With all of the major news surrounding Elon Musk and the Twitterverse, conversation has been swelling around a lesser-known social media network named Mastodon—and for the time being, at least, it seems like everyone and their mother is flocking to it. As journalists, marketers, personal brands, and even everyday users follow daily headlines covering Elon Musk’s impulsive and damaging management at Twitter, Mastodon’s popularity is beginning to noticeably rise as a result. The Washington Post is talking about it. CNET is talking about it. Joy Reid and Ali Velshi are on MSNBC talking about it, and it is the topic of a hot discussion on Wired. But as Mastodon Social’s popularity increases at Twitter’s expense, the question remains if the decentralized social media network which bills itself as a Twitter alternative is genuinely the savior we need, or just a new platform with new potential problems lying in wait.
Like with anything, I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
For users of Twitter, Mastodon brings a lot of positive benefits, as well as a couple of new features that could become immensely powerful for marketers and content creators alike. On the positive, Mastodon looks like Twitter, generally acts like Twitter, and has a lot of common similarities to Twitter that superusers will find immediately familiar. Adding to this familiarity is the fact that an increasing number of popular Twitter users are starting to find their way onto Mastodon, which means you won’t necessarily miss out on updates from your favorite community members.
Unlike Twitter, however, Mastodon operates on a system of independently owned, operated and managed servers—colloquially called the Fediverse. Despite being independently owned and operated, however, servers that run Mastodon network code are capable of speaking to other Mastodon servers based on a federated set of protocols—a lot like email. Ultimately, this means that users can have an account set up on one server, but still have the ability to speak to users that are signed up on other servers as well as receive updates from channels that are not necessarily hosting their account. In the end, despite being decentralized, this gives Mastodon the traditionally unified community feel that people have grown accustomed to on social media networks.
At first brush, this might overall seem like a giant pain in the ass—and I guess to a certain degree, it might be—but there are some objectively game-changing possibilities here for users of all types.
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the unique community-building capabilities that Mastodon servers have relative to Twitter’s Hashtags. Unlike Twitter, users can have their own Mastodon server built around whatever their preferred form of content is—and have in place moderation rules and standards that are unique to that Mastodon community. While I think many digital marketers may immediately jump to having a “fan group for their brand,” really, these would be fairly basic implementations of Mastodon’s server capability. The truth is that just as much as Mastodon servers can be open to the general public, there can also be private servers that require people to apply to get in. All the same, moderators can remove users for any set of reasons, which means that communities can be built around needs that are far more socially contoured than Twitter’s hashtags.
Though “fan pages” will inevitably become Mastodon servers, I think a better implementation would be say, a Mastodon server that only publishes the content of major news media outlets and completely ignores blogs and civilian journalism. While some people might hate this idea, there are plenty of others who might find a Mastodon server like this to be useful in an era where some civilian journalists are using the title to publish misinformation and conspiracy theories. On a less serious note, there could be a Mastodon server that is dedicated to everything related to Nightlife in Raleigh/Durham/and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Or, on a much more exclusive note, imagine a server that only lets in TV and film professionals. Or professional athletes? Really, the possibilities are endless for how users can create community, moderate their communities, and create demarcated spaces with varying levels of interpersonal access. Additionally, I think there is a lot of potential for people to have safe spaces that are much harder to disrupt, while at the same time capable of delivering more information to more users with more clarity.
Avowedly, Mastodon has some “there” there—and overall, the changes that it brings to social media relative to Twitter could be very welcome to those that use Twitter as a work tool, or source of information.
At the same time, however, Mastodon isn’t perfect. Though the service’s ethos of self-moderation and tailor-made experiences can lead to powerful results, let’s be honest for a second and admit that this shit goes both ways. Just as much as Black Lives Matter protestors can have a Mastodon channel dedicated to conversations between activists across the country—so too can reactionary elements that oppose them such as conspiracy theorists, religious nationalists, and literal fucking Nazis. Additionally, the ability to hyper-curate your channels means that there is even more room for people to find themselves in ideological or informational echo chambers that do little to challenge user worldviews, or encourage healthy debate. As one might suspect, the ability to filter users by application means that highly exclusive channels that are industry-focused, or education-focused, could further concentrate social and economic power, and subsequent access to upward career and social mobility.
But perhaps the biggest, and most glaring flaw of Mastodon’s current system revolves around moderation, as well as its long-term sustainability from both the ends of business and human resources. In the context of human resources, it should not be understated that moderation is not only a full-time job, but multiple full-time jobs. The truth of the matter is that for most Mastodon moderators, the job of moderation is a labor of love that is unpaid. At the same time, servers—at least at the time of this writing—are unfunded, and have no clear means of becoming so.
All of this is said to say that for the powerful benefits that could come with running a Mastodon server, the act of doing so is tantamount to burning a candle at both ends of the proverbial wick. So long as this is the case, there will be no way for regular people to successfully run a Mastodon server, as running a server—and paying employees to moderate it—ultimately involves money as a component to long-term sustainability. Who knew?
In some ways, for as much as Mastodon tries to bill itself as an alternative to many of the UX problems that are created by services like Twitter, it has managed to create new UX issues of its own. In the Mastodon model, because users can also be moderators, not having a system in place to actually finance the work that moderators have to do, is at best a UX oversight. But when that oversight is the result of removing advertisements because “hurr durr, ads annoying,” well that is a UX failure of cascading proportions.
The fact of the matter is that work has to be paid for. If a Mastodon moderator has a bad user experience as a result of having to filter abuse for no pay, then he or she will either spend less time on Mastodon being a moderator, or for the time that they do spend, there will be less incentive for them to do their job well. In the end, every single user taking part in that one server now has a worse-off user experience because the one administrative user tasked with filtering bad content is doing a bad job at it—and doesn’t care, because they are literally doing all this shit for free. So, while having a curated space might seem like pizzas and blowjobs on its face, the truth of the matter is that with the level of agency that Mastodon gives people who run servers, there is nothing to say that your favorite Mastodon server could also devolve into a chaotic, misinformation-filled shit hole of abuse. If you don’t believe that this is what the long tail of Mastodon moderation looks like, just look at the hellscape Reddit moderators have to deal with.
Though Mastodon currently benefits from having increasing name recognition, swelling user figures, and an erratic Elon musk on its side, it is also a system that is predicated on borderline comical levels of optimism regarding what it is that people value, what businesses need, and how people interact with each other online. The unavoidable realities of running any kind of social service online are that some content needs to be censored, some users need to be de-platformed, and yes, ads are essential because all of this shit has to be paid for. These realities don’t change just because a minority of users feel strongly about not seeing ads—or because a creator wants to make a service to appease their interests. While it is rebellious to preach in favor of self-moderation, decentralization, and against ads—there are legitimate business reasons why networks like this don’t usually go mainstream.
This isn’t an indictment of Mastodon’s value proposition, so much as it is me pointing out that for as quickly as people are flocking to this service, there are some pretty key and fundamental things that will need to be changed in order to make it ready for primetime use cases. The good thing is that it doesn’t necessarily take a genius to bring these changes to the social network. Since Mastodon is open source, its creators can find ways of embedding direct advertising support or even allowing for 3rd party advertisers like Google AdWords to run code on servers. At the same time, Mastodon servers could provide a ripe opportunity for selling subscriptions to dedicated users online. Despite the perceived complexity of adding better monetization features to the Mastodon moderation ecosystem, should the network continue to rise in popularity, it will have to make clearer and more concrete decisions about what it wants to be, as well as who it is for. Is it a crypto-anarchic approach to Twitter that is open to everybody, middle fingers advertisers, eschews algorithms and is predicated on the optimistic yet flawed principles of self-governance? Or is it the Twitter replacement that journalists claim it to be, with a few extra features in tow, that is a place for users, personal brands, and businesses to congregate? Despite being a promising addition to the mainstream social media space, something tells me Mastodon will have to make the conscious choice to be one or the other.
Most likely, it can’t be both.
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