Mastodon

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

The internet is composed of distinct networks, but data travels easily across them because the networks share a common set of protocols. These protocols are open and nonproprietary: any network can join the internet so long as it follows the specified rules. Mastodon is an open-source software project that applies this principle to social media. Servers are independently run but interconnect through open protocols to form a federation. They can also talk to non-Mastodon servers within a broader ensemble of federations—the “Fediverse”—so long as those servers also use the same protocols. Mastodon resembles Twitter, but the Fediverse offers a range of other services, including those modeled after YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

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This is a problem that cannot be solved online because it is not primarily an online problem. Still, a decentralized social media would be better designed to mitigate it. When the fascist social networking site Gab migrated to Mastodon, most of the servers that make up the Fediverse responded by blocking Gab. Because Mastodon is open-source, fascists are free to use it, but their communities can be quarantined. Decentralized social media moves “decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies,” explains writer Mike Masnick. Some ends of the network may be populated by toxic elements.

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The fact that these protocols are open and nonproprietary is a direct consequence of the internet’s public origins. Privatization has pushed things in the opposite direction: online life increasingly takes place within monolithic enclosures where interactions are governed by secret and proprietary algorithms. “Protocolizing” social media would break the walls of these walled gardens, and turn them inside out. Public Programming Mastodon is not tiny. It has millions of users, and it’s far from the only experiment of its kind: a number of similar projects are being pursued across the “decentralized web” community. Still, these alternatives remain relatively niche in comparison to the offerings of the tech giants.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Jack Dorsey and other senior executives were there in the room listening. We won nearly 5 percent of the vote. That day another subgroup of #BuyTwitter, instigated by Vermont cooperator Matthew Cropp, announced the existence of Social.coop. It hosted a server for Mastodon, a new open-source, “fediverse” alternative to Twitter. Social.coop, as the domain suggested, was a cooperative managed by its users. Rather than being controlled by any one company, a federated social network like Mastodon is made up of interconnected nodes; users choose which node to trust with their data, and through the network they can interact with users on other nodes without everyone consigning everything they post to a central hub.

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz
Published 3 Jun 2024

Information transit in the Fediverse works much like email, which also uses a protocol that sends your mail between, say, Gmail and Outlook. Posts on Mastodon rarely do a viral hockey stick because server operators choose whom they want to federate with, and they can block servers that are a source of misinformation. Even when servers are federated, posts don’t instantly appear on all servers at once. Indeed, some posts never leave their servers, while others hop across the Fediverse slowly, shared between individuals on different servers. Reading posts on Mastodon feels like Twitter in slow motion. Noble told me that social media companies could also put the brakes on sharing our data.

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But she pointed out that “there are other kinds of slow business models in entertainment. It takes a long time to make films and shows—even journalism. There is some value in slow.”12 Her ideas are starting to catch on with former Twitter addicts who left the platform in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover in late 2022. Many moved their accounts to Mastodon, a social media platform with some of the same features as Twitter but where posts don’t circulate as quickly. There are a few technical reasons for this. One is that Mastodon accounts aren’t all in one centralized location. Users open accounts on a specific server, often devoted to a particular interest like science or art, and these servers are federated with each other via a protocol that delivers posts from one to the next.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

As Oliver Leistert puts it in “The Revolution Will Not Be Liked,” for social media companies, “the public sphere is an historically elapsed phase from the twentieth century they now exploit for their own interests by simulating it.”16 * * * — WRITING IN THE ATLANTIC about a nascent decentralized network called Scuttlebutt, Ian Bogost gives us an image for this absurd situation: “Facebook and Twitter are only like water coolers if there were one, giant, global water cooler for all workplaces everywhere.”17 Dissatisfaction with this standard-issue water cooler has fueled the movement toward a decentralized web, which instead of private companies and servers makes use of peer-to-peer networks and open-source software. The goal is not only for users to own their own data, but to shift that data and software closer to their end points of use. Mastodon, for example, is a federated social network of “instances,” each using free software on a community-run server whose users can nonetheless communicate with those in other instances. As its creators point out, Mastodon can never go bankrupt, be sold, or be blocked by governments, because it consists of little other than open-source software.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

For an introduction to open-source philosophy, see Lawrence Lessig, ‘Open Code and Open Societies: Values of Internet Governance’, Sibley Lecture at the University of Georgia, 16 February 1999; or, for a fictional account of its actual implementation, I recommend Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (New York: Macmillan, 2017). For examples of distributed processing initiatives, see https://setiathome.berkeley.edu and https://foldingathome.org/. The social networks Mastodon and Scuttlebutt, the Beaker web browser and Jitsi.org web conferencing are good examples of federated and peer-to-peer network projects. 35. For a description of the Optometrist Algorithm, see E. A. Baltz, E. Trask, M. Binderbauer, et al., ‘Achievement of Sustained Net Plasma Heating in a Fusion Experiment with the Optometrist Algorithm’, Scientific Reports, 7(6425), 25 July 2017; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06645-7.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

What the Old Internet People have in common is that they still probably conduct a fair bit of their social lives online, often having a long-standing pseudonym that they use everywhere and internet-first friends that they’ve known for longer than some of their meatspace friends. They’re the social internet users most likely to have never gotten or to have barely used Facebook, because for them the internet is a place to tap into a global community rather than reinforce a local one. (In the late 2010s, many of them started contemplating switching to Mastodon, a social networking platform with a decentralized, topic-based structure and a lack of user-friendliness which both recalled the early internet.) As the internet’s role in everyday life has matured, Old Internet People have become harder to distinguish unless you ask them. Depending on their age and who they hang out with online, some can be confused for one of their two neighboring cohorts, the people who came online in the next wave.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Some believe that alternatives to social media that are not based on surveillance capitalism need to be promoted — encouraging the development of “civic media” as a “social” or “public” (instead of commercial) “good.”411 Indeed, there are several privacy-protecting search engines and social media platforms that do not organize their systems on the basis of personal data surveillance, such as DuckDuckGo and Mastodon. Some believe we should treat social media as “publishers,” or regulate them in the same way we regulate large utilities like electricity and water. Others believe that they should be broken up by using antitrust tools instead. Evaluating all these ideas can be difficult and confusing.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Between 2011 and 2013 it processed over $1.2 billion worth of sales, mostly illegal drugs. Although Silk Road was eventually shut down, there are now several other dark net markets, where stolen personal data, narcotics and child abuse images can be bought and sold, Amazon-style. Let’s imagine a blockchain-based social media platform (there are already versions of this, like Mastodon, which is on the normal net), in which posts are simultaneously hosted on multiple decentralised blockchain databases. Facebook runs on servers that sit in massive data centres controlled by the company – meaning that it can delete or edit what its users see. A blockchain social media platform would be untouchable – no government would be able to edit or remove hate-speech, illegal images or terror propaganda, unless the whole network was somehow vaporised.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

I have hope for an Internet that’s more like Geocities, with expressions of individuality and customization everywhere, but with the multimedia innovations that have made the 2020s’ Internet so compelling. It would be a messier, more fun place—more like a playground or a sandbox than the cubicle office floor that the Internet has come to resemble. Open-source software like Mastodon, which allows its users to create and host their own Twitter-like social networks, provides one hint at what might be to come. But Mastodon also demonstrates some of the disadvantages of such different infrastructure. Audiences are smaller on self-hosted platforms, and interactions are more difficult. You might not be able to find any kind of content that you want.