Now that there is an actual mass X-odus happening – and it is real and it is happening this time – I’m telling people: Right now, anything is better than X. Anything. I’m happy you’re finally leaving, over two years after I said it was time to go.
But I also say that I wish people were going to Mastodon, or some other Federation/ActivityPub social media system, and I ask them to turn on the BridgyFed gateway, to keep communications open with those of us in the Federation. I have other reasons for that too, which I may get into later, but that’s the reason I give. All of them are equally sincere.
I did that enough times – always friendly, always encouraging, but consistently and persistently, giving my little speech – and someone finally asked me why. So I told them.
1) I have been writing for years now about how Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into a fascist propaganda and disinformation machine. I wrote most recently about that here, and how it worked in this election.
While BlueSky is not Twitter, BlueSky is akin to Twitter in if it gains traction, Musk’s successful experiment with Twitter will be repeated. BlueSky will be bought out and the same thing or something similar will most likely happen with it.
This literally cannot happen with Mastodon, or with anything in the Federation of ActivityPub-speaking social media sites in general, of which there are literally thousands.
(BlueSky’s latest round of funding is another cryptocurrency investment firm with strong ties to Steve Bannon, one of the primary authors of our current political situation and who is strongly allied with Elon Musk. To me, it seems all but inevitable that what happened to Twitter will happen to BlueSky. I could be wrong about that, but… well. You do the math.)
2) Mastodon is actually decentralised/distributed social media.
BlueSky may describe itself as decentralised social media, but it isn’t in any sense that actually matters. While you can set up your own domain of it, all that really means is that you’ve got your own local storage. To actually use BlueSky in any way – to post, to read other posts, to send messages, literally anything – it all has to go through BlueSky corporate. If BlueSky’s main instance goes down, that’s it for the entire service. Hence: not actually decentralised.
By contrast, if mastodon.social – the flagship Mastodon instance – disappeared tomorrow, literally nothing would change for anyone else. Every other instance of Mastodon would keep working just fine, with zero loss of functionality.
There is no critical core site to buy and bend to your will. These are thousands, and anyone can set up another. An Elon-style takeover cannot work.
3) Mastodon has achieved something no other social media network has managed, and that is to turn the Nazi Bar phenomenon against Nazis via an administrative level action called defederation. I figured this out a couple of years ago and it’s genius and it works. Here’s a post I wrote where I figured it out, literally mid-post. It’s short, but it’s sweet.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems in the Federation, because of course there are. There are fash and trolls and all those horrible things setting up and using their own Mastodon instances, too. But because they are quarantined into their own Nazi bars and nobody else will talk to them, they don’t matter.
If you set up a site and you let fash on? Every competent instance administrator adds you to the “nazi server” list and bang, their entire instance and all their users are completely irrelevant. No whack-a-mole. Poof. Gone. And since setting up an instance actually costs money – you have to buy a unique domain – the “create 10,000 troll instances” phenomenon costs too much money to make it work.
This does mean you have to join a good instance. Or if you set one up yourself, you have to do the extra work of getting a good blocklist and keeping up. Once you’re set up, though, it’s genuinely one of the least difficult and most rewarding parts of instance management. “Oh look, a fascist hive. Let’s blow it up.“
Boom. Gone.
4) BlueSky is BlueSky. Every BlueSky is the same. It is a Twitter clone, more or less. It talks to itself and clones of itself.
Mastodon, by contrast, is one of several entirely different ActivityPub-speaking social media server types. It’s the best known, but it is not the only one, and they all intercommunicate.
Frendica, for example, is a bit like Old Facebook. There are an assortment of Frendica instances out there. Despite the fact that I do not have a Friendica account, some of the people who follow me are doing so from Frendica, and do not have Mastodon accounts. They see my posts, they can reply, I can reply back, and it all works exactly as if we were using the same social media, even though we absolutely are not.
I’m a member of a couple of Friendica groups… via my Mastodon account. I joined them from Mastodon. I can leave them from Mastodon. I can post to them from Mastodon.
I have never logged on to a Friendica server. And yet.
OwnTube is a distributed video hosting server. There are several instances of it. I follow a couple of OwnTube users from my Mastodon account. I see when they put up new videos, from Mastodon. I can watch them from Mastodon. I can reply to them from Mastodon, and even though I do not have an OwnTube account, my replies are visible to them as comments under their video.
I self-host a WordPress blog. It can be followed from Mastodon. Or from OwnTube. Or from Friendica, or Hometown, or Firefish, or Akkoma, or Lemmy (which is more discussion-forum like), or kbin, or GoToSocial, or anything else. You’ll see my blog posts in your social media account feed, whatever form that takes. You can reply to my posts from there. I see them on my blog as replies. I can reply back. You will see my replies on your social media instance.
No cross sign-ins. No changing accounts back and forth. No switching sites or apps. No weird permissions. No need for any of that, because they all talk to each other, and most of the time, it is utterly transparent.
Here’s a recent popular post on my blog. There are 74 comments. Other than the replies I wrote, all of those comments came from other ActivityPub-compatible social media sites. Some are Mastodon; some are not. They see my replies on their instances… of whatever they’re running. I don’t know and I don’t even need to care, because it doesn’t matter, because they all speak ActivityPub.
I have several hundred followers specifically of my blog, in addition to the 1500 or so on my Mastodon account. Most of them have never visited the blog itself, because they don’t need to. And yet, they’ve read all my posts.
That’s what the open social web actually promises – and, while it can still be kinda fiddly and weird… actually delivers.
There is more creativity in this space about what social media can be – for good – than in every other social media site in the world combined and it can be frustrating and it can be strange and it can be wonderful.
That’s why I think Mastodon is better – not in and of itself, necessarily, it has all kinds of problems even if I do like it, and run a small instance with 15 accounts. But I think it’s better more as successfully becoming a visible gateway to a much larger – and potentially truly better – social media world.
None of the modern online hellscape has to be like this.
It really doesn’t. None of it does.
It can be better.
And that’s why I care.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
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