I was fortunate to recently hear a talk by Andrew Godwin on Reconciling Everything and Takahe, a Python Fediverse server, at the 20th Anniversary Special edition of PyCon US. His talk indirectly persuaded me to take the leap and join Mastodon (follow me here). This article communicates the data which directly persuaded me, and what social media problems I think these tools solve.
I. What Convinced Me
I’m both an educator and a continuous learner. I’m motivated to join a social network when I see three simple things:
The social network is large and robust (ie not likely to collapse soon; large and also on a continued growth trajectory is best)
The social network shows signs that if I join, then I will be able to get my message to many listeners
The social network facilitates real communication. Not only will I be able to speak, but I will also be able to listen, and I can have meaningful back and forth with others
In this regard, I was ultimately motivated to join Mastodon after going through the following thought flow:
Hearing Andrew’s talk on Takahe and learning that it is one of many server implementations in the Fediverse
As an aside, noticing that Andrew and other PyCon speakers are mentioning Mastodon, not Takahe or Twitter, addresses for the purpose of follow-on communication and staying in touch
Noticing that much of the Fediverse is interconnected such that I seem to be able to join whatever server I want and access others. So, what server do I want to join? I prioritized avoiding a server that was likely to be abandoned.
So I’m looking for substantial size and group leadership, instead of being lead by one person
Mastodon checked all of the boxes. It’s the largest server kind in the Fediverse and continues to grow with substantial speed. Growth statistics are documented in this article by lostinlight. Again, notice that lostinlight mentions Mastodon in their author contact information. In short, Mastodon is the default entrypoint into the fediverse in my view.
Three quick asides:
Kudos to Andrew for his work in Python on Takahe. One downside of Mastodon is that it is written in Ruby.
Kudos to Hubzilla and Streams as being two cool Fediverse tools that have a ton of features as noted on the fediverse Wikipedia page. Mastodon is big for now, but it has a growth rate an order of magnitude smaller than some competitors, so keep an eye on these.
Kudos to Nostr and BlueSky, two other alternative social media tools that are not strictly in the fediverse domain, but they help solve current social media problems and also address some problems in Mastodon
II. What Problems are Being Solved
User data ownership and portability.
If a server rolls out some crazy policy or blocks me, I don’t lose any followers or messages. I can go elsewhere.
Customizability
While Twitter is closing their API and charging for old features, the fediverse is enabling customization through open source and plugins
This customizability at the server level combines with client exit incentives to create incentives for rich and diverse groups as well as individual-level personalization, instead of legacy “one size fits all” effects and average-user-oriented optimizations.
Platform incentive problems
Because user exit becomes so cheap, users will exit! This forces platforms to treat their users well, at the individual level.
Better relationships
In a sea of heterogenous servers, where each server has a relatively small community that they closely cater to and better serve, users will be happier and more willing to engage with each other. More communication will happen with a greater degree of effective, clear, safe speech, and more rapid onboarding of new users into the community.
Ultimately, better relationships including better information transit.
Scalability and platform robustness, or whatever
Decentralized systems and crowds are robust against single-point failure problems. I actually don’t think this is a major social win here because the existing social media platforms are highly robust already, but in theory this is worth calling out.
Perhaps the decentralized fediverse will create a net win over legacy systems by lower the total social cost of system maintenence, inclusive of both consumer and supplier cost, rather than by simply providing higher uptime. In fact, maybe uptime will be lower, and maybe data loss will be easier and more intentional, and maybe that’s exactly how the fediverse realizes cost savings over the traditional system of always-up services.
and more! I refer you back to the nostr README.md for a much longer list of things being solved by this new wave of social media technologies.