I don’t know if it was meant to be pejorative or not, but someone compared the state of Mastodon three months ago to LiveJournal. And complained that it seemed very much like it was meant to be a private space for like-minded people, unsuitable for viral activism of the kind that took off in 2020.
Which, at the risk of seeming insensitive: well, duh.
Mastodon was not intended as a Twitter replacement. It was intended as a Twitter alternative. The features it eschewed were specifically those that had been used to harass and troll the sort of people who defected from the birdsite, and it was meant to reduce reach: reduce dunk-quoting, reduce brigading and dogpiling, provide something that would be a safer space while still social. And the interoperability between instances was a bonus convenience – one gets the impression that the main focus was on intra-instance activity, where the specific rules and norms of the instance would prevail.
Phony Stark bought Twitter because that was the only way to build a hugely successful right-wing troll site with plenty of potential victims. As with anything in modern conservatism, the cruelty and domination was the only point, and the failing of Gab or Truth Social or Parker was that potential victims were unlikely to migrate there – leaving them with only their own kind posting pictures of their own feces. So Musk merely bought Twitter and handed it over to the worst in humanity, and did so in a manner so financially unsustainable that it’s tanked the primary business he’s supposedly built his genius on.
but back to Mastodon. It’s not in its final form, and probably never will be. But it started off as a phenomenon built for people who wanted top opt out of Twitter and the prevailing social media, which made it explicitly unlike Twitter. And now that people are trying to reproduce Twitter, it’s becoming apparent that there is a conflict between people who expect thing to work like they used to and those who don’t want that.
There are actually good arguments on both sides. the problem, as with so many things, boils down to the fact that technical solutions for cultural problems are a myth. There’s no way to build encryption that only the good guys can break, and there’s no way to build viral enhancements that allow the public to dunk on assholes without making it possible for assholes to dunk on innocents.
At some point, there has to be human moderation, and it feels like the Slashdot system needs to be tried again: after a while, random trusted users occasionally receive mod points to boost or bury a reply, and their mods are themselves meta-moderated for correction and future mod privileges. If you do this for replies (and presumably quotes as well), pretty soon you will locate, identify and bury trolls – not with an algorithm, but with the aggregated consensus of the community, randomly sampled repeatedly.
This could be a per-instance thing, modifying posts from other sides – one user repeatedly flagged? Block them. One instance as a constant source of downvoted posts? De-federate them. One person constantly making bad mods? Cut them loose. And by doing it on a per-instance basis, each instance is shaped by those who use it, and you can move around to one that is as freewheeling or heavily mannered as you like. (To some extent, this has happened already, with certain thoroughly racist instances cast into the void to yell at each other.)
Too many people are going for the TELSTAR approach – Terminate Elon, Let’s Start Twitter Again Right – but trying to use Mastodon as the new Twitter is like trying to use your Camry to plow the field. It’s going to take some serious modifications, and at the end of the day it may not be the best tool for the job. I’m getting more comfortable with Mastodon, but it’s not Twitter. Then again, it took years before Twitter was Twitter. I suspect we may speed-run the uptake process this time, but there are a lot of teething pains ahead.