Opinion — by @posty@aus.social
Disclosure: I am a patreon backer for both Mastodon and aus.social
For about the last four years or so I’ve mentioned Mastodon quite a bit on my Twitter account. I’m quite excited about its possibilities and have not really seen many articles beyond the basic introductions, but shortly for the uninitiated:
What is Mastodon?
It’s styled as a free (500 character) social media alternative to Twitter with over 4 million users and growing — but it’s more than just one website: it’s a an interconnected project.
Several thousand Mastodon servers (and other types of servers) all join together in a process called “Federation” — this uses a shared social media protocol called “ActivityPub” and they all choose to talk to each other by default.
These servers (called “Instances” in Mastodon parlance) are hosted by mostly community enthusiasts for free and/or a patronage model, similar to the way email used to be hosted in the 1990s.
This 2 minute video explains the basics further.
Here’s 10 reasons why you should join Mastodon I’ll break down:
- The more people that use it, the more useful it becomes
- Surveillance is not a deliberate feature of Mastodon
- Better privacy & sensitivity baked into the design
- The larger federation culture has potential to be less toxic
- True innovation is available within the Federated space
- Identity is built in by design
- Right now, there are no ads
- Friendly, with a strong human moderation culture
- Human focussed
- Decentralised, commons-based systems could help build a better world
Why I think you should join Mastodon
The more people that use it, the more useful it becomes — This is called the network effect. Services are only given power by the consent of the user/governed. Right now we’re all giving all our posts and effort away to companies now for free for them to make profit from. Think of why you joined Twitter/Social Media in the first place. It was probably because other people whose opinions you value were doing it too, lead by example — Leadership starts from within.
Surveillance is not a deliberate feature of Mastodon: Unlike Twitter — you cannot search every utterance of someone by design, nor can you maintain a secret list of people you are watching. If you follow someone — it is due to their consent. If you missed it, you missed it or you need to scroll someone’s timeline, ephemerality is builtin. If the content wants to be found, hashtags should be used liberally. Twitter is the world’s largest market research database, if you want someone’s opinion on ANYTHING, you can find it there. This is not as much of a problem on Mastodon.
Now, this isn’t to say you cannot be spied upon, but it’s an order of magnitude better than what we have available to us at Twitter (Open vs locked account). Because of the open nature of the protocol Mastodon works on (ActivityPub) scraping tools (to my knowledge) do not yet exist. These could easily be created by advertising firms, private investigators, surveillance states or all of the above! A key lesson to learn from our collective publishing experience at Twitter is that public REALLY means public.
A word of extra warning, Mastodon (just the same as Twitter) does not have end to end encryption for “Direct Messages”. an API for encrypted messages within Mastodon has been implemented but as yet this feature has not been used by any client. If you do use the existing “Direct Messages” feature, people you add in the conversation, as well as those people’s administrators, could potentially read these direct messages. If you need truly secure messaging I would lean on Edward Snowden’s advice and use Signal.
Some people baulk at the mere suggestion of unencrypted DM’s, but it’s best remembered that trust is not only a digital property, it’s a people property. I’m lucky, my administrator was literally the best man at my wedding — I trust him. If each of you in a message chain do not trust your administrator, you have greater issues than worrying about your “Direct Messages” for when you are going to meet for dinner plans. It’s just the same with email administrators, but we know Google IS reading your mail (at least the bots are).
Better privacy and sensitivity baked into design — Content warnings exist — if people are talking about sensitive topics this allows people to ‘opt in’ to the conversation rather than having it thrust upon them. There’s more granular security design of posts, for example you control the default security level of your posts at any time (which can greatly help with point #2 if your threat model is higher stakes than most) and account security and other effective anti-abuse tools.
I’m aware the Mastodon community are actively working on expanding these features.
The larger federated culture on Mastodon has the potential to be less toxic. This is my most contentious point. Why? Technically, on a federated platform the worst of the worst will always exist (just as they always have), they will just not be visible to you by default. It is impossible to entirely exclude ‘bad actors’ from an open network and disagreement and nasty, rude, angry and vitriolic behaviour are natural parts of the human condition.
Often these issues are systemic, at times I would even say this behaviour is called for, particularly in relation to politics. There’s no silver bullet here to make the ‘bad stuff’ go away — to quote one of Twitter’s best:
“everybody wants to be the guy to write the tweet that solves racism once and for all because it would look good as hell on a resume“ — dril
https://twitter.com/dril/status/757845760645804032
Twitter has a ‘dunking’ culture. Why this is so I’m unsure but I believe poor moderation and the human tendency to form mobs as well as power imbalances contribute. Twitter has been the ultimate experiment in (almost) limitless ‘‘freedom of speech”. We have now witnessed what that hath wrought. I’m a firm believer that freedom of speech does not equal freedom from consequences. Donald Trump seized this power on Twitter in 2016 to great advantage of Twitter’s political influence. It took a literal coup attempt before Twitter removed him from their platform after years of flagrant rule abuse. Moderation is key, and it doesn’t scale for one company especially when your primary focus is selling advertising space, this is the battle tech giants have been fighting for years now and will forever.
Put simply, I believe (well, possibly hope? I don’t have the data) we outnumber and outmaneuver the fascists. The best known fascist — never wanting to do the hard yards, has taken Mastodon wholesale and rebranded it “Truth.social”. One of the most critical features of Mastodon is turned off there though, Federation. So they’re all in their own little backyard yelling at whatever imagined enemy that exists today and we never have to hear about it! How nice for us over in the Fediverse. Should Trump change his mind on joining the Federation as he has with numerous other topics (or others dosuch as Gab) it’s true that this would effectively remove what was Twitter’s power to de-platform him that they only exercised at the last possible moment. I hope that America has learnt its lesson from the January 6th attacks and that should extremist movements rise again, that this be a problem for law enforcement/surveillance state to deal with and not Big Tech media companies whose interests don’t align with public safety.
It’s not to say online mobs haven’t existed on Mastodon, Celebrities have tried to come to the platform before and have been put off by the mobs — the best known messy example being Wil Wheaton. I believe this is the result of seeing the unbridled feedback of a truly unleashed Internet and Wil did not like what he saw. It was an excellent test of the platform that failed, but failure is an important step to success.
This is precisely why “blue tick” verified Celebrity account culture exists on Twitter/Social Media — for example, if you tell a blue tick to “fuck off” you will probably be immediately suspended by a bot, as they are a protected class to Twitter. As an Australian, we are know to tell each other to fuck off all the time, so culturally this changes our style of communication. A ‘fuck off’ needs to be thought about whether that had vitriol behind it and also whether it was earned or not. There’s no inherent ‘greater power’ imbalance to the account.
I think the creator of Mastodon’s comments regarding what happened to Wil Wheaton’s situation were absolutely correct:
“I’m not happy with how the Wil Wheaton situation was resolved. An admin was overwhelmed with frivolous reports about him and felt forced to exile him. I’ve said before that I think it sets a dangerous precedent on how a large group of people can mobilize to drive anyone off the fediverse. Mob rule is universally dangerous: Mods and admins must examine evidence and decide based on wrongdoing and danger, and not on how many times someone was reported.”
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100639540096793532
My advice to anyone who has a large enough following that it results in you getting verified on Twitter/Social Media or experiencing abuse to not join a smaller instance like mastodon.cloud. If you aren’t willing to commit to the project and set up your own instance (will do wonders for your reputation, can be easy to do) at bare minimum join one of the officially run instances of the Mastodon GmbH project — mastodon.social or mastodon.online and to give the project administration a chance to deal with this issue directly.
Moderation will never cease to be a difficult job, be it in a centralised or decentralised fashion.
True innovation is available within the Federated space — with Twitter’s rise to political power and sway we have seen a locking down of even developing bots at Twitter. As a new developer, I can tell you it’s a lot easier to use, there’s no application process I need to go through to create a bot. I just do it. No barriers, just developing. If I bothered to self host, I wouldn’t even have to bother with APIs if I don’t want to — but it’s not a problem for me currently so I don’t.
Identity is built in by its design — the very first step of joining is the hardest, defining what sort of community you should join first. You can have as many different accounts as you like across Mastodon instances, your experience is self-determined rather than prescribed by a company. This sheer amount of choice will be confronting — just choose one and see how it works out. Moving elsewhere is easy. Anywhere that sounds good to you is a good first step.
Right now, there are no ads — if you’re not paying for it, your eyeballs and brain are the product.
You are not immune to propaganda — be it for Pepsi or the next big war. Advertising is literally the original propaganda, which purpose is to sway public opinion. I do not want my opinions altered by marketing agencies anymore than I already do by other means. They’re also just plain annoying.
Much like with point 3, because of ActivityPub’s open nature, servers could if they so choose fork off the Mastodon project and introduce advertising. This is why it’s a critical time now for you to join Mastodon so we keep the culture Ad-free as much as possible. It will be very hard to absolve as Ethan Zuckerman coined it “The Internets Original Sin” — but I believe patronage models have been working well thus far.
Mastodon server owners should make a commitment now in their rules about whether they intend to keep their service Advertising free, this should be a core part of the movement which you can help forge. This however will not stop ‘influencers’ — however at least in the country I live, not disclosing a paid promotion is still illegal regardless of platform.
The reason why ads exist on the Internet are to essentially keep the whole operation going and generate profit. Servers don’t grow on trees so it is CRITICAL that there be enough resources available to server owners when required (be it monetary, people or even legal). Popularity will bring growing pains, but I believe a stronger federation will emerge because of it.
Friendly with Strong human moderation culture — server rules are clear when you join, extremists are suspended at a server level so only your trusted server administrators worry about this for you. Blocking is way more effective and silent, any user can cultivate their own experience, blocking either at the user or instance level — you will see nothing from them, no notification like “you blocked this account” to tempt you to read the garbage. You made the decision and it is respected. Should an account break their own server rules, you can report that to another human and it can be dealt with at a local instance level, be it a warning or a ban. You can even block personally at the instance level if you feel it necessary.
Human focussed — A portable and more customisable experience — data is exportable, no social lock-in. If you don’t like your server you can just export your friends list and import it elsewhere or even create your own server! This is relevant to your identity, if a community doesn’t exist on Mastodon, you could be the person who can create that space for others to feel safe in and share the human experience in all of its ups and downs and forge greater solidarity and community with others. Or just join one that already exists. This portability, combined with its abuse administration tools could allow as safe an experience as a communities moderation team can provide. Big Tech and companies in general by design will always have profit motive before user safety. Angry users bring clicks and eyeballs, eyeballs bring advertising dollars, which (if not propped up by venture capital) brings profit for shareholders.
I believe Mastodon’s design is to serve communication, and communication itself. You remove from view via your moderators (some) of the worst aspects seen on Twitter, I believe you’ll start creating something better. A centralised platform with open communication like Twitter will always essentially be like everyone being locked in a room with the worst cops in the world, except nobody has developed a way to punch anyone else in the face on the internet yet. Because of the open nature of Mastodon it allows people to enable the already existing self-sorting behaviour and opt in or out of communities without being forced to essentially ‘cohabitate’ with them.
Decentralised, commons-based systems could help build a better world. I’m not getting all kumbaya about this, but how good would it be if the concentration of money and attention wasn’t all siphoned into big media corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok wanted it. Instead, these finite resources are distributed amongst the community. Many users (including myself) have in their profiles ways that you can monetarily or otherwise support them — ‘going viral’ could mean real support coming people’s way rather than just dopamine hits of likes, shares and subscribes, with only the creme de la creme sharing ad revenue.
For example, should servers have a patronage model, once servers fulfil their basic needs of operation these resources could be siphoned back into the community in any way the server owner sees fit. Community events, charity etc. The organisations who already do this good work would do well to join in as soon as possible to forge stronger networks. Will it be a bumpy ride? Absolutely, but I believe it’s a wagon worth jumping on to see where it goes.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, jump to the “Migrating from Twitter” section.
How to Join Mastodon
- Download and install the iOS or Android app on your phone.
- The setup process will ask you to join an ‘instance’ — this is your server — it relates to your identity and who you are, it will always appear against your username like an email. If you don’t know, pick your closest regional instance as a starting point. In Australia, a popular one is aus.social.
- Set up your avatar, bio and write your first #introduction post so we can get to know you!
- If you have a Twitter account — See the Migrating from Twitter section.
- Login again in your phone/desktop instance web browser to see all the posts!
- Have a good time posting, reading your local instance posts and tell friends about this!
How to see all the posts:
Using a desktop computer or your phone’s web browser directly, go to the instance address (e.g. aus.social) and sign in there. From here you can swipe/scroll right through all the views.
Notable types of views:
The Local tab:
This shows all the users on your instance and “neighbouring” instances (instances that the admin has hand picked to show). This view is the best to look at to “settle in” and see what’s going on in your instance.
This view is available in the mobile app by clicking “Search” and scrolling across to “Community”,
it is due to be supplanted by a “groups” view that does not exist yet.
The “Federation” tab:
This shows all users across all unblocked instances as close to real time as possible all over the world that your server can see. This federated view is similar to looking at the green screen in “the matrix”, a lot of disconnected unrelated posts and due to Mastodon being hosted by literally anyone, you can find lots of Not Safe For Work content on this tab, or even harmful content, but mostly harmless. There is the occasional gem though :). The Federated view has been chosen to be left out of the app by the developers due to restrictive app store policies on both iOS and Android.
Migrating from Twitter:
I realised that I hated Twitter a few years ago, but didn’t know what to do about it. Recently I found an allegory while watching NBC’s “The Good Place”. Without spoiling the show I feel that there’s just too much bad faith, corrupt motivation and all around nasty people on the platform, and that I’d like to take those people that I do value on there with me to a better place. All of the worst people can argue their hearts out, virtually torturing each other on Twitter. Interestingly Twitter is referred to as “Hellsite” in Mastodon parlance, I prefer to think of it as “The Bad Place”.
You can just opt to stop using Twitter, but personally I find that really hard to do — I do love some of the interactions I’ve had with real people on the site. I admit it, I’m addicted to it. If I just turf the site, I turf all those people and future interactions. This is why I write guides like this, to bring you along in this journey. There are also other reasons I can’t leave, because that’s where I have my own personal project — Open_Welfare. I’ve been using Twitter as a ‘real time activism’ platform for about a decade and I can’t stop yet. That project exists there because political power exists on the platform. You remove the people, you remove the power.
Consider crossposting — a movement away from Twitter:
As per point 1, the best way to try to convince anyone to do almost anything is to lead by example. I share the same thoughts on both sites and I get starkly different responses on each network. This way you can act as an ‘ambassador’ of sorts on Twitter, and relax on Mastodon with buds. You have the best of both worlds, all it took was a little more administrative setup. Once you’ve joined, I want us to create a movement to show that we’re in the process of ‘moving’ from Twitter to Mastodon. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
How to become a “change ambassador”
Change your display name on Twitter to your mastodon address, ideally first e.g. mine is @posty@aus.social — Real name or whatever you want to say.
Why your name and not your bio? Well, put simply, the Name is the only free, 50 character advertising space that Twitter allows and we need to change some minds, our own propaganda. Your name is put next to EVERY single tweet you post and retweet. This way we can see and find allies across Twitter. Once the whole timeline is filled with mastodon addresses the question will be…
Should we move? Do we really need to use Twitter anymore?
This model has worked for years in the technology space — Microsoft pioneered it, it’s called “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish”.
The only thing needed is a hashtag to organise. I’m not sure what’s best, I leave this as an exercise for the reader — please share this article with your favourite hashtag via quote tweet! It would be ironic for this to spread far on a feature removed from Mastodon specifically due to its abuse.
So if you can’t just “turf” your account like me yet, make it so that YOU own your original ideas.
Put short — Bring Original Content Only. If you didn’t type it, you shouldn’t share it on Mastodon unless you are bringing a new perspective to it (e.g., old style Retweets). New original tweets should consider its audience and if it’s political or confronting, put a CW at the start of the tweet to auto add a content warning on Mastodon! The first line is the warning text.
Twitter’s culture is full of bad faith arguments and ‘dunking’ as said before. It’s like the worst high school recess that never ends and is constantly going on with little to no moderation, and when it does do moderation — it’s done poorly. When you can’t remove the bad-faith people, people have done what is seen as the next best thing: make fun of them. I won’t lie, I have enjoyed some (ok, a lot) of this but I also don’t think it’s healthy. That said it’s ok to just laugh sometimes at how absurd things can be though.
Twitter contains loads of brands. Brands still respond on Twitter, it’s sometimes useful to complain to them, so we don’t want your complaints about how your airline messed with your luggage directed to the brand and every single interaction with them. Honestly, I think brands could BE on mastodon, but they should be on their own instance that they manage, the same way they do with email. But for now, this is not a problem because we’re all too small and weird and think too differently for most organisations to consider it.
I hear any organisation brand managers’ thoughts right now “oh! but what if people block us/their server rules prohibit us from joining!!!” — this is entirely the point, maybe be a good internet citizen, use the communication well and people won’t want to block you. Consent is key. I believe those that embrace this mode early will reap the benefits. Just like person to person communication, if you communicate with good faith many people may afford it in return.
If you receive hostility from the fediverse, bear in mind this is new, people hate advertising (myself included) this is an opportunity to reflect on your history and maybe if your history is too bad, stay off until you demonstrate actual needed change (I’m looking at you fossil fuel industry).
Those I see in a position to gain the most from joining Mastodon are non-profits, charity organisations and trade unions, as I have seen the existing mastodon culture to be very welcoming to these topics, even use others’ existing infrastructure. I’m sure few would baulk at a charity being hosted on an existing instance for example to save them costs.
So, to ensure none of that ‘culture’ is brought over to Mastodon this is why I have these recommended settings.
Recommended settings:
goto: https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/
Only post tweets to Mastodon
Post your own tweets with the privacy: Public
Retweets: OFF
Posting quotes as old-style RT’s with links — Posting quotes with the privacy: Public
posting replies to yourself
AND advanced options Twitter word list: @
You change all these settings by going to”Options” and then Advanced Options
The @ in the Twitter word list is very important, this will stop any interaction you have with existing Twitter users from flowing over to mastodon, so you don’t have to worry about the aforementioned culture infecting mastodon.
Does setting up all of these settings sound annoying? Yes. But you only have to do it once.
I have bought my own domain to create my own crossposter, ideally with these settings as default. It will be available at the address http://good.actor/
