Mastodon, ActivityPub, and the Fediverse
Note: ActivityPub is a protocol which is used for social networking. Mastodon implements the protocol (plus some extras), and the Fediverse is the entire, decentralized network of ActivityPub instances, which may or may not be Mastodon instances.
By now many Terminally Online people have heard of Mastodon, the alternative, open-source social network that feels like Birdsite. You may have heard of it and been skeptical, or tried it and found it lacking. If you actually use it regularly or even switched to it from Birdsite completely, I salute you. You should write about how you get value from it, so as to help others who struggle. Personally, I have always felt it suffers from two things: unsophisticated curation and diminished network effects. It also suffers from a general unprofessionalism, by which I mean not that network participants are immature, but that nobody is providing valuable products and services that enhance the network. Let me explain:
Network Effects
The thing that makes Twitter valuable is that everyone is on it. That’s the main reason; its primary moat. People are posting content to it! The Fediverse needs more high quality content creators. Ideally people on Twitter would post to multiple networks (they may even already do this with more popular networks), but without an adequate audience to reach the incentive just isn’t there.
This is the kind of thing that is a problem until it isn’t. I don’t know what the overall trend is for Fediverse participation, but as long as it’s positive, my guess would be that it eventually hits a critical mass where the network becomes intrinsically valuable. But Twitter is not substantially bad enough to make most people who get value from it want to switch. I am ideologically the most likely sort to embrace a more open, standardized variant, and even I have struggled to make any sort of meaningful change. My most recent foray is motivated more by disgust with my experience on Twitter than anything else. But not everybody hates logging on.
How do we increase participation? Bootstrapping content via bots is an easy way to start. There are many valuable Twitter accounts that, if mirrored, would also be valuable in the fediverse. Doing this to a private account is likely to be frowned upon, but doing this for a news site could work. Unfortuntely, the lack of identity verification makes it tricky to represent otherwise famous people/organizations. The real William Shatner even gave Mastodon a try, only to quit due to impersonation concerns.
Curation and Professional Services
Nobody wants to admit it because of the way email has gone, but Mastodon/the Fediverse is a lot like email. It’s almost exactly like email, frankly. We endow instance operators with as much trust as we do email operators. We rely on their uptime (even more so than with email), and are stuck with whatever features they choose to support. Mastodon is really just a specific implementation of ActivityPub, so ideally it will compete with other implementations in order to keep users happy. But the ecosystem has been slow to evolve, and Mastodon has extra leverage due to being the first, and due to other implementations choosing to support their “proprietary” client API (although I woulder if that could be built as a reusable, independent layer on top of the ActivityPub API).
What about user recommendation? Spam filtering, showing the posts that a user finds relevant. Even if the Fediverse retains a pro-privacy approach that rejects the traditional relevance architectures that modern social companies employ, it’s still probably possible to build tools that improve the relevance of what Fediverse participants see. Mechanisms that make it easy to verify that the account really does belong to the person in question are also tremendously valuable. It’s easy for centralized companies to provide this functionality, and better, they are incentivised to. It seems unrealistic to me that this kind of functionality comes to the Fediverse absent similar financial incentives. I don’t think it’s out of the question, but until it happens there’s a limit to the value an “average” person can get out of it. It makes it too hard as a new user to find accounts to follow. You’re stuck browsing the network of whatever instance you signed up with, and whoever they “boost” (retweet). You can also proactively browse the directories of other instances. This isn’t awful but it’s not enough. I’m not necessarily saying that what the fediverse is missing is capitalism, but it’s missing dynamics that foster self-organization that are easier to create in well-funded networks.
The network can bootstrap without this. Individuals can fill in this role of curating content to make the network more valuable for others. But it won’t scale well and it’s not a reliable way to increase adoption. Even some of the earliest high-profile1 adopters are not very active anymore. mastodon.social is like the Hotmail of the ActivityPub world. Will there be a Gmail? Will it go as poorly?
Twitter has announced its intention to eventually open up, and maybe even to adopt and support ActivityPub2. I have doubts about this, because of what it would do to its moat, but it can still potentially make money by providing the kinds of functionality I’m talking about, which require experience and data that it already has access to. In some sense, that becomes the moat, and the features are what make that “instance” more attractive than others.
User Experience
Captain Kirk’s experience is meaningful. I think there’s a lot of insight to be had in looking at the similarities between Mastodon and email. Branding is a key thing and if instances are going to be run by randos, we at least need a way to point custom domains at an instance. I see there’s been some discussion around this already, so hopefully this will come soon. In that discussion some people propose that to achieve this users should just run their own instances. Others rightfully point out that that’s only for turbonerds. Even if self-hosting were trivial, another dev points out it’s bad for performance if everyone is doing that. Account migration is also imperfect and not yet supported by every implementation. These are things that I imagine will impove over time, but until then options are limited.
So?
I’m definitely not knocking Mastodon. I really am sick of Birdsite and want to make Mastodon work this time (it’s not my first try). I’m writing this partially as a brainstorm for myself so I can identify what’s stopping me making the change permanent. From a technical perspective Mastodon and ActivityPub seem fairly well-designed, so I’m excited about their potential.
I am now doing all of my posting via ActivityPub. If you’d like to follow me, here’s where to do it. If you’re curious about Mastodon or tried it and it didn’t click, I’d like to hear about your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!