Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

Everyone is approaching the social media issue as if it was a technical problem - it's not. No amount of decentralisation or protocols address (or even attempt) the root cause. The closest would be the crypto-based social networks, which while they have their own problems at least attempt to address the issue of funding the platform. You know it's bad when the closest thing to a solution comes from crypto grifters. Same issue with the rest of the "alternative" world, whether it's OSes or software. Lots of time spent on technicalities or ideologies, zero time spent on addressing the actual problem - that's why the "year of the Linux desktop" is still a recurring joke.

The problem with social media right now is the lack of a non-adversarial, sustainable business model. All these changes stem from the fact that advertising-based business models are on their last legs and are fundamentally flawed because they are adversarial to the users - the Twitter API shutdown is at least partly because they want to drive everyone to use the official client where it's easier to impose user-hostile functionality.

Decentralisation merely side-steps this problem which works on a very small scale but not only will break down at a larger scale (operating a social media platform costs money) but also brings a lot of its own issues. Part of the appeal of a social media platform is its popularity, network effects and a sense of community where most people are happy with or at least tolerate the rules and moderation policy.

A Mastodon-powered future will have 2 outcomes:

1) every instance federates with everyone and the entire thing becomes flooded with spam and other unsavoury (or outright illegal, at least in some jurisdictions) content because there is no common moderation policy. Users eventually get fed up and leave to a centralised competitor.

2) instances federate on a case-by-case basis which fundamentally breaks network effects and makes global conversation and community building impossible. Good luck explaining to non-technical users why they can't see/interact with the same posts as their friends because they happen to be on different instances that don't federate with each other, or because the content they both want to see is on a separate instance that doesn't federate with theirs. Users get fed up & leave or can't get started to begin with and sign up on a centralised competitor instead.

In both cases I haven't even addressed the issue of funding the network itself - there is still no business model (and any business model where users pay would require the service to have enough value for them to begin doing so - chicken & egg problem when the value of a social network is in its network effects), and even if there was, it will be more expensive because decentralisation requires a lot more system resources.

100%. I definitely found my usage increase when I found a more delightful and well-built client with Ivory.

For those new to Mastodon, I wrote a huge 8K word post about it recently, from my POV as someone who worked at Twitter for 9 years: https://paulstamatiou.com/mastodon/

I go over some of the constraints that the federated model brings that might be particularly interesting.

Certainly, but the second you get a rouge actor, your advertisers are going to be pissed.

At the very best the rouge app won't display ads.

At the worse, they'll ignore a nsfw tag and won't show the spoiler overlay, angering your advertiser.

Audits can catch it, but only after the damage is done.

I don't think there's any service that lets their ad supported plan be in the hands of a 3rd party client.

That’s not my experience at all. I follow all kinds of people I followed on Twitter before. And they use all kinds of instances (some even migrated from instance to instance – I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t mentioned it).

Using Ivory my experience is eerily similar to Twitter. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? If a critical mass of interesting people is there it just works.

I don’t really use the local timeline at all, that‘s just not relevant to me.

Obviously this will be wildly different for everyone depending on how many people made the move. For me personally and how I used Twitter it just works (and Twitter proper was getting more and more deserted and uninteresting anyway).

> Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off.

Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it. It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was there.

I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no engagement metrics" Twitter was something I missed and was part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on.

Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember Twitter was never more useful to me than those early days during conferences/conventions when you'd turn on SMS notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't matter, no one cared.

I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me.

I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall community. I think the community is just fine without the algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter without those things, those things were stuff that started me rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost me to Mastodon because I wanted to escape that.