Two years ago, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. The move sent shockwaves through the social network. Some cheered the upcoming changes by the so called “champion of free speech.” Others left it for other similar networks such as Mastodon. Twitter transformed into X, and the network continues struggle.
One of X’s biggest strengths is centralization. Everyone swims in the same pool. This provides unparalleled access to celebrities and power brokers. It allows for people from two different socioeconomic backgrounds to meet, share ideas and, of course, trades memes with each other.
The problem with X is that centralization is very expensive. It requires a global infrastructure to maintain and an army of engineers to keep it running. When Musk bought the service and fired 75% of the workforce, the site experienced tremendous reliability issues that persisted for months. Musk cut too quick and too deep to the determent of his users.
The rise of decentralization
As Twitter struggled to keep its service running, Mastodon briefly took center stage as a potential rival. Whereas Twitter manages thousands of servers to maintain its global network, Mastodon has a rather different approach.
In Mastodon, anyone can manage their own server also known as instances. Each instance is like its own version of Twitter. Each instance has its own member lists, its own moderation policies and instance members can share posts with other instance members. This results in a loose unorganized group of instances with no central management structure.
Sure, some tech overlord can “buy” an instance, but such ownership is limited to that one particular server. The purchase doesn’t affect the Mastodon community as a whole much like buying gmail wouldn’t affect email.
Mastodon is here to stay, for good and for bad.
Benevolent dictators or just plain old dictators
Each Mastodon instance is its very own community. This instance is typically run by a single person who pays all the server bills. They update the software and manage any issues. They also determine who members can actually interact with. Some of these administrators are great but others are rather problematic.
It can be said that Mastodon doesn’t have a singular Musk-like figure. It has hundreds of them. These instance owners have lots of power over their own community. A user can spend months on an instance, building a following only to be kicked out of the instance for violating a policy or simply irritating the instance owner. There is no recourse. In some cases, the user can migrate their profile but only if allowed by the instance owner.
There have also been situations where the instance owner can no longer afford their instance or they simply grow tired of running a server. In best case situations, the instance owner provides lots of notice to the community to migrate to other instances. In other cases, the instance goes dark. When the instance goes down, all the user profiles go down with it.
Moderating the federation
Moderation is a critical aspect in any social network, but it’s also incredibly challenging to find the right balance. There is no consistent policy. Each instance creates its own rules.
Being each instance has its own moderation policy, there is often resulting friction when posters interact with each other. One instance may encourage AI imagery whereas others may ban it outright. When those users interact, they have the option to block each other or block entire instances. This is good. It gives people control over the content they want to see.
Instance owners can also block other instances. This protects users from hate speech, disinformation and disturbing imagery. Unfortunately, instance owners may block other instances for any reason whatsoever. There is no recourse to this.
Mastodon.social, the single largest Mastodon instance, experienced a surge of spam accounts for a brief period of time. Many other instances blocked mastodon.social in reaction. These block actions cut off users from each other without any notification to their respective communities. There was no way to restore these connections outside of petitioning the instance owner or migrating to another account.
Looking ahead
There is no easy solution to decentralization. While it does prevent a singular person like Elon Musk from pressing his thumb on the global scale of discourse, it creates a labyrinthine network of dissimilar factions with different standards. It requires lots of research of the end users to find “their place”.
Bluesky is meant to be answer to the decentralization question. It provides a distributed network of servers but it behaves exactly like a centralized service such as X. It provides account portability, allowing users to keep their followers and posts regardless of switching servers. If a server goes down, a user can simply join another server and find their profile intact.
Threads has also shown itself to be an X contender by adopting the ActivtyPub protocol. This allows people to create a Threads account and share posts outside of the Meta ecosystem such as on Mastodon. Of course, the big problem with Threads is Meta itself. They but that’s far beyond the scope of this article.
As X numbers continue to crater, it will be an interesting to see how these contenders play out as users adjust to the ever changing social landscape. Each year brings new contenders so the “safe move” is to be platform agnostic. That is, a user looking for maximum reach should publish to multiple platforms. Sadly, the days of a singular service like Twitter is far behind us.
