Mark Carrigan

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The real world limits of decentralized social media

This was an interesting account from the Mastodon founder, explaining why they’ve started to offer a default server and distinguishing ordinary users from power users:

So in a way it’s a return, but also most people haven’t experienced that early version of the internet. So it’s new to them. Everything new comes with a bit of a learning curve. And obviously it’s a balancing act. We want to educate people about how things can be better, but we also want to make it as easy for them as possible to get started. The platforms that we are competing with, they’re also really circumventing this problem because they only have one website. Bluesky only has one server as of now. And so they don’t present people with a problem like, Hey, which service provider do I need to choose?

We’ve made a very large emphasis on throwing people into this system and saying, look, here’s a curated list of servers. We’ve made sure that your choice can’t be wrong, but you have to choose something, because we want to decentralize. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake because that’s still too difficult. 

And even if we say we’ve already done some vetting on these results, and there shouldn’t be a wrong choice here, just the act of choosing is too unexpected for people. So what we’ve done is we’ve leaned back from that a little bit and said, okay, [the nonprofit that makes the software that powers Mastodon], we’re going to run a server and we’re going to put that as the big starting option. If you’re a power user and you want to go deep and choose your own service provider, self-host, whatever, you can still do it. But if you don’t know about any of that, you don’t care about any of that, just click the big button and you can sign up. That’s our current strategy. And now the challenge is getting the word out there.

https://www.platformer.news/mastodon-interview-eugen-rochko-meta-bluesky-threads-federation/?ref=platformer-newsletter

The principles of decentralised networking run up against the socialised behaviours of users: “just the act of choosing is too unexpected for people”. Elsewhere he compares Mastodon to early social networks when users had different expectations:

I think that this can be a bit jarring because Mastodon is more like the original social networks that we had at the beginning of the internet versus how they are now, which is a lot more passive. Some are even categorized as entertainment on the app store instead of social networking. You open the app, it shows you something, and you never respond. You never become part of the conversation, you never participate.

https://www.platformer.news/mastodon-interview-eugen-rochko-meta-bluesky-threads-federation/?ref=platformer-newsletter

Their reluctance to take venture capital is admirable. It also means they won’t fall into the same logic which, I’ve argued, means Bluesky will inevitably come to resemble Twitter if it succeeds:

It’s an interesting question. In the short term, if you get a lot of money, obviously you can throw it at a large team of engineers, designers and everything. And you can get pretty far with that. But VC money isn’t free. They want returns. And the thing is that VC-funded companies, if they don’t get an exit, they tend to just sort of shut down. So I think that not having any VC funding, even though it’s a bit of an obstacle in terms of just getting the resources to have enough engineers and designers and everything, it also allows us to continue as long as there are people willing to donate. We don’t have to reach any specific goals, and we don’t need to change our business model to suddenly start extracting as much value as possible to try and salvage the company, which is the typical thing that happens.

https://www.platformer.news/mastodon-interview-eugen-rochko-meta-bluesky-threads-federation/?ref=platformer-newsletter

Alongside the socialised expectations of users in the 2020s this principle hostility to venture funding means Mastodon will scale very slowly. Which is fine. Small is beautiful etc. I admire the stance and share some of the principles. But it does mean that positioning Mastodon as a replacement for mass commercial social media, in the context we now confront, is fundamentally mistaken. I’m increasingly certain you can’t separate the ‘mass’ and the ‘commercial’ when explaining why social media has become the utter shit show it has by 2024.

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