Mastodon – and the pros and cons of moving beyond the gatekeepers of Big Tech

As Elon Musk’s Category 5 Twitter storm continues, the once-obscure Mastodon social network is gaining more than 1,000 new recruits an hour, pushing its user base to eight million.

Joining as a user is very easy. More than enough ex-Twitterers are happy to find a Mastodon instance at joinmastodon.org, get a handle list for their Twitter friends via Movetodon, and continue as usual.

But what new converts don’t know is that Mastodon is the most prominent node in a broader movement to change the nature of the web.

With the main goal of decentralization, Mastodon and its relatives are “federated”, which means that you are welcome to make a server a home (“instance”) for friends and colleagues, and in all cases users can communicate with users of yours. The most common style is email, where yahoo.com, uchicago.edu, and condenast.com all host a local set of users, but anyone can send messages to anyone using standard messaging protocols. With cosmic ambitions, the new federation of freely communicating subjects is called the “Fediverse.”

I started using Mastodon in mid-2017 when I casually heard the first buzz. I understand that people living in a world where decentralized network topology was the first major selling point were geeky and counter-cultural. There were no #brands. Servers were (and are) run by academic institutions, journalists, hobbyists and activists within the LGBTQ+ community. The organizers of One Template, Scholar.Social, conduct an annual seminar series, at which I presented.

The decentralization aspect that was such a selling point for me was a major design goal for Mastodon and its predecessor as GNU Social. In an interview with time, lead developer Eugen Rochko started the development of Mastodon in 2016 because Twitter is becoming more centralized and more important for communication. “It probably shouldn’t be in the hands of a corporation,” he said. The desire to build a new system “has to do with distrust of the top-down control that Twitter has used in general.”

Like many web applications, Mastodon is about piecing components and levels together. Handling or interacting with a Mastodon instance requires familiarity with all of these. Among them is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the core developer of the ActiTube standard, which defines how actors are defined and interacted on the network.

Mastodon and ActivityPub evolved at the same time, Mastodon was released in early 2017 and ActivityPub was finalized as a standard by the W3C in January 2018. It can be used in many contexts beyond just reporting what users had for lunch.

Like Mastodon, Activity Pub represents a rebellion against an increasingly centralized web. Christine Lemmer-Webber is the lead author of the 2018 ActivityPub standard, based on previous work led by Ivan Prodromo on another service called Pump.io. Lemmer-Webber tells Ars, when developing the ActivityPub standard, “We were the only standards group at the W3C that had no corporate involvement … none of the big players wanted to do this.”

ActivitPub felt successful in promoting decentralization over the past few months, even before the problems faced by its millions of users. “The assumption that you might have that only the big players can play has been disproved. And I think that should be really encouraging to everybody,” she said. “It’s encouraging to me.”

Setting standards

The idea of ​​an open web is like the web, where actors use common standards to communicate. “The dreams of the ’90s are alive in Fediverse,” Lemmer-Webber told me.

By the late 00s, there were more than enough networking and sharing systems that we loved, hated, and disagreeable like Boxee, Flickr, Brightkite, Last.fm, Flux, Ma.gnolia, Windows Live, Foursquare, Facebook and many others. We forget or wish we forgot. Various independent efforts have generally converged into the Activity Streams v1 standard to standardize interactions between silos.

Both the original Activity Streams standard and the current W3C Activity Streams 2.0 standard, used by Mastodon and Friends, provide a grammar for describing things a user can do, such as “Create a post” or “Like a post on a given ID” or “Request to be friends with a specific user.” ” The vocabulary used by this grammar is divided into its own sub-criterion, the vocabulary of activity.

Now that we have a way to describe the flow of human thought and action in JSON blobs, where do all these streams go? The ActivePub standard is an actor-based model that specifies that inbox and outbox servers must have a profile for each actor’s Universal Information Identifier (URI). Actors can send a GET request to their own inbox to see what the actors they follow are posting, or they can access another actor’s outbox to see what that particular actor is posting. A mail request to a friend’s inbox puts a message there; A POST request posts a message to the user’s own outbox to everyone (with the right permissions). The standard shows that these different inboxes and outboxes keep track of activities, just like our usual social media timeline.

(PS: If you want to see what an activity stream looks like, and your browser handles JSON well, grab a random outerbox and take a look.)

Here we have the Fedverse vision: a collection of ActivePub nodes, scattered around the world, all speaking a common language. Mastodon is one of many efforts to implement the ActivePub standard for inboxes and outboxes. There are dozens of others, from other microblogging platforms (“It’s like Mastodon, but…”) to the ActiveTube server that runs Chess Club.

In theory, they all interact; In practice, not so much. Sources of incompatibility stem from a number of issues, from deficiencies in standards to questions about how online communities should be formed to efforts to reach standard social media post/comment/thread formats.