Twitter and Mastodon: Practical Problems of Mastodon and the Fediverse

Your first problem, if you decide to get a Fediverse account, is which Mastodon server to connect to. I believed the Mastodon propaganda, and picked out a small site from the list at joinmastodon.org. That small site turned out to be run by fascists and does not allow one to cancel one’s account. I left and moved on to a small political site…which kicked my moderate liberal ass out for being too radical. I then decided that being one bird in a large flock was a good idea and signed up for an account at mastodon.social, the Mastodon mother site.

Many people won’t get past this first barrier. If you want to try, as a general rule, avoid small Mastodon (and other Fediverse) sites unless you personally know and trust the management; some of them are run by abusers, and you sometimes can’t find this out except by joining and sustaining abuse. Others are run by various sorts of snobs.

(By the way, why the devil are Mastodon messages called “toots,” a US English euphemism for “farts?” Really? Do I really need a fart joke every time I use Mastodon? Especially when I am writing about serious, heartbreaking matters?)

I haven’t used my Mastodon account very much; for one thing, most of the people I want to read are not on Mastodon. But for another, there are only rudimentary focusing tools, poor methods for discovering topics and people I want to follow, and only rudimentary tools for filtering out topics and people I don’t at all want to hear from. In for-profit social media, these are subsumed into their engagement software which, in fact, does provide these functions. Unfortunately, software which encourages engagement, even when otherwise neutral, has a bias towards the startle emotions. As Jaron Lanier commented:

The most engagement comes from the startle emotions, like fear and anger and jealousy, because they tend to rise the fastest and then subside the slowest in people, and the algorithms are measuring people very rapidly, so they tend to pick up and amplify startle emotions over slower emotions like the building of trust or affection. – link

Commercial engagement software provides a rough and ready version of the cocktail party effect, where surrounding conversations fade out so that you can focus on the one you are currently interested in. Mastodon lacks tools to support this, and so one is necessarily limited in the number of people and topics one can follow. I could not possibly have found the covid medical commentators I follow on Twitter on Mastodon, let alone follow them all – it would be like trying to drink all the sea.

And then there are real free speech issues, as opposed to the fake free speech issues brought up by the trolls and haters. In international spaces, as John Perry Barlow observed, the first amendment is a local ordinance. Mastodon.social is a German site, and subject to German law. This has some positives: Nazis and Nazi advocacy are unequivocally outlawed on mastodon.social. On the other hand, for many years, German medical doctors were forbidden from providing information on abortion; this ban was only lifted this year. Up until that ban had been lifted, had she been German, Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) would not have been able to write about abortion on mastodon.social (or any other German site), the way she has been doing on Twitter.