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What is Mastodon, and Why Is It Not Twitter? [1]

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Date: 2022-12-30

The front page feature on Ars Technica explains this fully (and sometimes technically), but in essence, Mastodon is not centralized. There is not a "Mastodon, Inc." or other corporate interest behind any of it. In fact, anyone that wants to bring a Mastodon "instance" online can do so and, with the built-in settings, it will automatically communicate with every other instance. These "instances" are typically hobbyists or interest groups that have decided to pay for a server themselves, which can be anywhere from $10-$100/month or more, depending on the size of the "instance" and the number of members that call that instance "home".

Are you lost? Maybe this will help:

Joining as a user is pretty easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy finding a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org, getting a list of handles for their Twitter friends via Movetodon, and carrying on as before. But what new converts may not realize is that Mastodon is just the most prominent node in a much broader movement to change the nature of the web. With a core goal of decentralization, Mastodon and its kin are "federated," meaning you are welcome to put up a server as a home base for friends and colleagues (an "instance"), and users on all instances can communicate with users on yours. The most common metaphor is email, where yahoo.com, uchicago.edu, and condenast.com all host a local collection of users, but anybody can send messages to anybody else via standard messaging protocols. With cosmic ambitions, the new federation of freely communicating instances is called "the Fediverse."

..

Servers were (and are) operated by academic institutions, journalists, hobbyists, and activists in the LGBTQ+ community.

So how the hell does THAT work? Well, there's a standardized GET/PUT setup where every message acts as, literally called, an actor. This means that it basically broadcasts itself and listeners on the other side know what to listen for. Using their email metaphor, something like Outlook or GMail is what Mastodon proper works like. In other words, people send a message that gets picked up by the Mastodon servers, and those servers understand the vocabulary in the message so that it knows where it came from, what it contains, who it should go to, and so on.

To continue with the email metaphor, when you get an email from anywhere, there's a part of every email called a header that contains the sender’s name and IP (basically their unique internet address), the content of the message, the people to be sent to, and so on. There's a lot more in the header, but think of it as the front of the envelope on a regular piece of mail. It has your address, usually some sort of return address, and so on. I know there are a lot of exceptions here (junk mail, spoofed email headers, etc.), but the point is that is what the "vocabulary" mentioned in the Ars Technica article is referring to (the JSON blob. In technical terms, JSON is a large KVP or Key Value Pair where every key is unique, but the values can repeat. Think FirstName: John, LastName: Smith, where FirstName and LastName are unique keys, but the sample fake name is the value, and that can repeat.)

So, why is this different than Twitter et al? There isn't a centralized server or service, so to speak. There's no "CEO of Mastodon". This is open source software that anyone can use, and it's based on ever-evolving standards so that each instance readily speaks (using the "vocabulary") to any other instance. And anyone (Daily Kos, for example), could easily spin up an instance that becomes instantly visible to every other instance.

But isn't this just setting it up for some troll group to get in there and fuck things up? There are controls in place and, not that it's perfect, it's better than one individual (or corporation) having absolute control.

[Christine] Lemmer-Webber drew a direct line from problems on other social networks to the development of a network where local controls are built in. "Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.

This means that, should some RWNJ group start up their own instance and start trolling to all hell, that entire instance can be blocked (not each user one at a time, but the whole thing).

Should you even bother with this? If things like Twitter and Facebook are (or were) important to you, now is as good a time as any.

As Elon Musk's Category 5 tweetstorm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1,000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million.

Eight million is a lot, sure, but in social network terms, this is still the bottom floor, as it were. If you do have an interest in it, now may be the time to jump in and see if it's for you.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/30/2144591/-What-is-Mastodon-and-Why-Is-It-Not-Twitter

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