Are Browsers Back?

Hurricane Season 2023

Mastodon, post-twitter social media, and a new public awareness of privacy

I recently joined Mastodon, and I'm appreciating the safe space to post my random thoughts and observations where no one will read them. You know, like we used to do on twitter, before everything went to hell there. 

Mastodon is nice and quiet and usually stress-free - a stark difference from Elon Musk's twitter (ETA it's X now 😅, because it is) which has been digging up the unholy burial grounds of the mobs of trolls and bigots that you figured you already blocked and were done with. You thought wrong.

You thought they were gone, but they were just hiding, waiting for the day they would have their revenge...

Supposedly there is no incentive for trolls and bigots to patronize an open source social media service like Mastodon, which runs no ads, has no algorithms to mass market fringe content, and seems to have no influencer clout of any kind. Its Patreon reports a paltry $30K a month in donations; its founder, Eugen Rothko, brags of his $41K USD annual income. Your favorite pizza parlor could be proud of such numbers, but in Silicon Valley? Such numbers would bring scorn and shame!

But then again, F that guy

Well, not in the Fediverse. They wear their austerity with pride there.

Are all these things true? Is this the modern online utopia marrying 90s simplicity and transparency with Boring 20s scalability and peer support? 

One could be forgiven for being cynical.

Frankly, one reason why you see no elderly reactionaries on Mastodon is because it's prohibitively difficult to use. Facebook is easy - log in once, click "What's on your mind?", rant away. Same with twitter - click big blue button and troll away. Even the *chan sites were so easy, your kids could do it. 

Mastodon, on the other hand, with its' labyrinth of instances and follow options for users all over the different instances, is, even for a veteran internet user like me, a little baffling. Why can't I just enter mas.to and follow people I've read and liked? Why do I have to go to their instance first, or search them awkwardly? Searching is also very bad on Mastodon, which for such an openly geeky environment is a bit of a shock. Finding people organically, e.g. by their NAME, is impossible.

I've experimented with alternate interfaces like Elk, which is nice but also comes with problems - the inability to mute jumping right to the forefront. And why is clicking the star bad for engagement? Why is it so important to boost when starring posts could also be seen as a metric of success? This is actually what an algorithm is supposed to do, so now you see the flaws in an algorithm free social network...

Facebook and twitter cranks would be annoyed with all this. They don't care how it works so long as it does. They want to minimize time learning how to do tech stuff and maximize their blowhard time.

Which is where Threads comes in to the picture.

Yes, Facebook - sorry, Meta - is unveiling Threads, their take on a federated app. And feedback from users is predictably scary - the situation seems to be, sign up and sign your privacy away. They track your microphone! If you cancel, it'll delete your Instagram!

Meanwhile, Mastodon management (such as it is) is scrambling to reassure their users that this Meta-don will not invade their new online home with ads and propaganda.

But users are not reassured. 

Can you blame 'em? Threads is an existential threat to the hipster vibe on Mastodon - it is, after all, populated entirely by left-spectrum former tweeters who spit at the thought of Elon Musk. Now here comes El Zuckinni with a convenient on-ramp for the olds and the angry red voters of every stripe to stomp on in with their lib-owning tirades and mean-spirited memes. There goes the neighborhood!

Not to be outdone, Jack Dorsey is staging a comeback with Bluesky, which is twitter, but....actually, it's basically twitter. Like a rock star whose albums all sound the same, Dorsey is just doing that thing he does, with reassuringly predictable results.

Actually, Threads and Bluesky are both the Silicon Valley equivalent of a "Legends Of Rock" reunion tour: old institutions run by aging millionaires whose imaginations were taxed a long time ago, going for a big money grab while not actually producing anything new.

Not to name names or anything.

In fact, there's a bit of an overload of new social media services popping up: Spoutible, Post.news, Substack, Medium, Telegram, Trello... sites like Truth Social, Ye's Parler, and the *chan sites dominate the right half of the conversation, while the Fediverse and (ahem) Quora lead on the left.

And then there's reddit, who alienated lots of users by deciding to overcharge third-party API services so badly that a few had to close shop. A short boycott later, and they're still chugging along, but at a fraction of their prior power.

Because here's one more factor to consider:

The pandemic is ending. Yeah, I know, again...but it's for all intents and purposes over for most of the population. People are shutting down their computers and going out to make friends again. In real life! The horror!

The internet at large needs to do better.

For now, it seems Mastodon is as good as it gets. But we've said that about many different websites before. We all assumed MySpace would be around forever. And LiveJournal and Flickr, too. And lest we forget: Something Awful and Bianca's Love Shack and Fark and Newgrounds and...

But they all had a great run. May Mastodon also go down in history as, for a while, a great reason to use the internet.