So if there is one thing we can all agree on it's that wooly mammoth's rock!
[NOTE: This may or may not end up being one of Kevin's really long rambling posts. It's too early to tell yet so go grab a drink first just in case.]
So in regards to my vague question the topic at hand is indeed Mastodon the "Twitter alternative" that has been making the news lately. Thanks to a billionaire making a few public comments while he was most likely
toking, Twitter is now in the midst of an unbelievable meltdown. It is both unbelievably funny and sad at the same time; funny from a tech geek perspective in how badly it is going and sad because there are now a lot of folks unemployed and the full ramifications of it all have the potential of affecting SpaceX and Tesla a bit as well (
just take a look at the recent $TSLA stock prices, in particular the closing price on 2022-11-09).
... I've had a Twitter account for years, and we use the
@CameraderieOrg account to help promote the site, but I'm not a Twitter
user as much as I am an occasional viewer. Once upon a time Twitter was a good way of getting a quick pulse on what people are talking about, whether it be stuff in the news, hobbies, or entertainment like TV shows & movies. Those days are over. These days Twitter is mostly a cesspool of crypto scams, advertisements, promotion of extreme ideologies, and trolling with just a smattering of actual content between. The past two weeks have also been the 'Twitter Crash-and-Burn' show with folks mocking the situation and, very,
very weirdly, other folks more or less defending Twitter's new owner as though he just walked on water. It's all bizarre, more so when you realize that somebody paid $44 billion (
BILLION!) for Twitter. ...
Twitter's implosion is where Mastodon comes in. Mastodon is, at it's simplest, a free open-source (FOSS) application that is very similar to how Twitter looks & feels. [
Link: Mastodon at Wikipedia] This allows anyone to download the software and, with some tech knowledge, be up & running their own mini version of a Twitter-like community. Besides the original "Mastodon" community at
Mastodon.social, with as of the moment 180K user accounts, it is estimated that there are over 4,000 Mastodon web sites out there. Each is called an "instance" in Mastodon parlance so when somebody speaks of an "instance" it's really just the specific web site they are talking about.
A lot of the Mastodon instances are highly localized in regards to their subject matter. Think of a topic or subject that would be open to discussion and there is likely a Mastodon instance of it out there. Politics, news, artists, photographers, scientists, LGBTQ, programmers, and on & on, there is likely an instance that specializes in it. There are, of course, a lot of open topic instances where it's a free-for-all in regards to discussions and those are the ones newer users will likely come across first. There are some well known Mastodon instances that have made the news. An ex-US President made a big deal about creating their own social media site after getting banned from Twitter. After raising hundreds of millions of dollars and getting all types of investors with a lot of media hype along the way it turns out that their big reveal was
just a rebranded instance of Mastodon. That also got them in trouble a bit since they violated the software agreement and did their best to strip out all of the Mastodon branding & identifiers while claiming all of it was proprietary. Whether it is a high-profile site that is in the news or just a small site with a dozen or so members, all of them are Mastodon instances with the same basic Twitter-like functionality.
Now this is where the interesting (
to me) part comes into play. It is also the source of most of the confusion when it comes to people talking about "Mastodon" lately. The Mastodon code is based on the open
ActivityPub protocol which is now a
W3 standard which allows it to be part of the
Fediverse collective. For the non-tech crowd, what that means is that the Mastodon software is able to communicate between instances. Somebody joining a Mastodon based site about digital art is able to talk to and follow members of a totally different instance that may be about woodworking and vice-versa. By searching the 'federation' of instances for specific member handles or hashtags somebody joining any individual instance is able to follow and talk with any members of the other four-thousand+ instances.
And that is where a lot of the confusion comes in. With all the recent talk of people leaving Twitter to "join Mastodon" they don't realize that there isn't a single "Mastodon" site or application, instead they are joining a specific individual community instance and from there they get a Twitter-like experience of being able view content within the entire Mastodon federation network of instances.
To clarify that, let's circle back to the Mastodon.social web site mentioned earlier. That is the first and original "Mastodon" instance that was up & running. By contrast
Deepspace.social is a totally different web site for people interested in what goes on in space that, as of the moment, shows it has 12 members versus the 180K on
Mastodon.social. [
Note: Both web sites have ".social" as part of the domain name but it isn't necessary, any valid URL domain name can be used, its just that ".social" is very popular among the Mastodon network.] Then there is
InfoSec.exchange, another web site aimed at IT security folks with about 21K members. All of them are running Mastodon, all of them are part of the Mastodon federation of instances that can talk to each other, and each of them have their own member bases with their own rules and norms.
When somebody "joins Mastodon" they do so by selecting an instance and becoming a member of that individual site. After joining they can search for people and hashtag topics and they can follow people and interact with people just like they did on Twitter. But... they didn't "join Mastodon", they joined
Deepspace.social or they joined
InfoSec.exchange or, most likely, they joined the
Mastodon.social website. Because of this their Mastodon account isn't just
@JohnDoe
like it is at Twitter, instead it is qualified with which instance they are on like
@JohnDoe@mastodon.social
in order to specify which
@JohnDoe
is being referenced. And, yep, that means
@JohnDoe
can exist at different instances, that part of the account name is not unique across all of "Mastodon", it is just unique to the instance. When trying to explain it I've seen a lot of articles compare it to email accounts where
JohnDoe
is not a unique name across all of the various email systems, it is just unique to the email provider like
JohnDoe@gmail.com
versus
JohnDoe@yahoo.com
and so on.
The next layer of confusion for the people migrating from Twitter is that there are three timelines available to you. Viewing 'Home' is the timeline of just the accounts that you follow. The 'local' timeline is activity that is happening on your instance. By contrast the 'Federated' timeline shows activity from both the local instance members and from members who, one way or another, are associated to members of the local instance. Let's say that there are two local instance users, John Doe and Jane Doe. They both belong to an instance about dogs. John isn't interested in the misc. stuff that is going on with the 4K+ instances in the Mastodon federation, he is only interested in dogs so he doesn't follow anybody except for other members of the same local instance. Jane on the other hand likes dogs, and is why she joined this particular instance, but she makes a living in IT security so she follows a lot of people from the InfoSec.exchange instance. When John and Jane view their local timeline they only see each others activity but when they view the 'Federated' timeline they also see the activity of all of the people that Jane follows from the other instances. The net effect is that members can choose to only see what is going on in their specific 'local' instance or they can see what is going on with just anybody that they are following, or what any of their followed friends are following by viewing the 'federated' timeline. What that means, really, is that John will never see most of what is being posted on the 4K+ instances that make up "Mastodon" unless somebody else on his local instance about dogs is following somebody from one or more of those other 4K+ instances
and John goes into the 'federated' timeline. Good luck going "viral" on "Mastodon" because, really, unless you're a high profile person that is followed by a lot of members across different instances then your post will
never get the same visibility that it would on Twitter where members are likely to spread it around by 'retweets' and it ending up on Twitter's trending list and being suggested to others. So while it is bad news for anybody who wants to simply get people to see their posts for whatever purpose (
promotion, ads, ego, trying to be an "influencer", whatever), it is very good news for people who want to post stuff and see stuff by other people who are most likely interested in the same stuff as you and will have their posts seen by people who are interested in the same stuff as you.
Anybody who is leaving Twitter and isn't really tech oriented to know the difference between wanting to "join Mastodon" versus signing up at a particular instance would be best to join
Mastodon.social since there are a lot of people on that instance already talking about anything & everything. That would give new ex-Twitter members more of a Twitter-like content experience that they would be expecting to see instead of joining an instance with a low member count and not much activity showing up in the timelines unless they know to seek out which accounts to follow at other instances. To see that in action, view the public timelines of
Mastodon.social vs.
Mastodon.world vs
DeepSpace.social. With the recent surge of ex-Twitter members sites like Mastodon.social are experiencing growth issues so patience is needed as well.
With this type of 'decentralized' network there is not a single owner of "Mastodon", there are thousands. Anybody can spin up a server and join in. Well, almost everybody. Instances don't have to be part of the federation, such as the forked version of Mastodon being used by the ex-President that does not talk with any other instances, and instance admins can block other instances. That way if somebody starts up a new instance and the content getting posted is reprehensible to the members of, for example, the instance dedicated to dogs, then the admin of the instance about dogs can configure their instance to block activity from/to the new instance that came online posting junk. There are lists out there being maintained of instances that are suggested to be blocked. Somebody can't buy "Mastodon", they can't buy ads on it, and they can't bring it down. If one particular instance goes down then, yes, the members of that instance are impacted but the federation network of instances still goes on. And it's possible for one instance to allow ads to be posted but unless members of other instances are following the account that is posting the ads then nobody will see them except for members of the local instance. The flip side is that with 4K+ instances there also potentially 4K+ different sets of "rules" being applied. Quite a few people leaving Twitter to join a Mastodon instance are finding themselves on the receiving end of people telling them that something they are doing, like posting certain content or not including 'content warning' tags, is not allowed even though there is nothing in the rules & terms that prohibit it on the site that they signed up on. Then there is the matter of the ex-Twitter users trying to find
@JohnDoe
to follow them only to find out there there are 20 different accounts with names like
@JohnDoe@BananaFans.com
and
@JohnDoe@GuysWhoWearSuspenders.com
and they have no way of knowing which one is the one they want.
... Some folks in our
Cameraderie community know I'm an old tech geek and I've been online in one form or another for a long time. When I see, shall we say "younger folks", get so excited about stuff such as decentralized platforms like Mastodon I can't help but think "
Dude, what are you talking about?! We were doing stuff like that back in the 80's with BBSes being FIDO nodes, being members of networks like RIME, and hooking into UseNet. Everything you're trying to deal with, like how to moderate content from other sites, has been dealt with many, many times over.". ...
Whew, that's a lot to type out but it gets us to the what the intent of my original question was, to see what our community thinks of Mastodon and their reaction to it.
My interest in technology is usually more geared towards the mechanics of how it works versus the actual application usage of it. At face value, Mastodon being a FOSS version of Twitter doesn't really get my attention since I'm not an avid Twitter user but when dug into deeper it is the underlying ActivityPub protocol that intrigues me. And that's when I usually get in trouble.
I'll be setting up a Mastodon instance if for no either reason then to play around with it. The server requirements are different than what is needed for
Cameraderie so just to get the instance running it'll require playing around with some new stuff that I haven't delved into before. For that reason I won't be using the same server. For the Mastodon instance I'll be trying out a Digital Ocean 'droplet' so that the Mastodon experiment sandbox is far, far away from the
Cameraderie sandbox (
totally different host providers, totally different servers, absolutely no communications between them).
If our community members surprised me by giving a response that many were familiar with Mastodon, or were already members of an instance, then I would make my experiment a bit more stable with an eye towards creating a "Cameraderie" branded instance and keeping it around for our members to use. Based on how this thread went I'll do the experiment with a different site name and not worry about keeping it around longer than experimenting time to gain knowledge.