Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of “fediverse” platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It’s a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it’s still not entirely clear how “open” Meta is really going to be with Threads.
In the last few months, I’ve been to a few different gatherings that were heavily populated by Meta folks working on Threads where they’ve made it quite clear that they are earnest about embracing the ActivityPub standard, which we noted was an incredibly important step for Meta.
Every Meta product to date has been a closed, proprietary silo. Once you check in, your only way to check out is to leave the platform entirely, meaning you can no longer easily see posts from others on the platform or communicate with them as easily either. Embracing ActivityPub, a standardized decentralized protocol that allows for a more “federated” experience, was a big step towards a more protocolized world.
It was something Meta didn’t have to do, but it’s a move that could impact the wider thinking about how social media platforms operate and who actually controls the data.
Now, some users who rely on ActivityPub (mostly on Mastodon, but many other services as well) have been quite nervous about Meta’s embrace of ActivityPub, as there’s a legitimate fear of it overwhelming the system or causing problems. Or, if Meta wanted to be nefarious, the infamous Microsoft-endorsed strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish, was always lurking.
And while that’s always possible, there are a few reasons to be moderately optimistic. One reason is just that the folks at Meta working on this seem quite aware of that fear and are doing everything they can to minimize the risks and to be good neighbors in the wider fediverse. And while there is still some fear that maybe they only send out the nice, earnest believers to the meetings, while the real bastards are waiting behind the scenes, even if Meta did try to destroy ActivityPub, the nature of it being an open standard limits how much damage it could really do.
Some instances are already blocking Threads, and if Meta becomes too much of a problem, then others would likely do so as well.
And while some had predicted that Meta would never actually embrace Threads, it keeps turning on more functionality, bit by bit. The latest functionality is that users on Threads can now see likes and replies from the wider Fediverse. Before this, users on ActivityPub-based systems like Mastodon could follow Threads users who opted-in to connect to the Fediverse, but the users on Threads would not see any “likes” or replies. And now that’s changing.
This follows what Meta folks have suggested over the last few months of rolling out ActivityPub integration slowly and carefully, to make sure they really don’t overwhelm or break things.
I think all of this is good so far, and it’s good to see a major platform embracing more decentralized social media. But there are still some concerns.
Just a few weeks ago, in a conversation with some researchers about decentralized social media, I pointed out the one thing I’d really like to see, but hadn’t yet, from the Meta side: third-party clients and additional services built on top of Meta. But, to date, I hadn’t seen any.
And, a few days later, I learned one reason why. Over on Bluesky David Thiel pointed out that, last fall, Meta had big-time lawyers at Perkins Coie send cease and desist letters to developers building a Threads API client that would have enabled more third-party apps and services. And, indeed, you can see that threat letter on the unofficial Threads API Github.
There are a few ways to think about this. First, given how much shit that Meta got into (including massive fines) for the whole Cambridge Analytica mess, you can see why they might want to more tightly control any API access. And sending threat letters to unofficial API tools is one way to do that.
Also, one could argue that thanks to the increasing ActivityPub integration, those who want to build can just build something for ActivityPub and get access to any Threads content from users on Threads who turn on ActivityPub integration. So, arguably, the existing ActivityPub ecosystem can act as a third party to Threads.
But, even as Threads expands its ActivityPub integration, that solution is still quite limited.
So while it’s nice to see Threads really doing more to integrate with ActivityPub, it seems like its lack of true openness still suggests an inherently closed and centralized system, rather than a truly decentralized one.
As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to this is the microblogging equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying “how do you do, fellow kids.”
Clearly, lots of people were willing to check it out. Mark Zuckerberg (on Threads) claimed that 2 million people signed up in just the first few hours.
Of course, I got that screenshot on the web (which lets you see things, but not login or post to Threads). When I tried to get a copy of it from the mobile app where you can actually post, I got this:
So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.
By this morning, Zuck was saying Threads had 30 million signups in its first day.
I mean, that’s what you get for bootstrapping on a social network and social graph that already has over 2 billion users. Some are complaining that this is an example of Meta leveraging its “dominant” position to enter a new market, but as I explain below, I don’t think this is so bad, because the open protocol nature of this means it’s actually resistant to the worst potential exploitation.
I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop. I have no real crystal ball on how it will do, and people who are insisting that one outcome or the other is inevitable are just guessing, so they can claim they knew it all along when whatever happens, happens.
What Meta does have, though, is the ability to scale this. While there is a relatively small team working on it, apparently just “a few dozen” Instagram employees, Meta does have the infrastructure in place to scale if it does catch on, which still remains a challenge for basically everyone else.
And, it’s not just the technical infrastructure, but the trust and safety infrastructure as well. Not that I think anyone is going to say that Meta has been particularly good at handling trust and safety challenges, but they have people and they have technology… and (importantly) they have experience.
But, still, the bigger, and more important part here, is just the fact this is built on ActivityPub. Back in December, I talked about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment,” where a big company steps in and offers a better UI, better features, and a simpler onboarding setup.
While a bunch of mid-sized companies have embraced ActivityPub, including Mozilla, Medium, and Flipboard, Meta is in a different league altogether. And that has both advantages and disadvantages.
But, the important point to me, and the one thing that matters, is that this shows that big companies can make use of interoperable protocols to build on, rather than building up silos. While Threads does not currently interoperate with the rest of the fediverse, the company has made clear that it intends to do so at some point, and even included this fact in the splash screen when you first setup Threads:
And that’s important. For the last two decades, the big internet companies have mostly focused on building their own proprietary silos, rather than using open protocols and interoperating.
Now, it’s true that some of the new European regulations coming into force put pressure on tech companies to interoperate more, but it remains to be seen how well that actually works (and notably, Threads is not available in the EU, as they found it impossible to currently comply with GDPR requirements). What is clear and is notable, is that this is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a “big tech” company embrace an open protocol.
And, yes, some people fear that the goal is to “embrace, extend, extinguish,” to use the old Microsoft playbook. But the nice thing about protocols is it actually creates incentives against doing so. Because of its open nature, if you don’t like where Meta is going with threads, you can go elsewhere. But you can do so without losing your ability to communicate with those in your network who remain on Threads.
That’s powerful and it’s how the internet was always supposed to work, but which we’ve gone away from.
Indeed, one way to look at this is that it’s Meta bringing many millions of new people to the protocol-based decentralized social media world. And even if plenty stay within Meta’s private park, it will allow those outside the network to communicate with those inside, and also to highlight how they can get the same basic thing without having to cough up data to Meta.
So, I’m personally not that excited about Threads as a product, nor am I all that worried about it doing something bad for the fediverse. I am excited that it shows how big companies can make use of open protocols in a manner that keeps the internet more open, enabling communication not just within a single silo, but where the users have more control, rather than a single centralized company.
Having more of that is a good thing.
And, while I know a bunch of Mastodon instances are planning to defederate from Threads as soon as it connects to the wider fediverse, I think the statement put out by Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is actually quite thoughtful about all this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
I agree completely. This is validation of open protocols and pushing power to the ends of the network, rather than just another silo. That, alone, is a good thing that should be celebrated.
I continue to be fascinated in watching how the various decentralized protocol-based social media systems are evolving — in particular how they’re dealing with the challenges of content moderation. There was an interesting discussion a recently on nostr over whether or not moderation should be best handled by relays or clients*.
ActivityPub has, of course, continued to move forward with its systems of moderation handled at each instance level, combined with the threat of “defederation” being used to keep “bad” instances in line (or cut off from parts of the network). That’s worked surprisingly well in some cases, but is also facing a few challenges, as there have been complaints about some of the largest instances, and now that Meta is planning to release an ActivityPub-compatible offering, there’s a weird push to make some instances promise to defederate from any Meta offering immediately.
But, again, Bluesky may be where the most interesting discussions on decentralized trust & safety and moderation are happening. A few months ago, we wrote about their plans for decentralized composable moderation, and recently they released some thoughts on how you can handle moderation in a public commons.
The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons. We don’t want to own people’s social graphs or communities. We want to be a tool that helps communities own and govern themselves.
The reason we focus on communities is that for an open commons to work, there needs to be some sort of structure that protects the people who participate. Safety can’t just be left up to each individual to deal with on their own. The burden this puts on people — especially those who are most vulnerable to online abuse and harassment — is too high. It also doesn’t mirror how things work in the real world: we form groups and communities so that we can help each other. The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities.
Somewhat importantly, they make it clear that they don’t have all the answers (no one does!), but it’s really interesting to see them discussing this openly, and publicly, and asking for thoughts and feedback as they move forward. To me, the thing that stands out is that the ideas that are presented obviously involved a lot of thought (to the point that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around some of the different proposals, some of which seem clever, while others may need a bit more baking before they fully make sense).
Historically, trust & moderation decisions come in two forms: formed on high in a centralized system in which little is discussed publicly, and people are left trying to sort through what’s actually happening, or in an entirely distributed manner in which things often spring up ad hoc out of need (see: Usenet killfiles), which often run into problems later on.
The Bluesky folks are trying to think about something that is a more hybrid approach, in which the system itself is design to enable communities to better manage things, not just one giant opaque centralized control bunker, and not putting all the weight on users which is unfair to many (especially the targets of abuse and harassment).
I think this kind of vision seems exactly the right one for an organization like Bluesky to have:
A company is an efficient structure for building out a cohesive vision of how things should work, but locking users into our systems would be antithetical to our mission. An open commons can’t be governed at the sole discretion of one global company. We offer services like professional moderators so that we can help protect people and provide a good experience, but we shouldn’t exert total control over everyone’s experience, for all time, with no alternative. Users should be able to walk away from us without walking away from their social lives.
The reason we’re building in decentralization is because we observed that business interests and the open web have a habit of coming into conflict. Third-party developers often get locked out. Moderation policies come into conflict with the diverse interests and needs of different groups of users. Ads push towards algorithms that optimize for engagement. It’s a systemic problem that keeps playing out as centralized social media companies rise and fall.
On Bluesky itself, the lead developer, Paul Frazee noted that they view the future company as a potential adversary, and are designing accordingly. That, alone, is a fascinating perspective to have on things, and one that certainly makes sense in the age of enshittification. And, unlike the way many companies that start on the open web, and later come into conflict with it, as they seek to pull up the ladder behind them to protect a moat, Bluesky is trying to design its systems in a way that protects the system from their own future attempts at enshittification:
Even when things are working correctly on social platforms, there are weird dynamics caused by people’s relationships being mediated by a single company. The Internet is pretty obviously real life in the sense that its management has real-world consequences. When these places control our identities and our ability to connect and to make money, having no way out from the founding company is a precarious situation. The power difference is daunting.
The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.
Now, some users point to the complex onboarding of Mastodon, or the “WTF how does any of this work?” nature of nostr, and worry that any decentralized/federated system has to be confusing. And that user unfriendliness, in some weird way, acts as a moderation tool in its own right, by keeping communities somewhat smaller. But it also keeps communities… smaller. So Bluesky has a different vision. A surprisingly refreshing and honest one:
A great experience should be simple to use. It shouldn’t be overly complex, and there should be sensible defaults and well-run entry points. If things are going well, the average user shouldn’t have to notice what parts are decentralized, or how many layers have come together to determine what they see. However, if conflict arises, there should be easy levers for individuals and communities to pull so that they can reconfigure their experience.
A great experience should recognize that toxicity is not driven only by bad actors. Good intentions can create runaway social behaviors that then create needless conflict. The network should include ways to downregulate behaviors – not just amplify them.
A great experience should respect the burden that community management can place on people. Someone who sets out to help protect others can quickly find themselves responsible for a number of difficult choices. The tooling that’s provided should take into account ways to help avoid burnout.
A great experience should find a balance between creating friendly spaces and over-policing each other. The impulse to protect can sometimes degrade into nitpicking. We should drive towards norms that feel natural and easy to observe.
A great experience should reflect the diversity of views within the network. Decisions that are subjective should be configurable. Moderation should not force the network into a monoculture.
Finally, a great experience should remember that social networking can be pleasant one day and harsh the next. There should be ways to react to sudden events or shifts in your mood. Sometimes you need a way to be online but not be 100% available.
There is no perfect content moderation solution out there. There is no whiz bang simple technical solution to the messiness that is human beings. As I’ve said many times, so many trust & safety dilemmas are really societal problems that we think are new or need to be solved by internet companies because they’re appearing through screens over the internet.
And, of course, nothing that Bluesky is working on may turn out to work, or matter. It’s still a small operation, and some of these ideas are completely untested. But, at the very least, it is presenting some pretty thoughtful ideas in an open way, and trying to think through the real consequences of what it’s creating here. And that, alone, is incredibly refreshing.
* The creator of nostr apparently does not believe moderation should happen at the client level, but when I asked him how relay operators could express their moderation rules suggested it didn’t matter since relays weren’t moderating anyway. Of course, since then I’ve noticed that nostr is being overrun with cryptocurrency spam, so at some point people there are going to realize that something needs to be done.
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. And, contrary to what most people believe, a huge part of content moderation is not “we have to suppress this content that scares us,” but just an attempt to “stop people from being jerks to others.” Unfortunately, too many people get confused, and think that “free speech” means they get to commandeer private property to be assholes to others, which results in confusing fights over people claiming their “free speech” is under attack when the reality is that a private property owner has decided you need to stop being an asshole.
But what if a social media network came along and just said upfront: our policy is no assholes and we’re not ashamed to say we’ll kick you out if you’re being a jackass?
As I’ve been discussing lately, I’m excited about the various new experiments with decentralized, protocol-based social media, because it allows for much more experimentation, and because it enables both services and users to opt-in to what they feel comfortable with. More competition can mean both more innovation (perhaps leading to new insights!), but also more communities trying different things and taking wildly different approaches, allowing users to opt-in to the situation they want.
One thing I’ve been talking about for a while is how the Fediverse/ActivityPub model allows for the possibility of companies to come in and provide much better experiences, that might improve on the core “Mastodon” approach that most (but definitely not all) people on the Fediverse use. And while some people were nervous about “companies” moving into the Fediverse, I was excited to see more corporate interest, because I hoped it would lead to some more interesting approaches.
Mozilla, which announced months ago its intent to enter the Fediverse with some sort of ActivityPub-based instance, recently laid out more details of its private beta plans. Their key differentiator? They plan to be more aggressive in moderating. Rather than presenting themselves as a “neutral” platform, they’re admitting upfront that their moderation plans have an opinion:
Today, we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta. We’ve put a lot of work into getting to this stage, but there is a lot more to do before we open it up more broadly. We’re making a long-term investment because we think we can contribute to making Mastodon, and social media generally, better.
You’ll notice a big difference in our content moderation approach compared to other major social media platforms. We’re not building another self-declared “neutral” platform. We believe that far too often, “neutrality” is used as an excuse to allow behaviors and content that’s designed to harass and harm those from communities that have always faced harassment and violence. Our content moderation plan is rooted in the goals and values expressed in our Mozilla Manifesto — human dignity, inclusion, security, individual expression and collaboration. We understand that individual expression is often seen, particularly in the US, as an absolute right to free speech at any cost. Even if that cost is harm to others. We do not subscribe to this view. We want to be clear about this. We’re building an awesome sandbox for us all to play in, but it comes with rules governing how we engage with one another. You’re completely free to go elsewhere if you don’t like them.
Now, you might not agree with that approach. But the cool thing about ActivityPub/Mastodon is that… you don’t have to. You can just join another instance that takes a more “free speech” type approach.
Letting a lot of communities all figure out how their own norms and rules will work, and letting users choose which ones to support and take part in, seems to function more like the analog world, where social norms, and local communities actually matter. One of the great things about social media has been its ability to connect people across the globe.
But the idea that there could be one single space, with very few rules, where everyone all meets together, has always been… a difficult concept to believe could work. The Mastodon/Fediverse setup of different communities, each with their own set of rules, where some servers agree to communicate across servers, is an interesting one that creates some really interesting incentives.
Mozilla has decided that they’re going to be upfront with how their instance will run, and they think that creating a welcoming community, rather than a shitposting battle royale, makes the most sense for them:
What’s most important to us is that the people who use our instance feel like their experience brings back more of what makes social great – and reduces the muck that has made it horrible.
Who knows how it will work? I think even taking such a strong stance won’t solve the impossibility problem, and they will still face very real moderation challenges should their instance start to scale. And, I think they’ll likely realize that figuring out who is violating these policies will still take a lot of very tricky line drawing, and people will get mad about where those lines are drawn.
But seeing more experiments and more attempts to make Mastodon useable for more people seems like a good experiment to try. And, I’m curious to see what a professionally run social media with a clear “no jackasses” policy looks like.
It’s not at all surprising why tons of people, including journalists, are sticking around Twitter even if they shouldn’t. Part of it is inertia. People were settled into what worked before, and change is difficult. Partly because of that, people are loathe to switch. Even those who have switched over to alternatives like Mastodon in the Fediverse find it difficult to do so. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in which, when people first sign up, it feels “empty” because there’s no algorithm pumping their feed full of content (though I’ve found Mastodon to be quite engaging, to an almost overwhelming degree that I can’t keep up). You have to do a little bit of work, and that can feel like a lot.
But still.
There are so, so, so many reasons to not think this is a good state of affairs. The events of the last few years should demonstrate why relying on any centralized social media is inherently risky. This goes beyond just Twitter, but Elon has been turning that site into a ridiculous plaything in which he makes decisions based on which of his dumbest (but most loyal) fans he thinks will get the biggest kick out of them, rather than any sense of what’s best for the site’s users.
Last week, the pseudonymous Chance from the Chancery Daily publication suggested that we start embracing a concept of “Fedi Friday,” in which even people who feel that they’re going to stick around on Twitter for a while at least just spend one day a week exploring alternative social media, just so they have a general knowledge of it, and experience with it, in case they’re targeted in the next “look at me, I’m in charge now” purge from an insecure, whiny billionaire.
Seeing how Elon has handled the whole NPR situation should be instructive. His pettiness in the whole thing, including yesterday tweeting “defund NPR” should highlight why relying on Twitter is dangerous.
And, even if you think you support and agree with Musk, he’s shown little to no problem with stabbing his supporters in the back the second they push back even the slightest bit. He’ll even publish their private communications just to win a slap fight. So even if you think that Musk is magically “saving” Twitter, it still makes sense to find a space that isn’t controlled by him.
You don’t have to commit to leaving Twitter. You just need to spend a little time each week testing out the alternatives, of which there are many. The ActivtyPub-based “fediverse” is much vaster than people realize, going beyond just Mastodon (though they all interact in some ways). Larger companies such as Medium, Mozilla, and Flipboard are all embracing ActivityPub in one way or another, and others are poking around the edges as well.
There are, of course, a variety of other, centralized platforms, and you can test them out as well, but all of those run the same risk of what’s happened with Twitter: they can be run by a thin-skinned, whiny, out-of-touch billionaire with the maturity of a 15-year-old and the vindictiveness of a pre-school child who has had his ball taken away.
There are some other decentralized platforms worth checking out as well. Nostr is an incredibly simple and lightweight decentralized protocol that keeps improving. Bluesky, which was initially funded by Jack Dorsey to create an independent decentralized protocol that Twitter could adopt, is now in beta with its own AT Protocol. Both are decentralized and worth exploring, through not as widely adopted as the larger Fediverse.
If some of the specifics of Mastodon trouble you, you can look at some various ActivityPub-compatible forks like Calckey or Qoto that include many of the features that people sometimes feel are lacking from vanilla Mastodon (like quote tweets).
There is no one right way to do things. The point is that rather than settling for continuing to feed into a system you know is bad and problematic, at least spend some time on just one day a week (why not Friday) to explore the alternatives. Spend a bit of time find more active accounts to follow, interacting with some of the many people who use these services, and just prepare yourself for the future, rather than pretending there’s nothing to do but be the plaything for a childish billionaire who delights in making you suffer, so long as it pleases his fans.
Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of interesting developments regarding protocol-based, decentralized social media, and each time I plot out an article about it, something else pops up to add to the story, including Thursday evening as I finally started writing this and news broke that Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) is at least in the early stages of creating an ActivityPub-compatible social media protocol and app, that it considers to be something of a Twitter competitor.
Meta, the parent firm of Facebook and Instagram, is hashing out a plan to build a standalone text-based content app that will support ActivityPub, the decentralised social networking protocol powering Twitter rival Mastodon and other federated apps, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol.
The app will be Instagram-branded and will allow users to register/login to the app through their Instagram credentials, they said. Moneycontrol has seen a copy of an internal product brief that elaborates on the functioning and various product features of the app.
“We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” the company told Platformer exclusively in an email. “We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”
I’m at least a little amused, because I’ve had multiple conversations with Meta/Facebook execs over the years regarding my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper, explaining to them why it would make sense for the company to explore the space, and was told repeatedly why they didn’t think it would ever make sense for a company like Meta.
How times change.
Back in December, we predicted this sort of thing, asking when ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment” and discussing how Google single-handedly changed email when it entered the market with Gmail on April 1, 2004.
And in the last couple of weeks there have been a bunch of really interesting moves from companies with long internet histories. It started last week when news aggregator Flipboard announced not just a tepid ActivityPub integration, but that it was going to fully embrace it. Flipboard founder Mike McCue stopped by my office the day before to talk about the company’s plans, and this isn’t just a random side-project. McCue recognizes that betting on protocols is the way to bring back the promise of the early internet, and taking us away from being solely reliant on internet giants. While early on, the company has already launched its own instance for Flipboard users to sign up (if they’re not already on another instance), and deeply integrated Mastodon into the app in ways that feel completely organic and natural (to the point that I, as a lapsed Flipboard user, have begun exploring the app again).
Days later, the ever popular site for hosting long-form writing, Medium (which was founded by Twitter and Blogger co-founder Ev Williams) announced that it, too, had launched its own Mastodon instance at me.dm for members of its $5/month premium subscription.
And, just around the time that the Meta news became public, Mozilla (which had previously announced such plans) turned on its own instance, mozilla.social.
All of these are important moves, and all of them happening within a two week period suggests that momentum is building towards recognizing how important a protocol-based world is, over a centralized-siloed world.
Also, having these larger companies embrace the space will do a bunch of important things to drive a protocol-driven world forward. For starters, they will hopefully help with the onboarding process — one of the major things that new users complain about in trying to get set up with Mastodon. The dreaded “but what server should I use?” question seems to stump many — but with more recognized and trusted brands entering the space, that question becomes less of an issue.
With these companies entering the fediverse, we’re also likely to see much greater improvement in other areas as well, including new efforts to improve features and UI. We’ve already seen a bunch of mobile and web app developers creating more beautiful front ends for Mastodon, but I’m expecting a lot more of that as well.
I also expect that this will filter down into the core code and protocol. With more companies working to join the fediverse, it creates something of a virtuous cycle that should benefit the wider space. It also should allow for much greater experimentation with new ideas and features (and that might lead to busting some old myths that resulted in poor initial design choices).
There are also lots of important features — especially tools for admins — that really haven’t received nearly enough attention and development, and having these bigger companies, who understand the space and the need, will hopefully spur more development.
Of course, as noted, as I started to plan out this article, I was mostly focused on the companies like Flipboard, Medium, and Mozilla and their efforts. All three have been extremely respectful in how they’ve been exploring and entering the fediverse. All three seemed to focus on participating and listening as they figured out their plans, and doing so in a way that fits with the fediverse, rather than trying to bend it to their will (and even so, they did upset some people).
Meta, somewhat obviously, is a bit of a different beast. And certainly some on Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms are worried. I’d argue, however, that Meta embracing ActivityPub is a phenomenal thing. First: it’s validation. It shows that Meta recognizes that something is happening. Second, everything I noted above about spurring needed improvements also applies here and Meta could provide a lot of help. Third, even as there are some who want to keep Mastodon smaller, if it’s really going to thrive, it needs to continue to grow and be introduced to more people. The nice thing about the fediverse is that you can craft it to meet your own needs, so if you really want to keep it small, there are ways for you to do that yourself, and create a smaller community.
But the biggest reason why I think it’s so important that Meta is now even willing to explore the fediverse, is because it shows (as my paper suggested) that the largest most siloed companies can absolutely benefit from moving away from that model and towards a more open, distributed, protocol-based world. The old Twitter had suggested that could be the case when it embraced protocols and set up the independent Bluesky project, which Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal intended to eventually replace Twitter’s infrastructure. But seeing Meta explore it as well is obviously even bigger. And, honestly, I’d be shocked if Google weren’t similarly playing around with something.
Of course, this is Meta we’re talking about. There’s just as much likelihood that P92 never amounts to anything. There’s also the possibility that Meta tries the old “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook of Microsoft. However, one of the nice things about ActivityPub is that it should be somewhat resistant to such efforts. And, as such, it also creates its own incentives to keep companies like Meta in check. Because if it starts acting “evil,” then the fact that it’s easy to move elsewhere (without losing contact with everyone) acts as a natural pressure valve, creating incentives to keep even the most evil companies in check.
And, speaking of Bluesky, last week, it also opened the (invite-only, currently) doors to the beta version of its app. While I’m excited about ActivityPub and Mastodon, I’m also excited about Bluesky. As I’ve discussed, the folks working on it are incredibly thoughtful in how they’ve been approaching this, and I think that the underlying AT protocol they’ve created actually solves many of the protocol-level limitations found in ActivityPub that have frustrated some folks in the fediverse. I believe that the Bluesky team explored ActvityPub and recognized its limitations, and that was the reason it chose to work on AT Protocol instead.
I do wonder, however, if Bluesky is going to end up deciding that it somehow needs to embrace ActivityPub in some form or another as well, especially as it has been building a larger and more entrenched userbase (which may continue to grow as more companies move in). I’m still optimistic about Bluesky, because I think the approach is even better than ActivityPub, but in the end, having a critical mass of users is the most important thing.
All that said, this much activity in the last few weeks shows that protocol-based social media is having a moment. I’m not saying that it’s the moment that inevitably leads to a bigger shift in how we view the internet, because it could still all come crashing down. But, something’s happening, and it’s pretty exciting.
And it brings me back to a question I asked a few months ago: why would anyone spend time embracing/using another centralized social media service after this? This is your opportunity to contribute to a better future internet. For all the complaining about “big tech” and the lack of competition, here’s the chance to make a difference, to embrace an internet that is more about the users than the companies, where power and control are moved to the ends of the network (the users) rather than the owners of the walled gardens.
There’s a real opportunity now to help make that better future. I recognize that there’s a decent contingent of cynical people out there who keep telling me it will never work, and we’re all locked into this world of big awful companies. And, who knows, perhaps things will go that way. But, why give in to that when there’s at least a real chance for something better? Something that more approximates the end-to-end internet we were promised?
Something is happening right now, and its success or failure is dependent on what people do next. So why would we not join in and try and build something better? Join a fediverse instance, encourage others to join, or even create your own. Participate in the myriad discussions about how to make things better for everyone. Generate ideas of how the technology can be put to use for good, and then put those ideas into action.
In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.
That’s not the only danger for the Mastodon world. The sudden emergence of Mastodon as a popular alternative to Twitter has inevitably attracted the attention of people with lots of spare money looking to invest in the Next Big Thing. The German software developer Eugen Rochko, the person who created the Mastodon software, told the Financial Times (non-paywalled version on Ars Technica) that he had received offers from more than five US-based investors who were keen to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into his project:
But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”
Rochko runs one of the biggest Mastodon instances, mastodon.social (disclosure: it’s the one I use). Another big instance is pawoo.net:
Pawoo, operated from Japan since 2017, is the second largest instance of Mastodon. It has drawn users from all over the world including illustrators, anime fans, novelists, and music enthusiasts since its inception. Accumulating around 800K users, Pawoo has become a “place to enjoy creative activity and unfettered communication.” The Pawoo acquisition marks another milestone of the Mask team towards the building of a decentralized social network and a free, open internet.
That description is in a press release from Mask. Few people in the West have heard about pawoo.net, even if they use Mastodon. That’s because on mastodon.social and many other instances, access to pawoo.net is “limited” as a result of “inappropriate content”. The complex saga of why pawoo.net is mostly disconnected from the rest of the fediverse is described in a long post on the Ansuz blog, written by Matthew Skala. As the blog post explains, the “inappropriate content” of pawoo.net involves sexualized drawings of children, which are unacceptable and probably illegal in much of the West, but largely unproblematic in Japan, where the majority of pawoo.net’s users are based.
Rochko may not be interested in selling some or all of Mastodon and mastodon.social, but the purchase of pawoo.net underlines the fact that those running other servers may be willing to do so. Pawoo.net has been bought by Mask Network, which describes itself as bringing “privacy and benefits from Web3 to social media like Facebook & Twitter – with an open-sourced browser extension.” The roots of Mask Network are in the world of cryptocurrencies – it even has its own native token, Mask – so we may be about to see an infusion of Web3 ideas on this particular instance.
The federated nature of the Mastodon means that it is hard to stop this kind of experimentation and commercialization, even if bans are imposed by other instances that are against this shift. How all this works out over the coming months and years is one of the key issues facing the burgeoning world of Mastodon and ActivityPub.
It’s been interesting to watch over the last few months as tons of people have migrated from Twitter to Mastodon (or similar compatible ActivityPub-based social media platforms). I’ve noticed, however, that some people keep running into the same issues and challenges as they discover that Mastodon is different than what they’re used to with Twitter. There are a few tips and tricks I’ve been sharing with various people that seemed pretty broadly applicable, so I figured it was worth doing a post laying them out.
A couple of quick things to note: these are unlikely to be universal. It’s just a few of the things that I’ve found that take the Mastodon experience to a new, better, more useful level. In other words, yes, this is highly subjective. Also, some of the tools I’m discussing are relatively new, often developed by users who saw the need and decided to build something (again, this is something that’s nice about the open platform that enables anyone to see something that they feel can be improved… and improve it). This also means that it’s highly likely that there will be even more of these kinds of tools and add-ons from others in the near future, and they may surpass most of the suggestions here. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list.
Separately, there are a million “how to get started with Mastodon” posts and articles out there. If you’re brand new to Mastodon, I highly recommend checking those out first to get the basics down. This post is more about taking your Mastodoning to a new level. Perhaps the most comprehensive guide is found at Fedi.tips. A few other good beginner posts are Adam Field’s post on Medium, Dell Cameron’s guide at Gizmodo, Tamilore Oladipo’s guide at Buffer, Amanda Silberling’s guide at TechCrunch, and, finally, Noelle’s wonderful GuideToMastodon.com, which kicks off with the same advice I’ve given tons of people: DON’T PANIC. You’ll figure it out. Lots of people have and so will you.
All of those should give you a pretty good basis for understanding Mastodon, and (in particular) some of its differences from Twitter, which seem to be the things that trip people up the most.
Finding people to follow
My biggest “beginner” suggestion is to find and follow a few fairly active accounts, and then when they “boost” someone interesting, follow those people as well. If you’re trying to “migrate” from Twitter, there are a bunch of tools to try to find the people you follow there, including Fedifinder and Debirdify, but the one I found to have the cleanest interface, and the most useful (and allows one-click following) is Movetodon.
If you’re looking for new people to follow around a particular subject, there are a variety of lists out there, including Trunk, Fediverse.info, Fedi.Directory, and PressCheck.org (which verifies journalists, specifically).
A very cool tool I only recently discovered is Followgraph. You put in your Mastodon handle, it looks up all the people you follow and all the people they follow, and then recommends to you the people who lots of your followers follow, but you don’t… It’s pretty useful in surfacing people I might want to follow (though it also surfaces some people I know about but deliberately don’t want to follow).
I also, generally, recommend not cross posting between Twitter and Mastodon, but there are perfectly good reasons to ignore this suggestion. My thinking on it is that this is somewhere different, and you should learn to use it “natively.” Also, it feels like many people set up a cross-poster and then go off and ignore Mastodon, so their accounts are sort of zombie accounts.
Advanced view
This is probably the tip that is most well known and most commonly suggested for going from Mastodon beginner to expert. If you go into settings and click the box to “enable advanced web interface” then you end up with a multi-column interface.
For people who are familiar with Tweetdeck, the unfortunately long-neglected, multi-column Twitter app that initially made Twitter super useful, was purchased by Twitter, and then basically languished, that’s what you effectively get with the advanced web interface.
There are a few tricks to making this interface more useful as well. The left most column is for search (more on that in a bit) and posting. The right most column is basically the “active” column. This takes a little getting used to, but once you figure it out it makes sense. It can be the “getting started” menu (this is what it is when you first log in):
However, if you click on a particular post to see a thread or replies or whatnot, the post you click on takes over this column. This is a bit different from Twitter/Tweetdeck, but kinda makes sense once you get used to it, as it leaves your other columns in place. To get back to the menu, you can click the “hamburger” menu button that is in the left-most column. It may be a little confusing to have to click something in the left-most column to get the right-most column to go back to the menu, but (again) if you think of the right-most column as the “active” column, it makes sense.
Make use of lists
This is a useful feature whether or not you use the advanced view on Mastodon. If you follow enough people that there is a relatively active flow of new posts, I’ve found that lists are a super useful way to focus in on more interesting stuff, without it becoming overwhelming. This is the same thing that I did with Twitter in the early days, creating a series of “lists” of users, so I could narrow down what I’m following for specific purposes.
In my case, I’ve created four lists: “must read,” “journalism,” “law,” and “tech.” These should be somewhat self-explanatory, but I put the accounts I want to make sure I don’t miss into “must read” and those are usually the first thing I’ll check when checking in on Mastodon. Then I’ll bounce between the other lists and the home feed (of everyone I follow). I do not use either the federated feed or the local feed, as they are (for me) firehoses of noise. On some smaller, more focused, servers, I think the local feed can be quite useful, but for most major servers, it’s mostly useless.
I have seen some new Mastodon users focus on the local and federated feeds, and then get frustrated. I think it’s generally best to ignore the federated feed entirely, and only use the local feed on more tight-knit focused servers.
In the advanced web view, lists are even more powerful, as you can pin them and see all of them next to each other. This is also a little confusing at first, but if you create a list, and then access it (via the “getting started menu” where you click on “lists” and then the list of your choice), you then need to “pin” the list to have it show permanently in the advanced web view. You do this by clicking the slider settings button, followed by the “pin” button:
Once “pinned” you can then move the column left or right in the advanced view with the arrow buttons:
The list interface in Mastodon isn’t the best, and I highly recommend the Mastodon List Manager app, written by Andrew Beers. It has a somewhat simple interface, but it works so much better than the built in list interface. Beers’ app shows all of the people you follow in a giant list, and then puts any list (and you can create new ones directly in the interface) as a kind of grid next to the names of those you follow. You can then check off what lists (if any) you want to put the people you follow onto. It’s very simple, and it just works (for what it’s worth, I ran into a few bugs with it, and Andrew was quite helpful in getting them sorted out and fixed).
This setup makes it super easy to create lists and assign people you follow to various lists. It’s way easier than Mastodon’s built in setup.
There are some limitations to lists. Currently, (unlike Twitter) there really isn’t a way to make your list “public” or to share it. You can export the list as a CSV and in theory share that, but it’s much more complicated than Twitter’s ability to make a list public and have other people follow it. Also, I’ve seen a number of people complain that (again, unlike Twitter) you can’t add users to lists who you don’t follow. I’ve never used that feature on Twitter myself as the people I put on lists are always people I already follow, but some people like to do that to keep tabs on certain people/topics without having to “follow” them in their main feed.
Better UIoptions
Even as useful and helpful as the advanced web UI is, there are alternative interfaces as well. Most of the really unique efforts are on mobile, and not with the “official” Mastodon apps. I highly recommend checking out a few such apps to figure out what works for you. I use Tusky on Android and find that it works for me, but I hear good things about many other options. And, it sounds as though a bunch of developers are working on even nicer iOS apps as well (the folks who made the popular Tweetbot for Twitter are working on one called Ivory that lots of people are talking about).
However, for regular desktop use there are some additional options as well. I’ve played around with Sengi, Whalebird, TheDesk, and Hyperspace, and none of them really did much for me, to be honest. The advanced web interface struck me as better for me, personally, than any of those apps.
However, there is one other interface that I really like: Pinafore.social. It is not a downloadable desktop client like those above, rather it’s simply an alternative web interface for your existing Mastodon account, that is very clean, and very simple. It has a Twitter-like feel to it, and the site is quick and responsive. If you like a very clean interface better than a more cluttered one, you may like Pinafore quite a lot. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my account:
You can access your notifications or your lists (via the “Community” tab) and it’s all quite nice. I use it probably 30% of the time, though I still use the advanced web interface more of the time. However, when that gets overwhelming, sometimes it’s nice to just switch over to Pinafore and have the cleaner interface.
In an ideal world, I’d love to see what Pinafore’s developer, Nolan Lawson, would do if he created an “advanced web view” version of Pinafore, but on the site he claims it’s not on the roadmap to create a multi-column view version (though I still wish someone else might take the idea and run with it).
This is another area that I’m hoping we’ll see a lot more development in over the next few months, as it’s a wide open space, and the nice thing about such an open system is that anyone can design an interface or app for it.
Extensions
There are some really useful browser extensions that make Mastodon much more useful. I know that some people shy away from browser extensions, especially as they may represent a security risk. But if you’re okay with it (and the main one I’m recommending makes its source code available for people to review), they make things quite useful.
The main extension I recommend is FediAct. One complaint I’ve seen from some users is that if you end up on a Mastodon post on a different server, it’s a little bit complicated to interact with it. This is where the nature of federation feels a little complicated, though it’s not that difficult once you understand it. If you view content from other servers through your own server, you can easily interact with it, because that content has effectively been copied over to your server, and your interactions link back with the original.
However, if you end up on a different server entirely, that server doesn’t know you’re logged into a different federated server, and therefore can’t interact directly. Instead, you have a couple of choices on how to interact, with the most basic one being that when you click to do something, it will ask you to indicate your own Mastodon instance address before effectively moving you over to interact with it on your own server. It’s clunky and a little bit of a nuisance.
Apparently, there was a period of time where Mastodon had built in tools to get around that, but people quickly realized that’s a pretty big security problem, as you’re effectively opening up a cross site scripting hole.
FediAct, however, allows you to do this while controlling it directly in your browser, and making Mastodon work the way most people think it should work. You plug your own instance into the extension, and then if you end up on a different server, you can still like and boost posts just like you could on your own server. It works and is nice and solves one of the bigger headaches people have with Mastodon’s federated setup.
There’s a separate extension called Roam that some people have recommended, which does some of the same things as FediAct regarding interacting with people on other servers. It also has a bunch of other features, including making it easier to post to Mastodon from anywhere, and to schedule posts to show up at a later date. It’s got a very clean interface and looks nice, but I haven’t really done much with it so far.
Hashtags
One of the things people often remind newbies on Mastodon about is that there is no text search: just users and hashtags. Some people find this frustrating (perhaps for good reason), but it does encourage people to make better use of hashtags (something I often still forget to do). That said, there is a nice (relatively new) feature on Mastodon: the ability to follow hashtags. If you find a hashtag that you want to follow, you can follow it just like you would follow a person:
This can be useful if you want to follow a particular topic more than just a few individuals who tweet about that topic. Unfortunately, it appears you cannot yet add hashtags to lists, which would be really helpful and hopefully will be an upgrade at some point soon.
Alternative platforms
As lots of people will remind you, Mastodon is just one implementation for ActivityPub, and there are lots of others. Some of those are designed to create totally different services (like PeerTube and PixelFed), but some of them are just alternative, but usually compatible, takes on creating a microblogging setup. Some of these are forks of Mastodon’s open source code, whereas others appear to be built separately from the ground up, but still made compatible (somewhat) with Mastodon, so you can still follow and communicate with the folks rushing to Mastodon while potentially actually not using Mastodon at all.
There are some forks that are more minor changes to Mastodon, like Hometown and Glitch. Hometown makes very minor changes to Mastodon with things like better list management and better rendering of rich text. Glitch adds a lot more like, better formatting tools, hiding follower counts, a better threaded mode and more.
Then there are just generally alternative takes on microblogging that either are built on or cooperate with ActivityPub. Some of these are more lightweight than Mastodon, and many have more features. This includes things like Pleroma, friendi.ca, and Misskey (which also has forks like Calckey and FoundKey). There are a bunch of other ones as well, and each has some different features, including some features or UI options that people feel are missing from Mastodon.
If you’re finding that Mastodon just isn’t doing it for you, it might be worth looking at the feature sets and UIs of these other platforms to see if they’re more your speed. For the most part, you’ll still be able to communicate with everyone on Mastodon… just via a non-Mastodon server (though sometimes they still call themselves Mastodon, just because).
There are, also, instances that have changed the feature set directly. For example, while the default Mastodon post is limited to 500 characters, there are a bunch of servers that have expanded that. For example, I’m pretty sure that infosec.exchange (a popular instance for the infosec crowd, obviously, that I believe is running the Glitch fork) allows for posts up to 11,000 characters. Or there’s qoto.org, which basically would let you post a novella with a limit of 65,535 characters. It has also implemented quote tweet functionality (all of the “key” forks have this as well), rich text, and actual full text search.
In short, even if there are features you think are missing from Mastodon itself, there may be other instances that have already implemented them, or if you’re technically proficient, you may explore setting up your own alternative instance.
One thing to note: there are (reasonable) complaints from people on smaller instances that some of those may not function as well, as the federated nature of Mastodon means that certain content is effectively excluded from those servers. This creates some problems, and while there are some attempts to solve them (with things like relays) there definitely are some downsides to joining a tiny instance. Of course there are some downsides to joining a giant instance as well. Once again, hopefully these are solvable problems, but did want to flag it for people rushing off to join different instances.
Conclusion
Again, this is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but it does show a bunch of tools, features, and services that I’ve found useful in getting around some of the limitations of Matodon that seem to frustrate some users, and to make this open, federated, social network much more useful.
