Online exclusive:
The date was November 14, 2022. That’s the last time I posted a message on Mastodon, the social media network millions flocked to in protest at Elon Musk’s shambolic US$40 billion takeover of Twitter.
I was among those who set up shop on Mastodon in the hope that it was about to become a viable Twitter alternative, given the technical glitches and surge in hate speech following the SpaceX and Tesla founder’s moves to reimagine Twitter as a free-speech bastion and the “world’s digital town square”.
I’ve nothing against Mastodon. In fact, there’s plenty to like about it. The open-source alternative to Twitter and Facebook is a so-called federated social network, meaning it’s not controlled centrally by one company.
There are no algorithms voraciously hoovering up your personal data and every like and retweet with the aim of deciding what adverts to show you. In fact, on Mastodon, there are no ads.
A ghost town
But that alone, it turns out, is not enough of a selling point. Today, Mastodon, from my perspective anyway, is largely a ghost town. A handful of my contacts and public figures I follow have a presence on the platform. But even most of those remain on Twitter, keeping a foot in each camp and automating their posts so they go to both platforms.
Mastodon’s big problem is that it’s hard work to find the community you want to connect with there. That’s partly down to its decentralised. Many users have set up their own “instances” of Mastodon, their own little corner of the Mastodon empire, which runs on their own computer server.
Genuinely interested to know if anyone who started using Mastodon during the great self-purge after M*sk took over is still using it? I signed up but have barely looked at it. Although I suppose if you did successfully leave here, you're not going to see this...
— Damian Christie (@damianchristie) June 25, 2023
Auckland-based Twitter user Damian Christie isn’t digging Mastodon either.
That offers great freedom. The Listener, for instance, could set up a Mastodon instance for readers and subscribers to discuss stories, chat with writers and offer feedback - a bit like a Facebook group. But adding all those instances together to have a Twitter-like news feed full of interesting and timely posts is a clunky process.
Although Mastodon hosts large communities, such as Mastodon.social, the original Mastodon server that about 250,000 users connect to at any one time, you have to invest a lot of time adding instances and users to get the mix of content right.
As of April, an estimated 2.5 million daily users logged onto Mastodon, compared with Twitter’s roughly 240 million. It feels like the opportunity for a true Twitter rival to emerge has ebbed away.
No unique selling point
So what went wrong? The anonymous blogger Bloonface, who describes him/herself as a “left-wing p… stain”, and was initially an enthusiastic Mastodon convert setting up an instance on the network in April last year, has penned an excellent post summarising why the anticipated Twitter exodus failed to materialise.
It turns out the attributes that make Mastodon more virtuous than Twitter - its open-source software, the platform being largely controlled by the community rather than an egomaniac tech billionaire, and not having any ad - aren’t that important to mainstream social-media users.
“Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them,” writes Bloonface.
The difficulty of finding people on Mastodon and the sharp learning curve for Twitter refugees are also seen as deal breakers by Bloonface. Then there’s the culture of the platform, which varies widely depending on what areas of the Mastodon fediverse you are occupying, but could be compared to the bulletin boards of the mid-1990s or the Linux open-source community that was pushing an alternative to Microsoft Windows in the early 2000s.
These groups were populated by passionate, well-meaning people who put a lot of time and energy into fostering their communities. But they could also be autocratic and dismissive of people who didn’t share the same outlook on technology, politics or life in general.
The whims of admins
Mastodon, in the midst of the inflow of new users late last year, quickly became “a place where you are subject to the whims of both other users and other disparate community admins, who can and did arbitrarily cut people off from their followers and friends based on non-adherence to some ideological prior or other”, writes Bloonface.
I saw that first-hand on a number of New Zealand Mastodon instances, with admins unconvincingly explaining why they had blocked users. My November 14 break with the network followed an admin’s post suggesting journalists should be banned from Mastodon because they couldn’t be trusted not to include posts in their news stories without permission. It was all a bit too controlled for my liking.
There’s also the issue of financial sustainability to consider. Twitter is still bleeding cash following Musk’s radical reorganisation, which saw him reduce the company’s 7000-strong workforce by half.
But Mastodon doesn’t have a commercial model. Crowdfunding and donations pay for the servers Mastodon instances are hosted on, making it hard to scale the network.
As usage grows, more server capacity is needed, which means bigger technology bills. Mastodon is vulnerable to the free-rider problem - many users expect a great experience but aren’t willing to help fund it.
“I think it is safe to say Mastodon’s expansion from now on is, in the absence of Twitter actually finally imploding, going to be a trickle rather than an explosion,” concludes Bloonface, who has given up on the new platform but won’t be going back to Twitter.
At least not “while doing so delivers money, however small an amount, to Elon Musk, who is a repellent arsehole”.
Sticking with Twitter - for now
I take a more nuanced view. Musk may have many repellent views, regularly act like a teenager and be all too happy to run Twitter as his personal fiefdom - hosting live-streamed Spaces discussions with his favourite politicians and advertising Tesla cars to his 144 million followers.
But he’s also a genius and it would be dangerous to write him off. Twitter remains the most useful social community to be part of and even those who have departed can’t seem to stay away from it.
Perhaps proving the point, many Mastodon posts are snarky references to what is going on on Twitter.
Scientist and PBS host Sheril Kirshenbaum takes aim at Elon Musk.
That’s because many of us remember the earlier days of the platform and the experience of meeting new people and have our minds open to new ideas. We’ve invested a lot of time in Twitter and aren’t willing to write it off just yet.
So I’m willing to give Musk a year to steady the ship and see if his newly appointed chief executive officer, Linda Yaccarino, can be a moderating influence. I’ve even signed up to Twitter Blue ($135 for a 12-month web subscription) to do my bit to help the platform become more financially viable.
In return, I gain the ability to edit my tweets for up to 30 minutes after sending them, allowing me to fix typos in hastily sent posts. Supposedly I’ll see fewer ads and my posts are likely to gain more traction over non-subscribers. But I’m not convinced that’s the case two months into being a Blue subscriber.
With few other attractive social-media options, Twitter remains the place to gather online.
Many of my friends, however, are opting for a third, increasingly attractive option - taking a break from social media altogether.
Venal, nasty and stupid. Spending time of this platform used to be joyful. Time for a break methinks. Byeee.
— vincent heeringa (@vheeringa) June 25, 2023
