Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter, on this week’s DecoderPod
. He’s not kidding with the cats thing, in case you’re listening. That was 100 percent true. But there’s all sorts of other servers.
We could actually talk about Medium as an example of that, because Medium has spun up their own Mastodon server. Now, they are a publishing platform for long-form articles for writers. What do writers do? They usually announce what they’ve written on social media, in short form content. Mastodon is a perfect fit for them to basically offer it as a value-add.
An example of that is email and the situation with Gmail. Gmail is huge. They have very good spam filters, but unfortunately, those good spam filters sometimes catch people who try to self-host email. It creates a situation where it’s so difficult to self-host email that you’re basically forced to just go use Gmail or one of the other large providers instead.
audience, but I’m going to do it just so I’ve said it out loud. Email is an open protocol that is run by standards organizations. Gmail runs on those protocols — SMTP, IMAP, and the rest — and so does Outlook or whatever. The reality for most people is that there’s a collapse between the protocol and the application on their phone. If you have Outlook, you are almost certainly not using the Gmail app. If you have Gmail, you are almost certainly not using the Outlook app.
That is the idea. The idea is the funnel. They get started on mastodon.social, but afterwards they can move to an account on their own server that they create or on a different server provided by a different company or person. Historically, that has been the case. A lot of people who are currently running their own servers had their first account on mastodon.social. So it is working, and I imagine it will make mastodon.
I realize I keep asking about money, but one of the reasons I keep asking is that if you want to be a success on the scale you’re talking about, it actually needs to become an ecosystem. There need to be multiple kinds of business models and businesses using the protocol and using Mastodon. That’s what makes it resilient to change in a way that MySpace’s business was not.
on the show. He said, “ActivityPub is great. Fundamentally, this is all blogging. My whole company is blogging, whether it’s Tumblr, WordPress.com, or whatever. We’re going to support this and be in full support of blogging.”. She said, “Mastodon is really interesting. This is where I’m pointed. First, we’re just going to set up an instance and see how it works.” You can see the turn there for her is building some ActivityPub support directly into the browser itself.
Do you think that someone might fork it and make it more specific? The social platforms that tend to win are the ones that kind of funnel everybody towards a particular format that captures the zeitgeist. I’m specifically thinking of Friendster, to MySpace, to Facebook, to Instagram, to TikTok, the funnel has been, “Just point a camera at your face and go.” You’re kind of back to, “Well, actually, writing is the ne plus ultra of the internet. We should just do a good job at it.
Do you think there’s any danger of one of those platforms saying, “We’ve hit the limit here. We’re just going to fork the Mastodon code and build our own version of this thing, with a separate network that might have its own network effects,” and then that becomes a challenge to Mastodon?for that. The punchline is that you now have one more standard to care about.I think what speaks in favor of ActivityPub and Mastodon is that we have built up this network.
This is the challenge, though. Small communities are relatively self-sustaining and self-moderating to an extent. As they scale, things get out of control very quickly and people start doing very bad things very quickly. We have written about the challenges moderators face on skilled social platforms for years now.
Yeah. Going from that point back to moderation, this decentralized system also allows sharing the load of the moderation burden between completely different systems and completely different organizations. If you count a person running a server as a moderator, then the lower bound of the number of moderators in the fediverse is something like 9,000 or 10,000, because that’s the number of servers there are.
I would say that content moderation is one of the hardest problems in social media. There’s no denying that. We can add features, we can remove features, we can improve how a button looks, whatever. Content moderation is always going to be at the core and center of what makes a social media platform work. So yeah, it is complicated.
What I’m curious about is that moderation is the cost, even beyond server costs or whatever. As your community scales, moderation and legal compliance become a cost that is almost unbearable for anyone except the largest companies in the world. Facebook has to run moderation services across the world, they have to be in legal compliance across the world. Right now, as we speak, there is a Supreme Court case about Section 230 and Google’s recommendation algorithm on YouTube.
Is it easy to start a social network from scratch? No, it absolutely is not. Imagine starting something like Twitter completely from scratch. Mastodon is what allows you to do that if you want to. It’s a shortcut to starting your own Twitter for the public if you want, but it comes with all of the costs, problems, and risks of running a public service like that.
Well, it’s based on my experience running mastodon.social and the moderation loads that we get. Most of the reports that come to us are usually about people who have just signed up and don’t belong here. They’re the people who don’t actually agree with our rules and break them straight away. During times when we had closed registrations, the load on our moderation team was a lot lower. For the most part, it’s quite straightforward really. The people who break rules show themselves very quickly.
Obviously, there is a side to the fediverse that is completely the opposite and leans towards permissive; everything goes, free speech, everything. For the most part, it is ostracized and distanced from the previous side. A lot of different approaches exist out there.Well, I believe that our part grows faster because they get traffic from joinmastodon.org, our official website, and our official apps. So that helps.
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