Mastodon about Nothing ft. Alex Hern
Added 2022-12-02 10:00:05 +0000 UTCThis week, we're joined by Alex Hern, UK Tech editor at the Guardian, to talk about Mastodon, the new ‘alternative twitter’ people have been moving to in the wake of Elon Musk’s twitter take over, and the very real threat of the platform becoming dysfunctional.
We will be discussing the history of Mastodon, Alex’s experiences on the platform and where it differs from twitter in terms of objectives and positions. We’ll use his experience (documented in his guardian article) to discuss whether Mastodon is a suitable twitter alternative, or whether it’s simply attempting to revive what’s already dead - can Mastodon really survive a social media economy that’s pivoting to video anyway?
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Further reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/12/joining-the-herd-whats-it-like-moving-from-twitter-to-mastodon
https://theconversation.com/what-is-mastodon-a-social-media-expert-explains-how-the-federated-network-works-and-why-it-wont-be-a-new-twitter-194329
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-is-like-to-use-mastodon-twitter-social-media-2022-11
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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_onEarth).
Comments
This episode was a bit less negative about Mastodon than I thought it was going to be. :) I definitely agree with some of the criticism's about Mastodon's clunkyness and share concerns around moderation and scalability issues. However, the fact that anyone can potentially participate in improving Mastodon, or any of the apps that inter-operate with Mastodon, means that there is more opportunity to just get stuck in and improve things, imo. With the private company social media apps, all you can do is beg and hope that they will implement new features to improve your experience. Often, though, these companies will do the exact opposite, because they need to sell more advertising space or whatever. The question of how Mastodon will manage to get the funding needed (for hosting costs, admins/moderators, code maintenance, translators etc) is another that one that always crops up. I've been surprised, though, at how many projects have manage to flourish based purely on donations, this podcast being one of them ;) Ultimately, though, when people talk about Mastodon they aren't talking about Mastodon specifically, they are talking about ActivityPub. And ActivityPub is just a protocol, in the same way that email refers to a protocol (IMAP or SMTP). You could say that, ActiviityPub is just an expansion on the capability that is provided by email protocols. This expansion allowing the messages you get send to be displayed differently, in a way that is more like a social media feed than a mailbox. Email itself is burdened by a lot of the same issues that Mastodon is. People still get spam and abuse sent to their inboxes, but it's still commonly used. It's even having a bit of a revival with this Substack like newsletters becoming popular. With email, spam has been dealt with by having email providers share information with each other on the common spam patterns to watch out for, and systems like this are being built up with folks share blocklists with each other and suchlike. When I think about email and SMS in comparison to social media and other popular messaging apps, it is pretty ridiculous that you end up having multiple apps on your phone that all perform the same function and yet can't interoperate with each other. I have to have a bunch of different messaging apps on my phone to communicate with different people. It's kinda silly, no? Maybe we should all go back to using MSN messenger.
Ben
2022-12-05 20:05:27 +0000 UTC
