Playing with Hairy Elephants
The tools we’ve built our social networks around matter.
You should join? You shouldn’t Join? Maybe. I don’t know.
Relationship status: It’s complicated.
This document serves two purposes. On one hand, it’s a personal exploration of how I relate to this burgeoning social platform— and on another hand I’m also hoping it will help you speed up your adoption of it.
Or rather, find your place in the ecosystem.
Fluffy Elephants, MastoWhat?
Mastodons are infectious memes, who knew?
About Birdsite.
Twitter is where I go to make meaning with friends…
If you follow me on there, you may have noticed that I’ve not been happy with the way that the social network has been moving.
I’ve seen some dismissive jokes from people to the effect of “everything else that happened, and the @ messaging is what caused you to leave?”. I think that notion don’t fully grasp the way that network effects lock us into the platforms we use. I know I personally have a hard time disassociating social networks with the people who manifest them. I think many of us do. It’s dismissive and privileged to throw shade at those of us who are still tied to a platform despite it having many flaws.
I’ve actually been mourning the loss of Twitter. I transposed a bit on the ideas echoing in my head into two of the section in of my eulogy for Peiter Hintjens, specifically the sections titled “The song of mourning. Sun’s Screaming.” and “Death of a Network.”
Twitter was where I go to make meaning with friends… But its not anymore.
And for some strange reason, a large portion of my social network has been kicking the tires over at Mastodon. And the tires are popping because it wasn’t meant to handle all these kicks.
But this gives me hope.
Mastodon’s 500 server error: It’ll be OK, just breath.
This document will continue after a short message from our sponsors.
We’re sorry, but the ephemeral tools you use to make meaning and understand the world are currently experiencing growing pains as the swarm learns to adapt to it’s new environment.
In the meantime, have you considered taking a short break to nourish your physical body?
A short history lesson in hacker jargon.
“Jargon live in the swamps. They feed on attention. If they can’t get that, they’ll settle for fear and confusion.”
“But the first one was so friendly! I just talked to it a little and it started following me.”
“That’s how it starts,” he said. “A little Jargon doesn’t look like much. Some people even keep them as pets. But they form packs, and they are very dangerous.”
— from Lauren Ipsum, Chapter 0. A book on programming.
So like most viral things, lots of people jumped on it, not realizing Mastodon is a strange offshoot of GNU social. It’s not exactly GNU social, but as a rewrite it takes many norms from that ecosystem while being mostly compatible.
But one of the “fun” thing Mastodon seemed to have accidentally adopted from GNU land is the semi-asinine naming conventions. I say this lightheartedly because the naming concern it is mostly punny(ha!) and cute. But it is worth noting that this amphiboly can make it difficult to fully understand some nuances.
I’m a fan of this framing when it comes to the Mastodon naming complexity:
“ Ok, I got it: #mastodon the scientist, the monster is actually called the #fediverse :)”
— @hermeslispegistus
GNU’s not what?
Take for example the definition of ‘GNU’. It stands for “GNU is Not Unix”, and yes, it is recursive, and yes it is bordering on Alice in Wonderland levels of silly.
There’s a long history of developers using Jargon and there’s not much we can do about it now except point out how unhelpful it is in hindsight. I’ve been part of that culture for a while so I personally don’t find it that difficult. However, I can fully appreciate the way that ingroup abbreviations create linguistic wedges and unnecessary divides / friction between cultures.
It’s not fun needing to have a crib sheet just because a group’s language has become so obtuse that it’s FUBAR and bordering on going full SNAFU.
The great Google alleviates this a bit, but at the same time it also seems to raise the waterline to the point that mere mortals can’t even learn to swim… To go META: “Abbreviations Seriously Suck”
In other news, a few people on my side of twitter accidentally a new word to talk about this concept. I find it interesting how groups of people seem to form language barriers almost reflexively like it’s part of our nature.
Looking back at that all of this, it sounds dysphemistic. I don’t mean it negatively. I have my own special issues when it comes to understanding language nuances and find everything — even my own unique acronyms — to be frustrating. So in my head this idea is associated with a lot of negative feelings and I find it hard to tap metaphors that aren’t some how tainted by that latent negativity.
Mostly, I’d like to express the idea that these language barriers exist, jargon or otherwise, and that they are sometimes accidental. I believe that for a healthy level of cooperation a sort of translation might be necessary. Trying to break out of isolationist patterns like this is why I reach out to others on Twitter and spend so much time reading and trying to understand others’ world view. Playfully exploring language is what helps me find my own voice and break down my own self-imposed linguistic prison.
Prescriptivists hate me because of this one weird trick.
But I digress.
Ape, if you don’t care about punny names, why bring that up?
Because its really really easy to confuse Mastodon.Social — the hosted node in a federated social network platform (that you can get an account on)— and the GNU Social-compatible microblogging server. The server happens to have the same name and is the basis for the site, but it is so much more.
This ends up being a very important distinction. The platform itself is really the federated network of servers, of which Mastodon.Social is just one node.
So what is Mastodon?
“Mastodon is an open-source server that integrates with other GNU Social (and other compatible) networks. The entire network is like an unlimited number of different Twitter websites, users of which can follow each other and interact regardless of which Twitter website exactly they are on. This has obvious benefits as there is no single company that has a monopoly.”
— Gargron, Lead developer of Mastodon (the codebase), and host/admin of Mastodon.Social
In fact, I myself only just found the faq today because someone ‘retoot’ed it. Or reblogged it. or ‘Boosted’ it. or… Uh, can we just call it an RT? I’m calling it an RT.
So anyway, someone RT’d a link to the faq and there’s a couple of really important lines in there:
What else is part of the federated network?
Let’s call it the “fediverse”. It has existed for a longer while, populated by GNU social servers, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora etc. Not every one of those servers is fully compatible with every other. Mastodon strives to be fully standards-compliant and compatibility with GNU social is higher in priority than the others. […]The software is free and open source and communities should host their own servers if they can, that way the costs are more or less distributed. Obviously it’d be hard for me to pay the bills if literally everyone decided to use the mastodon.social instance only.”
So from the get-go, one of the biggest differences from Twitter is that Mastodon etc is ran as a federated network. The federation idea is likely foreign to many people. I’ve been explaining it like how everyone can get a different email address, (or physical mailing address). But to be honest, most people are just going to click on over to the homepage and sign in. Which is a shame.
There are mastodon nodes (servers?), and there are gnusocial nodes (servers?) etc. and while the’re are some concerns over the way that this federation occurs, they are basically compatible and you should be able follow and converse between people on remote nodes.
Also unlike Twitter, with a federation each instance/node can have a distinct Terms of Service and Code of Conduct. As well, each is meant to be ran by separate administrators and moderators. If you think about it, each host is just some place where the owner has chosen to pay for and run the website.
Where Twitter’s systems act as a centralized monstrosity that glazes over the complexities of running a large scale server infrastructure, the federated nature suggests that nodes distribute themselves as local instances as needed — depending on connections between nodes as a way to share content.
And a side effect of this, each node is effectively it’s own little fiefdom.
mastodon is at an interesting, precarious intersection between basic UX minimum requirements and long-term political architcture wins (federation). user experience is _going_ to suck for any platform not funded by VCs and huge teams of full-time UX gurus, but the price you pay for that is your souls (advertising needs and eventually censorship)
— JohnHenry
So, I think it’s kinda important that people realize these nuances. This isn’t some VC backed, advertising driven, walled garden trying to get your attention. It’s more like a indie-driven pop-up library/social network ran by people in the community who all happen to agree upon a shared standard to communicate with. I’d like to think that out of mutual respect for public infrastructure that we’ll all try and find our own place in the federation. The last thing we need is for us all to end up behind metaphorical moats.
The copy on quitter.no’s homepage seems to capture it the best:
“Quitter.no is not a service and you are not a customer here. We are a small part of a bigger social change, creating a large decentralized community. This means that we don’t have to be neutral toward the content on our GNU social instance. If you don’t like the direction this instance is going, you are free to move to another instance or start your own. You will still be able to follow and be followed (and blocked) by users on this instance.”
So if you’re kicking tires, please play gentle. And if you’re not gentle, don’t be alarmed if a ban-hammer comes after you. We’re effectively invading someone’s digital home and encroaching on shared spaces.
No Drama Ayy LMAO, por favor?
Take a moment to watch this (somewhat questionable, somewhat hilarious) video meme going around that covers the topic:
There’s been some drama over the way Mastodon (the .social site, not the app server?) blocks a couple of other networks — which seems to break a lot of the built in federation of conversations between them. I feel like that’s how it’s supposed to be, but everyone jumped to mastodon.social without realizing what they were signing up for (*cough* federation *cough*). Make no mistake, having an account on Mastodon (the .social site, not the app server?) means you have an implicit block list.
And maybe it’s harsh, but the sentiment of ‘start your own server’ isn’t that unreasonable in the grand scope of things. As someone who is more open and generally has a thicker skin than others, it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. And in a certain sense this policy disenfranchise those who don’t have the skills to run their own. But that’s also part of the ethos behind gnusocial, not mastodon itself.
The inherent beauty of the platform, if we can maintain it, is that there is a strong cultural focus on being able to federate. From where I’m standing, having all these little fiefdoms is a feature, not a fault. Even better, despite the complaints, Mastodon (the server) is intending to stay compatible with the larger network, and hopefully become even easier to setup over time.
So, should you join the federation? Yes.
Should you join Mastodon.social? Maybe.
Is this new system perfect? No.
But I think Twitter as we know it, is dying.
Market incentives have it quickly turning into cesspool of brands shitposting brands. A place with simultaneously a high degree of harassment, and an extreme lack of freedoms. Largely due to forces outside of the management’s control.
“the content we read online is going to be continue to be backed by harmful business incentives. That is, until either the consumer demands otherwise or until some enterprising person can build a repeatable model that allows journalism to thrive without being mercy to platforms for advertisers that care about reach. Seeing that the latter has never happened, all we have is the former.”
— Medium, and The Reason You Can’t Stand the News Anymore.
So if you want to join the federation, here’s some resources to help you find a place to set up shop:
- Mastodon:
instances.mastodon.xyz/
github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md - GNU Social:
fediverse.org/
social.guhnoo.org/
federation.skilledtests.com/List_of_Independent_GNU_social_Instances.html - Diaspora:
(incompatible alternative to gnu social ecosystem, still quite active)
the-federation.info/nodes
Also, here’s little tool from the developers to help reconnect with other users you’re already following on Twitter: https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com/
My personal plan is to go about spinning up my own server so I can be in better control over my content — and just let people federate with me.
In the mean time, I’m going to enjoy watching people be creative as they learn and explore this new ecosystem. Even if its just some silly ants having fun, I’m already seeing some great things:
Toot Poot’n Scoot!?
That’s all for now. I’ve got some content to perhaps make a part two. I plan to explore some of the in’s and outs of using the federated platform well, but I seem to have reached my stopping point for today.
I hope this helps.
Tl;DR:
Federated systems are weird.
Welcome to Mastodon.
Here’s a guide on how to toot.
Enjoy your stay.
The tools we’ve built our social networks around matter.
