, because I’m not following too many accounts yet.
Nonetheless, if you want more content, the “local” feed (all posts of your instance) at least in my instance (Fosstodon.org) is interesting and relevant to me. That’s another reason to carefully pick your instance.
The people
In Mastodon you feel closer with the people of your own server, there’s a greater feeling of trust and community. Also, beyond servers, people are nicer, seem to care more about others and share useful/interesting stuff instead of wanting more likes or more followers. Of course, it’s part of human nature to aggrandize ourselves, but culture also matters, and this far, in the corner of Mastodon I’ve had the chance to explore, culture seems different than in mainstream social media.
Separability
Another potentiality that I haven’t taken advantage of, but I can see might be useful, is that, if you have different facets of your life, you can have accounts in different servers to keep them separate. For instance imagine you are a software engineer and a rock climbing enthusiast. Maybe you want to have two separate feeds and audiences for these two aspects of your life. With Mastodon, this is super easy, you just create accounts in two separate servers, presuming there’s one server for rock climbers and another for software engineers and you switch from one server to the other just by changing the URL in your browser. Some of the mobile apps, I’ve heard, also support multiple accounts.
Data collection
From what I’ve read, Mastodon (the software) collects a lot less data about you. That makes sense because there are no targeted ads or engagement optimization, so there’s no need to build a detailed profile of who you are (so called “demographics”) or what you like. However, keep in mind that this doesn’t prevent unethical admins at one server to do extra data collection. They could tweak Mastodon itself, or run custom tracking software.
Downsides and concerns
Not everything is roses and chocolate, though. There are still many problems with Mastodon that I want to discuss next.
Less people and less content
Some of them are just due to the mere smaller size of the Mastodon network. For instance, for the tech community in English there’s plenty of content, but for other languages or professional communities there might be just small groups of users and very few content creators. Because of the small amount of users, the people you want to follow might just not be there. Conversely, you cannot easily tell people “follow me on Mastodon” because they might not have an account or wish to create one just to follow you.
Discovering is harder
Discovering accounts within mastodon itself is a bit hard, no much suggestions of new people to follow, except some generic suggestions when you signup. What you can do, though, when you follow a few accounts that you like, is to see who they boost (repost) stuff from, then going to those accounts and seeing if they might be interesting to you. Also you can search your favorite organizations, content creators or friends and check if they have a Mastodon account and start following them.
Would it scale up?
My main concern, however, is that, as I said before, IMHO, Mastodon’s governance/ownership it’s the most revolutionary aspect of it (the federation). This model is still very new for social social media and has only been tested on a small scale. Nobody knows what will happen to this model as it grows. It works well with 10 million, but some things will certainly change if it reaches 500 million or 1 billion.
Might the community fracture as the stakes of decisions become higher? Will the warmer feeling of community screw up with growth?
Also, in terms of technology, can it scale up, or would it suffer terrible performance problems?
Can Mastodon defend itself and compete with social media backed by Big Tech Money? Just imagine all the innovation in AI or Virtual Reality companies like Meta can integrate in their products vs the limited budget of Mastodon. What if they decide Mastodon is a threat and put effort on sidelining it?
Security
From the point of view of security, Mastodon also raises a mixed evaluation. On one hand, they collect a lot less data, and the network is formed by independent servers, so a data breach should compromise a lot less data and for less users. But still, Mastodon is often run by volunteers probably with less resources and skills than the teams operating traditional social media sites. I can only imagine that Twitter or Meta has at least tens of security experts analyzing and mitigating potential threats. But of course, given all the data these companies collect, they are also much more juicy targets for attackers.
Some scenarios, for instance: bad actors could just create instances, coerce instance admins or hack their way to obtain users data, or even take full server control. Imagine somebody taking control and posting from of an account with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers.
The fact that Mastodon (the software) is open source is also a double-edged sword. On the bright side, the code it’s open to security audits by just everybody, so any vulnerability might be detected and reported quickly. But, on the other side, hackers also have access to all of it, and they know exactly in which servers is running.
I can only imagine, as Mastodon becomes more popular, that hacking it will look more and more attractive.
Another scenario is launching DDoS attacks to silence certain servers that post annoying content. Imagine, for instance, an authoritarian government with immense resources suppressing dissent coming from a small server. Typical social media have much more infrastructure to protect against such attacks, making it very hard to silence an individual. But I guess you can solve these problems with third party tools that provide this kind of protection.
Even though these concerns and pain points, to me the upsides still carry more weight, but I understand if it’s different to you.
How to join
If you want to try Mastodon, the official way is visiting https://joinmastodon.org. Go through their list of instances (servers) and pick one according to your interests. As I said, your server won’t limit you, you can follow and be followed by people from other servers. But within-server communication is more fluid and there’s a greater sense of trust and community. People tend to follow and be followed more by people in their own servers.
Accounts are identified by a handle @username@serverinstance.domain. For instance mine is @armando_rp@fosstodon.org. Beware of your handle, from what I understood it’s your account ID, you cannot change it unless you want to recreate your account from scratch without your followers.
Something that feels weird is that at the beginning your feed will be empty, you only start getting content in the feed after you follow accounts. Then it will have just a few posts, and then will gradually fill.
Some servers, Fosstodon included, have a manual review process before approving your account. I wrote a note saying I’m a programmer, interested in OSS, that I write articles at Medium and share some small open source projects at Github. But, honestly, I don’t know how the manual review works, maybe they don’t even read your message. I had to wait for around 5 hours to be approved, quite OK, I’d say, but there are no timing guarantees here (remember this is operated by volunteers), so prepare even for a few days of waiting, depending on the server and how many people are signing up. In the server list at joinmastodon.org they tell you which servers have a manual account approval, in case that’s a problem for you.
It’s a custom of Mastodon culture to write a post introducing yourself and tag it with the #introduction hashtag (if it’s English). People may then boost (repost) your post or “favourite it” (similar to liking) thus welcoming you to the community. Some people might reply to your post with welcoming messages. In my case, after the introduction some people started following me. I think is a way of showing support for a new member. Thank you guys!
Closing thoughts
I want to see Mastodon succeed very much. Not because I’d want Twitter or other social platforms to fail, but because a good dose of healthy competition with a more open approach would do much good in this space IMHO.
If you want to support Mastodon you can just join. If you like it, you can invite your friends or followers to give it a try. If you can reach the influencers or content creators that you like, you can encourage them to create an account and bring some of their followers with them. Furthermore, if you’re a pro with technology you might start a new server for an organization or community, or even contribute to the core Mastodon software.
I think Mastodon doesn’t exclude other social media, it’s just a new, alternative channel where you can get in touch with people. You don’t need to ditch Twitter or Instagram or whatever, you can support Mastodon just by also posting your content there, being available for Mastodon users.
Just remember that people are nicer here, so please, try not being an asshole and kill the good vibes.
References
- Official onboarding site https://joinmastodon.org/
- Mastodon software repo https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
- Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)
