Like any good techie, I've been playing with Mastodon these past couple of weeks, now that Melon Husk has purchased Twitter.  Having a space on another microblogging platform isn't a bad idea, in case you want to pull the ripcord on the parachute if and when Twitter goes down in flames.  I tried Mastodon back in 2016 (or was it 2017?) when it was new, and I ended up deleting my account.  Twitter worked well enough for me back then that I didn't need to maintain another social presence.  By that time, I had settled on the main tools I'd be using.  The 2016 version of mastodon seemed pretty much (at least according to my recollection) to be a Twitter clone, except without my network. The 2022 version of Mastodon feels like the 2016 version of Twitter. Back in the day, I think I decided to join the main mastodon.social node so it felt more like the twitter of the day.  In the intervening years it seems like more nodes have been added (including right wing ones... 🤦‍♂️).

Anywho...Since it seems like I needed to have a look at mastodon more than just a mere curiosity, this time around I decided to pick an instance more aligned with my main twitter account, and chose scholar.social - that's also where a few of my contacts seemed to go.  After playing around for two weeks and reconstructing some of the follow-connections I've had on twitter now for a while, I've re-assessed my analogy for Mastodon.  Yes, it looks like Twitter from 2016, but it acts more like a phpBB forum with federated connections to other phpBB forums.  Each instance might as well be another mini social network, and each network has a 'personality' and rules to follow. It also influences a lot of the content on the local social's timeline.

Each server admin can allow or disallow connections to/from other socials in the fediverse.  This can be both good and bad; e.g., I really don't want nazis in my timeline, yet at the same time some of the people I follow on twitter (e.g., troublemaking data scientists and apparent activists) seem to be blocked in the instance I am on.  Hence the argument that you can "just pick any instance" and follow whomever is not a reality in practice. Server admins do have enormous control over what is seen and not seen, so federation is a nice feature, but it's also not a given.  The fact that much of the federation depends on server admins allowing/disallowing connections doesn't add value to that feature.

From a practical perspective, the design decisions for the underlying software are both stuck in 2016, and stubbornly refusing to change.  For example, one of the features on Twitter that I particularly like is the quote tweet...as seen here used by mastodon's official account...

The reason for the lack of such a feature? Well...no sub-tweeting allows because people abuse it...but...as evidenced above Mastodon's official account does it, it does not  always lead to abuse, and the rationale is total bullshit if you ask me. An extension to this ideological aspect (or perhaps additional rationale), is that the software developers want to force you into a conversation with the original author of the post by replying to their timeline...but not everything need be a conversation! So converse, or get off the platform? 🤔

"I've made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people's behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for "good" like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank's" - https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726

Ideology doesn't just perpetuate the software design, but local instances have their rules as well.  Don't get me wrong, ensuring that there is a minimum level of community respect is important, but the instance I joined explicitly prohibits cross-posting to other socials, no shortened URLS, and there's a page of community standards, including about content warnings (some things you'd normally expect to see...and other things you wouldn't, like pictures of insects...). In another instance, I guess you also have to provide your academic CV and have your publications verified to gain entrance. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️. So, yeah... it's like joining an discussion forum community circa 2000s... but now you're federated and people might follow you from another phpbb...

Yes, mastodon, like any technology, is not value and ideologically neutral. I really wish academic friends and colleagues would stop buying into it hook-line-and-sinker and repeating claims without (appearing to) critically think about them.

Other issues I have with the technology:

• No fulltext search...seems and obvious feature to me.  People need to proactively hashtag their posts for you to find content.
• If your server admin decides to call it quits, there goes your instance...not sure what the migration path is. You probably can migrate to another instance, if given enough time.
• Server admins pay for this out of their own pockets, so much of media uploading is a no-no because it eats up resources.
• No algorithms... and people are treating algorithms like they are inherently evil.  They're not. But fine let's go with no algorithms: Do you know one useful thing that an algorithm can help provide? Useful discovery of content and people that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
• Furthermore, since everything is one loooooooong stream, my home feed is spammed by freakin' threads because nothing gets hidden past that first post UNLESS the author mutes subsequent posts to it.  Or, people decide to post everything  in one go, so I get all of Professor X's posts, while The Human Torch's posts are relegated to page 3 of scrolling...
• Apparently, image accessibility is an issue, but I'll take people's word for that.
• As pointed out by some people I follow: Mastodon hasn’t really been set up to deal with large-scale coordinated harassment - and some instances are going to be bad at moderation; some OF them intentionally and some unintentionally.
• Moving to another instance if your instance isn't working out is fine for a discussion forum...but not for a microblogging service.  If you need to move to another instance there are problems, and federation won't solve those (as indicated above).

What people seem to forget (or not realize) is that some of these features that Twitter have emerged organically from the users of the community. Twitter really started as an SMS-to-web bridge (hence the 140-character limit originally), but evolved based on how people used the platform. Doing stuff differently because your platform isn't twitter and you are taking an ideological stance isn't a way to make things useful to people.  But, maybe you just want to do you, and that's fine...

I think people on Twitter are having a knee-jerk reaction to Melon Husk.  There's a reason why Mastodon didn't take off in 2016. I am willing to be pleasantly surprised though. That said, here's my parachute account in case I need to use it. Feed free to connect. Althought, I suspect I might be using my LinkedIn account more...

Your thoughts?

PS:  Funniest tweet describing Mastodon: "Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs" 😂

PPS: OK, one more joke, and then I am wrapping up this blog post: