When Twitter first appeared in July 2006, I loved it. At one point, a geek created an app that logged tweets and geolocated them in real time on a world map, so you could see little dots appearing all over the world. (I even did a short video recording of my screen and put music to it, but I didn’t put it online because I didn’t own the rights to the music, and now I can’t find it. Sigh, that’s digital life.)
What I loved about Twitter in the beginning was that it allowed you to connect with the thought streams of people you liked or admired. However, like all good things, that came to an end when the platform embarked on algorithmic curation of user feeds to increase “engagement” (and, hopefully, profit). And from then on, it got more and more tedious, even though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform, and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.
Like many other people, my gaze fell on Mastodon as a possible refuge from Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same type of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. The mastodon, on the other hand, is a protocol – “a system of rules to spin your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. While Twitter is a universeMastodon is what has been called a “fediverse”, that is, a decentralized network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one. the observer put it: “A distributed network of services similar to Twitter”.
That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively simple. Joining Twitter simply involves signing up at twitter.com; but to become a Mastodon user, you need to sign up to one of those semi-independent nodes. They are basically just servers run by individuals or groups, and Mastodon kindly provides a list of which you might consider joining. Once inside, your identity is linked to the server where you have an account. So if you have chosen the username “vici” on the server arsenalfc.social, then your username will be @[email protected]. And you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter what server they are on.
From then on, it’s a bit like using Twitter: post instead of tweeting, reposting, liking, etc. The big difference is that you only see things that have been posted by those you follow – your feed is not algorithmically curated for the benefit of some venture capitalist. (Mastodon is open source and managed by a non-profit company based in Germany, Mastodon gGmbH.)
If you’re coming from Twitter, the first thing you’ll notice about Mastodon is that it looks CalmerSomehow, there is less shouting, less aggressiveness, less posturing, less humble boasting. And, of course, it can also seem boring at first, because you’re only seeing what your “following” (is that a word?) have posted or reposted. You’ll also notice that if one of your contacts wants to post something that they think might be shocking or disturbing, you can flag it beforehand so they don’t click on it.
So far so good. But since this is technology, there are downsides. The most obvious one is that while you’re no longer at the capricious mercy of an erratic digital emperor named Elon, your chosen Mastodon server administrator may not be an angel (or a democrat) as such either. discovered blogger. “I believed the Mastodon propaganda,” she wrote, “and chose a small site from the list at joinmastodon.org. That little site turned out to be run by fascists and doesn’t allow account cancellation. I left and moved to a small political site… which kicked my moderate liberal ass for being too radical. So I decided that being a bird in a big flock was a good idea and signed up for an account on mastodon.social, Mastodon’s mother site.”
So is it a substitute for Twitter? I don’t think so, just like avocados are not a substitute for mangoes. Twitter is really for broadcasting – for letting the world in general know what you think, or alerting people to your next book/event/podcast, or complaining about potholes, Rishi Sunak, Brexit, the metaverse and just generally awful about it all.
At its best, Mastodon seems to be more about talking than yelling, and in that sense reminds me of the early Internet, in the 1980s, before the World Wide Web, and in particular Usenet, the first global online discussion space on the web. In which case, wouldn’t it be ironic if Martian adventurer Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter turns out to be taking us back to the future?
what i’ve been reading
Freedom of religion
Remembering the challenge of Pope Benedict is a fascinating editorial on November Nathan Gardels magazine on the late pontiff’s debate with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas on democratic values.
Data Protection
Some really useful digital security tips from American cryptographer and technologist Bruce Schneier, who knows these things inside out, can be found in the Choose strong passwords post on his Schneier on Security blog.
Grammar school
A civil war over semicolons is an entertaining piece by Gal Beckerman on the Atlantic about the discussions that the American biographer Robert Caro and his publisher, Robert Gottlieb, have had for 50 years.
