mastodon - a very vague overview

I wrote this up on twitter a few days ago: much better for long form. I'm going to edit with some updated information but feel free to ask me anything or correct me so I can clarify/fix.

Six days on #mastodon and I'm not sure what to think of it now. I like it, but some caveats. I've also been reading the API and github documentation and source which has influenced me. If you haven't joined yet or have but are still screwing around wondering what the heck:

1.) Do not think of mastodon as social media; if you're familiar with mailing lists, mentally recalibrate to this: a fancy live-action mailing list using a messageboard structure with some vague IRC features.

2.) There is no concept of 'private' as understood in social media.
a.) The owner of your server can see everything you post no matter what.
b.) Possibly the owner of any server who has someone following you who is reading your posts. I still reading API calls so hold that one.
c.) There are four settings for posts: Global, Unlisted, Followers Only, and Direct Message. Let me break down what that means but look at Followers-Only there. That means WHO FOLLOWS YOU. Not WHO YOU FOLLOW.
You cannot only post to those that YOU follow.
- Global - everyone who exists on a Mastodon server can can potentially see it and boost/reply/etc .
- Unlisted - same as above, but your post will not appear a public feed line your local server or federated.
- Followers Only - This is NOT 'who you follow' aka your friendlist/circle/etc.This is WHO FOLLOWS YOU. There is only one way to specifically select like that.
- DM/Mentioned people only - This will ONLY go to people you # in the post but you only have 500 characters and names count

Refresh our definitions here: FANCY MAILING LIST. But with loose affiliations to other mailing lists. Okay now we'll talk about follows and posts, the local timeline feed and the Federated timeline feed.

3.) Feeds, Timelines, and All The Things
a.) Home - that is your personal feed, equivalent to your friendslist on LJ/DW, your roll on tumblr, and home on twitter.
b.) Local - this is the posts of everyone on your server.
c.) Federated - next tweet because this one takes time.

Federated is: all the public posts of everyone on your own server's friendslists in a single feed, including yours It is not ALL THE SERVERS or ALL THE USERS. It is individuals from multiple servers who are being followed by someone on your server. It can also be servers that are on a relay if your server subscribes to that.

That means that everyone on your server can also see every public posts of every single person you are following on the Federated feed and you can see the posts of theirs.

4.) The community you choose actually is really goddamn important depending on what you want.
a.) If your server is tiny, the Local feed is going to be tiny and the Federated feed will follow.
b.) What you see on the Federated feed is very dependent on what everyone on your server is interested in. In other words, if you pick a FurrysUnite or WeOnlyLikeBach servers, your Federated feed may not be heavy on variety.

5.) Lets talk about Mastodon As Fancy Mailing Lists: each server is its own country run by its own admin with its own rules, regulations, and quirks.
a.) Admins can backend block entire servers. You can't see the people on it, follow them, see their posts, and same for them.
b. ) There are levels of blocking below Disappearing an Entire Server, sure. But you seriously seriously need to research your community first to find out what those are and ideally, a list of blocked/block-lite servers and why they're blocked.
c.) Just like with mailing lists, you are subject to an Owner who is making the rules, blocking the sites, and all the things we took as life lived back in mailing list days, but now with the fun of many of these and implicit crossposting, and hey, that.

4.) Your posts are at least implicitly subject to the rules of any server that has someone following you. So yes, your post may be fine for WeAreCoders and DestielIsOurLife, but maybe not so much on CrazyAdminServer where you have a follower and yeah, you're blocked from that server

Mastodon isn't like any social networking site out there, but it's not the Old West of Collective Internet Memory, either. Decentralization does not mean you personally will have any more control than you do right now on twitter or tumblr or lj or dw or anywhere else. You don't.

Decentralization means control is now in the hands of not one corporation or person, but many of them. Primarily whoever owns your server and who they delegate to run it, and secondarily to the admins and staff of other servers.

So I can't say this enough: if you join, recalibrate your brain to "mailing list but fancy, modern, and interconnected with other mailing lists". A mailing list run on someone's home server or space they personally pay for on a web server.

The first rule: Sysadmin is God.

Note: I'm on the Fosstodon.org server: https://fosstodon.org/@seperis

Comments

[brooksmoses]

It's interesting seeing how the "federated" aspect of the design shows through a lot of this, as a foundational piece (which is probably why it works instead of being one of the attempts to be like some other social networking site only federated, which are inevitably doomed to failure).

There is no concept of "private" as we have on places like DW, because that idea of privacy depends on a trusted intermediary to carry the messages and identify recipients. Decentralized trust like that is a hard problem. (One could probably layer some sort of public-key-encryption-based thing on top of the existing system to get pieces of it, but it's still awkward.)

The post settings sound like they are not so much privacy settings as visibility settings, somewhat akin to making files "hidden". It's more about convenience and avoiding clutter than about anything like privacy or security.

The "federated" feed sounds like it's sort of an everything feed -- but specifically it's everything the server you're reading on is aware of, which cannot be "the whole universe". It's only aware of things that get posted on it or that get pulled to it because of people's subscriptions.

The sorts of communication that a system supports -- what it allows, and what it makes easy or hard -- have a lot of effect on what sort of community and culture gets built on it. This sounds like a really fascinating experiment to see what community-shapes grow on this one.

[seperis]

Everything you wrote here.

The API options alone explained a lot about what the philosophy and purpose of at least this iteration of the Federation in social media. Especially the posting options: you're dead on in the 'visibility' rather than actual 'privacy'. The methods used to block/silence/mute/etc also follow the same pattern. And even that much can be optional; if you're a sysadmin, you can change the code so those options on posts don't even exist. It's interesting.

The only thing that bothers me is something that would only bother me when we're in open source; there isn't a lot of transparency for the user except at the admin's discretion, and to me, not enough public information on a server, and for that matter, not much more even if you're a member.

Example: I cannot anywhere in the API find a public option to see the list of servers my server has blocked/silenced/muted. I can access some server info but not that. Now I could obviously be missing a call for that or I'm looking in the wrong place, but. Yeah. That's part of the reason I want to test drive one and find out because like when you're reading the code for any project, what they chose to be accessible to users and what they didn't--and what a sysadmin can turn on and off--will tell me a lot about what is actually the goal and ideal they're working toward.

Another example: whether a user should know they're blocked on a server from replying to someone or just let them think they did when it didn't work and if they notice, let them assume weird code thing or something. Legit debate on 'is this a problem or not' on I think Github. I was riveted by that particular thread. And not very reassured by the fact that thread even existed, because I just don't think 'gaslighting' is usually the best solution to pretty much anything.