Thoughs on Mastodon and Decentralisation

Or "In Defence of Counter.Social"

Recently psztrnk wrote an entry about Twitter Evancuation Day[1]

(which I did not participate in, having never used Twitter in the

first place), part of which was a criticism of the Mastodon instance

Counter.Social. psztrnk claimed that Counter.Social was no better

than or different from Twitter, and that those who had left the

latter for the former had made a mistake. In this entry I intended

to (respectfully!) disagree. I will also respond to some extent to

Jandal's wonderings on Mastodon[2].

So, let's start with some background for the unfamiliar.

Counter.Social is a Mastodon instance based on the philosophy that

what's really wrong with social media is that people from "evil

countries" (like China, Russia and Iran) are exerting undue

influence over public discussion (I'm not sure if these are

supposed to be "ordinary people" from those countries or people

working in some kind of official capacity, as some kind

"intellectual agent provocateurs", PSYOPS or whatever). They are

proud to be the only social media service taking active counter

measures against this, which I take to mean that they do not allow

registrations from IP addresses which geolocate to one of the evil

countries, and do not exchange messages with other Mastodon servers

in those countries.

Psztrnk describes this as "basically destroy[ing] the most important

idea behind Mastodon by breaking the federation", describes the

administrators as "autocratic" and bemoans the principle of "my

money -- my server -- my rules", behind which that administrator

stands in defence of their geoblocking.

Now, let's get some things out of the way. Do I think influence

from non-Western nations is the biggest problem with modern social

media, or even amongst the 10 biggest problems? No, I very much

doubt it. I don't doubt that some of those country's governments

probably do engage in PSYOPS on Twitter etc. This is probably

quite likely, and I think it's just as likely that major Western

governments do the exact same thing in response. I DO doubt that

blocking certain countries based on IP address geolocation is an

effective countermeasure against this. Let's be serious, anybody

who has used the internet for more than a year knows that IP

geolocation is broken and stupid. It is very easy, very cheap and

perfectly legal to circumvent it by routing your traffic through

an intermediary. I do this every day, and you can get your bottom

dollar that official propaganda agents from Russia and China do it

to. So, I think Counter.Social are implementing naive and

ineffective countermeasures against a very small problem, and

that's silly. Folks who don't realise this and think they are

doing something that matters probably aren't very knowledgable and

probably have lots of silly political ideas about the inherent

superiority of the Western world and its "rightful ownership" of

the online world. I suspect plenty of the folk there aren't folk

I'd like to hang outwith regularly. So, Co.So is not my cup of

tea. But I also do not think they are engaging in any great evil,

nor are they actually remotely unusual in Mastodon space.

Anybody who has paid close attention to the sudden and rapid

integration of Mastodon into the Fediverse knows that the idea that

there is one integrated and harmonious Fediverse where every server

federates with every other one is not even close to correct. Heck,

Mastodon itself, by introducing non-standard and poorly-documented

extension to the de facto standard OStatus protocol, caused a lot

of problems with federation between Mastodon and non-Mastodon

servers. Holding Mastodon up as being all about universal

federation is a little bit of a joke. This is especially true

because the flagship Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, is

well-known in the Fediverse for its very extensive block-list.

Many of the earliest and largest Mastodon instances have nearly

perfectly insulated themselves from "the old Fediverse", i.e. any

nodes running GNUSocial, PostActive, Pleroma or other platforms.

This is usually because of the unwilligness or technical inability

(see below) of these servers to enforce conduct standards which

the admins of those Mastodon standards consider necessary.

Jandal asks, as a non-Mastodon user having a hard time getting a

feel for Mastodon from the outside (I strongly decry the fact that

Mastodon instances hide their local timelines from non-users, this

is ridiculous and makes it very difficult for people to "shop

around" for a commmunity which suits them, even though this is

supposed to be the point), whether or not the ideology of

federation and decentralisation is well understood and embraced on

Mastodon. He observes accurately that many people are piling onto

a very small number of "super instances", which is not very

decentralisy.

My observations are that the ideology of decentralisation is very

little understood by many Mastodon users. Anybody who has paid

close attention can tell you that for most of the users

responsible for Mastodon's meteoric rise, the "killer feature" is

not, at all, decentralisation or federation. It is the fact that

Mastodon admins can impose stricter social norms of conduct than

are enforced by Twitter and thereby do more to create "safe spaces"

from trolls, bigots, "nazis", etc. Some instance admins will block

your instance not only if you don't have terms of service up to

their standard, but also if you do not yourself block other

instances who don't meet those standard!

Another "killer feature" is Mastodon's built in "content warning"

functionality, as well as the widely accepted norm (enforced by

admins) that these should be used very widely indeed. Now, most

Fediverse servers have a long-standing policy that if you post e.g.

sexually explicit or graphically violent content you should tag it

as #nsfw, and most software recognises this tag and hides/blurs

that post until you click a button afirming that you really want

to see it. Mastodon has extended this idea to a kind of "eggshell

society" where it is the moral obligation of every party to

carefully consider whether anything they say could, conceivably,

be upsetting for some minority segment of the online community and,

if so, tag it with an appropriate content warning. Anything to do

with politics, with health issues, with body image issues, with

gender/sexual identity issues, with drug or alcohol use, should,

in this school of thought, be flagged as such. For many people,

this is an ideal view of the world, and Mastodon is the only

software that caters to this idea (many Mastodon servers block

non-Mastodon OStatus servers, e.g. GNUSocial servers, simply

because their users do not use content warnings, regardless of the

fact that they literally cannot use CWs because these are a

non-standard OStatus extension invented by Mastodon and not yet

supported by most other servers). I belive many of these people

would happily join some kind of social media platform which was

centralised and non-federating so long as it had these and similar

features and anybody who did not use them correctly was warned and

eventually blocked for failure to do so.

As an indication of how little understood the nature of Mastodon

is, I have literally seen somebody ask, in all apparent

seriousness, "should corporations even be allowed on Mastodon?". I

am baffled by this. It's not that I love corporations and want to

see advertising on my timeline - I don't. It's that I don't

understand what it would even mean for them to be "allowed" or not

on Mastodon. This is as sensible as asking if corporations should

be "allowed on email", or "allowed on the web". It's

decentralised, people! It's literally impossible to stop

corporations joining the network, and that's the point! I don't

think this is widely understood or appreciated. I think a lot of

non-technical but ideologically inclined people who have grown up

on social media, used to having their activities controlled by

Silicon Valley megacorps, see Mastodon as some kind magical new

world where they are free to make up the rules that they want, and

have the power to ban those who do not follow them, a freedom that

they do not have at Twitter. And Mastodon does give them that

freedom, and that's great! But it gives that same freedom to

the folk who run Counter.Social (and it even gives that freedom to

Nazis).

All this is to say, Mastodon is all about "my server, my rules"!

This core principle of electronic self-ownership is *vitally

important* and should not be decried but embraced and defended at

all costs! The same power that lets Co.So block people based on IP

address lets others create, say, LGBT-only Mastodon instances. It

goes without saying that not everybody who wields this power

will do so in the same way. That's okay. One size does not fit

all. I do not think we should make a virtue of every Mastodon

instance federating with every other Mastodon instance

unconditionally (which is already not what we have). This will

only leave all communities unahppy.

I do not think it is accurate to call Co.So's policies autocratic.

They are very upfront and clear about their policies. Their users

know what they are signing up for, and have probably actively

sought it out. If anybody finds they were mistaken or changes

their mind, they can leave Co.So for some other Mastodon instance,

and unless their new instance is in an "evil country" they can

probably still talk to many of the same people they spoke to from

their Co.So account. Moving servers is a relatively low-cost

affair, so a server's policies are not really thrust upon the user.

I also do not think that people leaving Twitter for Co.So does not

represent progress. The real problem with Twitter is that if

you're on Twitter, you can't talk to people who aren't on it, and

if you aren't on it, you can't talk to people who are. This leads

to the well-known "network effect", whereby 90% of the planet ends

up on the one service, Twitter, and the flow on effects of this

are the real problems:

• Twitter becomes a single point of failure, both from the

perspective of oppresive regimes censoring the internet, and

from the point of view of technical failures.

• Twitter accumulates lots of private information on 90% of the

planet, which makes it very attractive from the perspective of

the marketing surveillance complex, and an attractive target

for data theft, and leads to the possibility of catastrophic

accidental data leakage.

• Twitter can make unpopular changes to their interface or terms

of service and users have no choice but to accept them because

if they leave they are cut off from 90% of the planet. This is

much closer to autocracy (although, still, at the end of the day,

Twitter cannot force you to join Twitter)

All of these problems go away if Twitter is replaced by 100,000

Mastodon instances, even if some of those instances have heavy

handed moderation policies based on nationalistic ideas, and *even

if* some instances do not federate with others (which is already

the case). It is inevitable that there will be differences of

opinion in the Fediverse, it is inevitable that some admins will

want their communities to have no contact with other communities.

As long as the Fediverse doesn't balkanise into hundreds of

completely disconnected subnetworks, which doesn't seem likely to

me, I think everything is just fine.

Finally, Jandal makes some amusing and glib remarks on the value

of microblogging, be it centralised or not. He concludes that

even if Mastodon were perfect, in the end "It's just another

microblogging platform. Perhaps a better, healthier one, but

still a vacuous one. It's like environmentally friendly farts".

I need to think on this. Although I found it funny, it also

"hurt", just a tiny bit, because I spend quite some time and

energy on Mastodon myself these days, but also because I find it

incredibly easy to imagine myself 12 months ago expressing

• exactly* the same sentiment. Have my beliefs changed or have

I lost my way? More on that very question in a future phlog.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/psztrnk/log/20180103.txt

[2] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~jandal/phlog/i-deleted-my-microphlog