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

The once-obscure Mastodon social network has been gaining over 1000 new refugees per hour, every hour, bringing its user count to about eight million.

You can join as a user. More and more people are happy to find a Mastodon instance via joinmastodon.org, get a list of handles for their friends via Movetodon, and carry on as before.

New converts may not know that Mastodon is just the most important part of a larger movement to change the nature of the web.

Mastodon and its kin are federated, meaning you are welcome to put up a server as a home base for friends and colleagues, and users can communicate with users on yours. Yahoo.com, Uchicago.edu, and condenast.com all host a local collection of users, but anyone can send a message to anyone else via standard messaging protocols. The Fediverse is a federation of instances that are free to communicate.

I heard the first buzz of Mastodon in the summer of 2017. The people who lived in a world with its first major selling point was a Geeky and Countercultural group. There wasn't a brand. Academic institutions, journalists, and activists were involved in the operation of the server. I have presented at an annual seminar series hosted by scholar. social.

A core design goal for Mastodon was the decentralization aspect that was a selling point for me. In an interview with Time, the lead developer of Mastodon said that he began development of the project in 2016 because of the importance of social media. He wondered if it should be in the hands of a corporation. His desire to build a new system was related to a feeling of distrust of the top down control.

Mastodon is a web app that needs some familiarity with all of the components and standards in order to host or interact with it. The main focus of The Fediverse is the ActivityPub standard of the World Wide Web Consortium.

ActivityPub was finalized as a standard by the W3C in January 2018). ActivityPub has become such a focus of use that many forget that it can be used in many other contexts.

ActivityPub is a rebellion against the internet. The lead author of the ActivityPub standard is Christine Lemmer-Webber, who worked with Evan Prodromou on pump.io. The only standards group at the W3C that didn't have corporate involvement was the one that developed ActivityPub. The big players didn't want to do it.

ActivityPub was a success for the idea of decentralization even before its multi-million user boost over the last few months, according to her. You might have thought that only the big players could play. She thinks that that should be inspiring to everyone. I'm inspired by it.

Standards setting

The idea of an open web where actors use common standards is not new. Lemmer-Webber said that the dreams of the 90s are still going strong.

There were so many incompatible networking and sharing systems in the late '00s that we didn't want to use them anymore. The Activity Streams v1 standard was formed from various independent efforts to standardize interoperation.

The original Activity Streams standard and the current W3C Activity Streams 2.0 standard are both used by Mastodon and friends. The Activity Vocabulary is the sub-standard for the vocabulary one uses with this grammar.

Now that we have a way to express a person's thoughts and actions, where do they go? A universal resource indicator for each actor's inbox and outbox is provided by the activitypub standard. To see what actors they follow have been posting, actors can send a request to their own inbox, or they can get another actor to post. A post request to a friend's inbox places a message there, while a post request to the user's outbox posts messages for everyone. Our social media timelines are similar to the various in- and outboxes that are specified in the standard.

If you want to see what an activity stream looks like, just grab a random outbox and have a look.

The vision of the Fediverse is a set of ActivityPub nodes scattered around the globe, all speaking the same language. The inboxes and outboxes of the activitypub standard are being implemented by Mastodon. The ActivityPub server that runs a chess club is one of many.

They all communicate in theory, but in practice they don't. There are several issues that lead to incompatibility, from the standard to questions of how online communities should form to efforts to reach beyond the norm.