Part 1 – Welcome to the Fediverse

If you already know your toots from your tweets, and your fediverse from your universe, feel free to skip this introduction and head straight to Part 2 where we discuss what this means for you.

If your only familiarity with mastodons is as an elephant’s ancestor, this first part will give you a quick primer on what Mastodon is and why it’s important, before we explore what that means for your arts, culture or heritage organisation in Part 2.

The Problem with Social Media

We all (or at least, I hope all) agree that plurality of the news media is a good thing. Between television, radio, papers and websites, we have access to a variety of news media, with differing viewpoints, and ensuring that we have access to a breadth of viewpoints is often jealously guarded by governments – for example, Ofcom in the UK ensuring an appropriate range of owners of media companies.

That’s less true for social media, though. In fact, the majority of our social media is controlled by a few major corporations – Twitter and Meta (formerly Facebook) being the biggest.

In theory, the ownership of social media shouldn’t matter – because a platform such as Twitter is made up of 206 million daily active users, meaning we have access to millions of viewpoints.

However, in practice that isn’t the case.

The platforms – again, primarily Twitter and Meta – can shape our social media in 2 main ways. Firstly, they can limit what we see – for example, by suspending or banning content which is inaccurate, offensive or otherwise objectionable. Secondly, they have their own agenda of promoting things they want us to see, such as advertisers or viewpoints which will generate further interaction.

Neither of those things is inherently objectionable – if we have plurality of social media. But, where social media is dominated by 2 major players, there’s a risk that the viewpoints we see are those of the platform rather than the diversity of the users in that platform. For this reason, there are competing viewpoints – particularly in the US – on to what extent social media should be regulated. Is peer and advertising pressure sufficient? Should government step in?

This problem is pulled into even sharper focus when one of those platforms comes under the control of one man, as we’ve seen with Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter.

The Alternative – The Fediverse

Whilst regulation is undoubtedly an approach, is it the best one? Governments move slowly, and are generally conservative. And, in any given country a decent proportion of the population is at least sceptical of the government of the day. Advertisers can exert pressure, but generally in their own interest. People power is undoubtedly a thing, but lacks fine-grained control.

Federated social media presents an alternative.

The general idea is that rather than a single social media platform, a “fediverse” of instances pool resources to make a platform.

Each instance – representing hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of users – is owned and operated independently, with its own moderation team, policies and rules.

These “mini social networks” collaborate to make a larger network – but the federated nature of the platform means no single company or individual has the ability to limit what we can read. It’s a bit like the internet as a whole – lots of independent pieces (websites) making the whole.

Like the old joke about an aged relative thinking they “deleted the internet”, with federated social media (or “the fediverse” for short), no one can control (or delete) the social network. The same can’t be said for traditional social media – if we all irritate Musk enough, I certainly wouldn’t put it past him to “delete Twitter”.

So where does Mastodon come in?

Mastodon is a federated social media platform. Its creator Eugen Rochko developed the software itself, and operates the largest instance, but anyone can download the code and run their own instance. That’s a huge difference between Mastodon and Twitter or Facebook – good luck trying to download Twitter and run your own!

In broad terms, Mastodon has similarities to Twitter, but isn’t the same. There’s a few key differences – around who you see content from, how you search etc – which are important, and I’ll talk about those more in part 2 of this blog post. But, in simple terms, thinking of Mastodon as similar to Twitter is pretty safe.

On Mastodon, the posts (called “toots”) are a little longer. You can still create threads, upload images, link to external content etc. You can also “boost” (similar to retweeting), reply and “like”.

So, the overall look and feel can be very similar to Twitter.

The biggest difference is, you don’t “join mastodon” – you join a mastodon instance. That means your handle has 2 parts – your own identifier, and the identifier of your server. Mine is @rmhwalters@arts.social – arts.social is the instance name.

There are other forms of social media – such as Pixelfed (think Instagam), PeerTube (you’ve guessed it – Youtube) and Frendica. But, Mastodon is seeing the most press right now.

What’s Mastodon like?

Slower – there’s less constant content coming at you, for reasons I’ll explain in Part 2. That means there’s less of a tendency to doomscroll.

A little bit geeky – the earliest adopters have been techies and academics, and although it’s growing fast, there’s still a disproportionate number of fairly cerebral people on Mastodon right now.

A lot less angry – Twitter sometimes feels like the number of angry shouty people vastly outweighs the “here to be sociable” people, which isn’t the case on Mastodon (at the moment). Whether that changes as more people join, time will tell – but there are elements of the platform designed to minimise this.

It’ll Never Catch On

Well, right now, I’m 50:50 whether it will or won’t. Twitter is still some 30-50 times the size. But, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon is growing fast.

There’s 2 main risks to Mastodon’s growth:

1. It doesn’t get enough users, and Musk sorts Twitter (or at least, himself) out sufficiently to retain Twitter users limiting Mastodon’s growth to a rather niche community
2. It gets too many, and the (volunteer) moderators and (volunteer) instance owners are overwhelmed to the point it implodes.

Personally, I’ve joined Mastodon, but not fully left Twitter. Whether I leave depends on whether and when it reaches critical mass – I stay on Twitter because there’s enough people who interest me to outweigh the angry, the bigoted, the racist, the ill informed and other people who don’t interest me. As more of those move to Mastodon, my ties to Twitter loosen.

So, there’s a real chance Mastodon remains a curio of 2022. But on the other hand, some of us are old enough to remember the time when MySpace looked like it would never lose its monopoly. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment) So, betting on Twitter right now wouldn’t be one I’d take. Even if you don’t make the move, it’s well worth a look.

What about the arts, culture and heritage sector?

Right now, I’m not seeing much of our sector. But, that doesn’t surprise me – I suspect at the end of 2006, there weren’t that many of us on Twitter either.

We are trying to change that and have this week created a dedicated Mastodon server for those who are interested in discussing anything related to theatre, arts, culture and heritage (note, this is open to all and not a exclusive link to PatronBase) – join us over at the Arts Social instance over at arts.social 

There’s certainly enough of a chance Mastodon takes off, to make it worth your while reading Part 2.