Mastodon is a good technical achievement, but that’s not enough

Making a Twitter challenger requires more than development skills

Last week I signed up to mastodon.social. It’s an instance of the Mastodon network server — or, more plainly, a Twitter-like broadcast social network. The big difference from Twitter is that Mastodon is open source and decentralised, meaning there’s no single owner; anyone can run their own instance of it that will be fully compatible with mastodon.social.

At this stage, mastodon.social is a pretty straightforward copy of the Tweetdeck interface with Twitter functionality, albeit Twitter from about 2010. You can broadcast, reply, add media, favourite, reblog (retweet), and follow. Considering it’s been put together in three or four months by a single developer (with a few community contributions), it’s an admirable technical achievement.

But other than being decentralised, and therefore not owned by The Man, it doesn’t seem to address any of the (perceived) failings of Twitter. In fact it doesn’t have any anti-abuse measures beyond a block button, making it even more prone to abuse than Twitter itself.

In order for a social network to escape the traps that Twitter has fallen into, concentrating on the technical aspects is not enough. This can’t succeed with a single developer, or even a team of developers. It needs some strategic thinking behind it.

Off the top of my head, I would say that it needs to at least consider:

1. Anti-abuse measures built into the platform from the ground up. Not features copied from Twitter, and not in the future, but now, and at the very core of the project. Whether this is community moderation, a karma system, real-name policy… I don’t know. But it needs to be addressed as a critical feature.
2. Community ownership, whether from a crowd-funded share offering or setting up as a public benefit entity. Keeping it out of private hands means less likelihood for sales of private data in the future.
3. A path to self-sustainability. A shortfall in funds increases the chances of being forced to take on outside funding or unwelcome advertising. Perhaps there should be consideration of a charge private organisations for access when they exceed a follower threshold.

I like Twitter. Or, rather, I like the opportunities that it affords me, although I don’t really care whether Twitter Inc. is the company that delivers the service. I’d be on board with an open Twitter replacement. But for it to succeed, it should be looked at with a mindset much broader than a developer’s.