In case you haven’t heard - and if you haven’t, I admire your advanced level of Not Being Online - Elon Musk has taken over ownership of Twitter. The Definitely Big Brain Genius leveraged a high-interest purchase of the social media app to take it private and began an extended performance art piece I’ve taken to calling ‘Eradicating Imposter Syndrome’. Whether it’s failing to pay employees on time, illegally firing workers in countries where there are actual worker protections, reinstating all the Nazis & pedophiles (but not Alex Jones, because even he has limits when it relates to something bad he’s personally experienced and only when it relates to something bad he’s personally experienced), Musk has been tweeting his way through the entire thing. The acquisition and pursuant performance art has dragged down the stock of every company he runs & devalued his net worth by nearly twelve figures, but that has only emboldened him as he now gets to start from scratch, and by scratch I mean starting with more wealth than the GDP of Morocco. One can only imagine what it’s like to learn you’ve lost the amount of money in 11 months that two nations have committed to spend to produce 100 gigawatts of green electricity and nobody’s knocking on the door to repossess anything, must be terrible. I’m sure if I was in that position, I’d be sympathetically tweeting at alt-right accounts at 4am instead of, like, using my singular resources to sleep on a bed made of literal clouds I had captured and brought to ground level by my own private army of scientists.
All of this instability has the Twitter userbase looking for alternatives; people are moving to Discord, to Instagram, and trying new options such as Post & Mastodon to varying levels of success. (I’m heartened that basically nobody is saying they’re going back to Facebook; Twitter may be the 4th circle of Hell but Facebook is at least the 6th. Great work, Zuck.) Mastodon has been around for awhile with the sort of organic growth you would expect from an open-source project created by one European nerd with a strong anti-capitalism take on Twitter being a self-described ‘public square’ with a profit motive that often sits in direct contrast to its espoused public utility. It grew in fits and spurts, those spurts generally coinciding with one billionaire or another being rumored to want to purchase Twitter. (Ironic side note: Truth Social, a site founded by a man who is arguably the global avatar of what Mastodon is against, is using Mastodon’s open-source code without attribution. The Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is less than pleased, but such is life in the open-source world.) There are now a couple million Mastodon users, give or take, and a significant chunk of them aren’t really sure how to use it because it is very similar to Twitter but also very different from Twitter.
The tech/IT demographic is well-represented on Mastodon, and it seems like they’re going to be the ones who stick around even if others leave for whatever other flavor of the month gets hot. The way Mastodon works appeals to tinkerers & engineers. Other demos are showing up as well; journalists, comics, nature/science people, and before all of us there were many people in more targeted communities (LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, etc.) who setup shop in Mastodon as a way to avoid the harassment they endured on most social media. One group I don’t see much of yet is the sports accounts, which is historically not much of an early-adopter crowd in general, unless it relates to getting pirated feeds of games in which case they turn into Mr. Robot and break out their Tor relays & home-brew WAN accelerators. The most common complaints I’ve seen from Sports Twitter are either “I don’t get it”, “how do I do the things I did on Twitter”, or “seriously, I do not get it, like at all”. I think I have a way of re-framing Mastodon that can help very specifically the sports crowd, and it involves SBNation. But we’ll get to that.
The thing is, Mastodon is just similar enough to Twitter that it tends to make the new parts seem weird and foreign to the less tech-savvy users. There is a learning curve, and to explain why I’m going to need to lift the curtain on how Mastodon differs from Twitter behind the scenes. It all starts with the concepts of federation and decentralization.
Your eyes just glossed over, didn’t they. I get it, but I promise this will make sense.
(I think.)
On a basic level: Twitter is a web of servers all housed under one name, all of the users are under one roof, all of the content resides at twitter.com. It is very centralized. Mastodon, on the other hand, is better thought of as a thousand tiny Twitters, each with their own servers & users & content. It is decentralized, no one site or account controls them all. All it takes to start your own Mastodon instance (or your own ‘twitter’, so to speak) is a domain name and a server. (I’ve actually done this as part of learning about how it works, it’s not that hard1, though I’m shutting it down shortly for reasons that aren’t relevant to this article.) You can build the instance to be however you like, it’s your fiefdom. You can make it open to anyone who wants to join or make it invite-only and have only your best friends hang out there, it’s up to you.
The key difference with Mastodon is that instead of Twitter where everybody is in the same domain, everybody on Mastodon is split up among their own instances; people on mastodon.social don’t by default see the posts (or tweets, or toots, whatever term you prefer) of people on mastodon.world or journo.host. Each instance has its own database of posts & users. So how do they see each other? That’s where federation comes in, and that’s where SBNation comes in.
SBNation may not be quite the internet sensation it once was, but I think it’s instructive because it is in a way a great (if simplified) example of the concept of federation. Many of us remember sites like Barking Carnival, Good Bull Hunting, Wide Right Natty Lite, EDSBS, among others. They were all blogs under the SBNation mothership, each a separate team-specific instance with its own garden of posts, comments, images, etc., but if you setup a username on one site, you could still go and comment on other sites if you so chose because they were all connected in the SBNation universe. If you started on barkingcarnival.com and logged in as Bitterwhiteguy, you could stay on BC forever if you wanted, never venturing outside its walls and only interacting with the locals, or you could go to a site like goodbullhunting.com and comment on their articles. You just had to know how to look for GBH in the first place…you had to know their domain name, and that’s pretty much it.
This is basically Mastodon. You find a server you like - say barkingcarnival.com - and register a username - say Bitterwhiteguy - and now you have your handle: @Bitterwhiteguy@BarkingCarnival.com. Now if you want to follow whoever you like over at goodbullhunting.com - say StringSays - you just search for @StringSays@GoodBullHunting.com and voila you’re following him. This is the Fediverse, a name given to the Mastodon ecosystem and proof that nerds shouldn’t be left in charge of branding things. I’m imagining them all in a coffeeshop, high-fiving each other for shortening “federated universe” to “fediverse” while a nearby marketing exec sets their coffee down and walks across the street to the nearest bar. If I had more free time I’d start an instance dedicated to fans of Kevin Federline, call it federverse.fediverse. Maybe it’s good I don’t have more free time.
I’ll put it another way: if you think of the centralized version of this, every account on Twitter is actually pretty similar if you just add a domain name on the end. I’m not @Bitterwhiteguy so much as I’m @Bitterwhiteguy@Twitter.com. So with Mastodon, you’re adding one piece of significant information to the name to make it findable. I’m not @Bitterwhiteguy there, I’m @Bitterwhiteguy@hachyderm.io, because I moved over to the Hachyderm.io instance someone else is running. Those of us who are old enough to remember what it was like living in a town where you didn’t have to tell people the area code on your phone number likely also remember the grousing when we had to start telling people the area code, this is basically the amount of extra effort you’re going to need to summon to find friends on Mastodon. You get used to it pretty quickly.
Also, and this is one of the primary selling points of the application, there are very few Nazis! One of the perks of the way Mastodon is designed is that an instance which looks shady can be blocked by an admin, so if you’re over on mastodon.world and the admins decide hitlerhadafewgoodpoints.biz is crossing the line, they can block every user from that instance in a few keystrokes. Remember the vulnerable OG crowd I mentioned earlier? They’ve done a bang-up job keeping the hatred low over here.
This is not to say Mastodon is a panacea; there are some limitations and growing pains going on. The benefits of being decentralized & federated - if you build an instance, you are in control of your own mini-Twitter - also have some drawbacks - if you build an instance, you are now on the hook for your own mini-Twitter. This means whatever instance you join is likely being run by volunteers who are either running their instance out of their home or are paying a managed provider for things like licenses and hard drive space. There are a number of instance owners who have seen their monthly bills explode along with the explosion of interest in Mastodon, as the Twitter crowd is coming over & uploading all their cat photos & videos like they think storage space is as infinite as it was on the bird site. (The admins of Hachyderm celebrated a successful database migration by telling everyone to upload happy cat photos, the ensuing tsunami of said cat photos then crashed the server. I love this place.) A decentralized social media app is more like a bunch of houses in a neighborhood who are happy to have you drop by the block party but please don’t eat all their food & leave. That is to say when you’re looking for an instance to call home, do a little legwork in reading their instance rules to make sure you fit their vibe. If you think you’re going to be doing something that takes up a lot of their resources - basically if you’re going to upload video directly to the site, by far the biggest server hard drive killer - maybe kick a few bucks a month to the admins of the site as a way to help them out.
Okay, I lied, why I shut down the server is actually relevant; I looked at the effort of handling video storage and the accompanying DMCA compliance & noped the hell out. I suspect a number of other instance admins are struggling with how to deal with that aspect of the userbase surge; every time you upload a NFL/FIFA/NBA clip to Twitter there’s a process involved in yanking it if one of the teams/leagues files a complaint. Instance admins are going to have to sort that out if they let people upload videos directly. You can help out by uploading to somewhere like Youtube and linking it in your post instead of embedding it, as one alternative. I digress.
(Also, moving between servers is a non-trivial amount of effort and your posts don’t follow you to the new place, so that’s another reason to do the legwork before deciding on an instance to setup shop. Think of it as the social media equivalent of the ‘measure twice, cut once’ carpentry adage.)
Mastodon in a lot of ways is a throwback to the old days, where smaller groups of people with a common interest would setup their own site and hang out together, but with the added ability to more easily poke around other sites and find other friends. Instead of going to a half-dozen websites, it’s all in one app. It’s like Twitter, but with a little more elbow grease and a lot fewer shitposting billionaires. I’m probably spending about 1/3 of the time I used to spend on Twitter on Mastodon now, but I could easily see that ratio flipping in the coming months as more and more people join the site. Come take a look.
Well, the setup is easy; the moderation and management is more complex as you take on users, but you can limit that pretty easily.
On the Rice game, post Beard:
Being emotionally flat is especially problematic for young, non-professional athletes. Watching a first half of shots falling short, lost scrambles for the ball, lack of effort on rebounds and on closing out on three point shooters, I thought the second half would be better.
It was. The team cut off driving lanes that had been open, closed out better on threes, scrambled hard for loose balls, got position on several rebounds, and made some shots. The first four improvements were largely attributable to Brock.
Carr shot well. Allen contributed. So did Bishop, and Rice appeared in OT. But it was a ragged effort.
As the initial shock wears off I think the team will settle down. It is such an old team that it should have internal leadership that will bring back a high level of play.
It is a flawed team in terms of playing at the highest level, say beyond the Sweet Sixteen. I still think this team can get two wins in the tournament, without Beard, just as I thought it could before.
I have to wonder how this indefinite suspension without pay will affect the Morris situation, if at all. That may never be known, of course, but if Morris portals at midterm I won't be terribly surprised.
Must I join to keep reading here?
I have avoided Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others. Originally this was because as a then practicing attorney I wanted fewer potential open doors to my files. Of course, Google and MS were already spyware. So I was an early adopter of Linux - in fact I am on an Ubuntu laptop now. And Duck Duck Go. And heavily restricted Firefox and Opera and Vivaldi.
So will I miss anything that I really want to read if I simply do not create a Mastodon account?
I appreciated the explanation of how Mastodon works, and I wish the platform well for those who want an internet community that is usually sane for online conversations.
So, thanks!.