Mastodon: I’m Spartacus!
Mastodon is the Open Source Federated social network taking on billionaires, has its time finally arrived?
Elon Musk’s take over of Twitter has caused it to hemorrhage long time employees and users. If nothing changes the social media site could stand to loose 13–25% of the users this author interacts with to Mastodon and other emerging social networks.
Mastodon is like the Spartacus of social media, but could this really challenge Elon Musk’s recently acquired Social Media empire?
Taking On Earth’s Richest Man
Applying what I’ve learned from startups, I think every day people can not just measure Twitter’s turmoil, we can accelerate it!
- Step 1 — Track the trend.
- Step 2 — Forward Project.
- Step 3 — Disrupt!
Using the same playbook as Venture Capital funded startups, could we make this space cowboy cry?
Step #1 — Track the trend.
First, I’ve been tracking my twitter connections adoption of Mastodon. It’s the easiest emerging social media service to track so I’m started there. You can track your Twitter connections exodus too. Tools like Debirdify provide a way to lookup your connections and check if they have Tweeted about their Mastodon accounts.
Due to the uncertainty unleashed by Elon Musk, there are many new socials rushing to reassure ex-Tweeters. Since I’m focusing on Mastodon today this is certainly an under count of your friends who are attempting to leave Twitter.
So far I’ve found that every day twitter users are trying something different. Approximately 0.1% to 0.5% of my connections are creating a Mastodon account and telling the Twitter-Sphere about their planned departure every day for the last two weeks.
Since Debirdify relies on users to make a post with a link to their new accounts this may not find everyone who is experimenting with Mastodon.
However, startups have taught me that, small ripples turn into BIG waves if sustained. So even though a fraction of a percent per-day are exploring the Fediverse (federated internet) its rapidly turning into a surge of interest.
This trend already has resulted in exponential growth of the Mastodon user base. This trend may also be occurring on other networks as well!
This should be alarming, because Mastodon admittedly has -many- significant issues!
Just like any typical MVP from the startup world, things are not smooth sailing.
Step #2 — Forward Projections
I took the avg daily change and the lowest daily change I’ve observed so far and projected it forward another two months. This suggest if nothing changes, twitter could loose around 13% — 25% of users to Mastodon.
It’s clear that users are -trying- to leave twitter. Regardless of how bad mastodon is, users clearly want out of Musk’s idea of free speech! This poses a significant and emerging threat to Twitter’s ability to maintain its high quality legacy user base.
Step #3 — Disrupt
The competition to twitter is NOT staying still, and neither is Twitter! In startups, you face ACTIVE adversaries.
Twitter made the first moves, and so far its not been good for many!
Twitter is a pretty big bird ship now.
Big boats are notoriously tough to steer! Twitter is attempting to keep all 300M+ users happy as well as advertisers and that’s not been going so well.
Their ankle biting competition are like speed boats.
They have fewer users and that typically makes it easier and faster to adapt to changing currents! Mastodon and the competition face much less legacy support requirements. Groups like Mastodon are also Open Source. Meaning there’s no bankers asking about loans. No employees who might walk out. Just volunteers, donating their time and server capacity. For these hackers, cash donations can go far!
So, if Mastodon can improve customer support, while Twitter stumbles at the same, the service could become -very- sticky!
Mastodon User Experience
Mastodon has privacy issues. The admins of servers sit in a privileged and trusted position. The other emerging sites likely do as well, but are closed source so we don’t actually know how good or bad they are for security. Open Source technology almost always has an edge here. From what I can tell Mastodon was caught off guard by how quickly users wished to flee from Twitter.
Mastodon clearly has the right tech on the way, just a question of if they can deploy it in time. The scrappy team around Mastodon recently introduced and completed implementation of the Double Ratchet protocol. This would make Mastodon direct messages out of reach of volunteer server admins(like me!) and provide a similar level of security as the lauded Signal Messenger app.
This leaves one major risk for mastodon and emerging clouds. Moderation! If, and this is a -big- IF. If mastodon can get this part right, quality could compete with twitter. This largely hinges in gaining more server admins with diverse backgrounds and perspective to create pleasant spaces for their users. With every passing day Elon Musk continues to make contentious choices which cause ever increasing numbers of users to question their time spent on the website.
In many ways, Elon Musk appears to be the site’s on worst enemy. So unfortunately I suspect that both Twitter and Mastodon may be on equal footing as far as quality of moderation is concerned today.
Mastodon has two major hurdles I’ve noticed.
- Server setup complexity
- Confusing user clients
These are really one in the same, UX optimization, just depends on where you sit. Coming from the startup world, both are very solvable. They have a very effective MVP and with time, interest, volunteers and donations these are likely to improve rapidly.
Hack The Planet
Elon has ~3k staff remaing, not all are developers or operations staff. Meanwhile planet Earth has 20 million+ hackers! Many of which contribute to Open Source Software.
Should the 20Million decide to take on the three thousand it’d could become one of the most epic battles for the future of social networks and free speech. A battle against the world’s biggest billionaire. A battle of user ownership of the cloud platforms. This fundamentally reminds me of my childhood, watching Linux eat the cloud and embedded world and taking on a certain billionare named Bill Gates.
Sponsor Me — I want to Fight in this Battle!
I for one LOVE these odds! This is a big opportunity, one I’ve been waiting for a VERY long time. Are you with me?
Please donate to me. It’s clear Mastodon and the various distributed social media solutions need minorities and Black people to engage in this process. This type of representation is critical to ensure a fair and equitable federated future. Sadly, I like many minority engineers can’t just drop everything. I need your help!
Are you with me?
With your support I’ll join that fight full time, and teach you about it as I do it! I’ll launch a well moderated mastodon server and scale it and keep blogging vloggling along the way!
Lets take on the billionaires and take back the internet.
You can support me on:
With your help, I’ll have plenty of time and resource to work on Mastodon and many other Open Source projects. #HackThePlanet!
I also accept cryptocurrencies:
$btc — bc1qcf7prhw2d3yf2wnaxpe94afpth5mlp9r8w34qv
$eth — 0xdeE034687f28107669729aC9cF026696D7eF9C41
