I’m leaving Mastodon

I’m leaving Mastodon. Cue the response, “This isn’t an airport. No need to announce your departure”.

I write that with a chuckle because yes, I should just leave. Yet, I want to leave some sort of marker of my digital wanderings. For a time, I saw Mastodon as a potential for micro-blogging. Mastodon was a wonderful decentralized vision of expression without fear of rich people buying it and exploiting it.

But Elon Musk didn’t come in to destroy it, nor did any other rich person appear on the scene to push their weight around. Rather, it was the people in my small space that drove me out. Not all of them, but enough to make my choice without hesitation.

Here are some thoughts on my departure announcement.

I admire its purity …

There’s a great scene in the movie Alien. In it, Ripley discovers that Ash is working for the company to return the Xenomorph at the expense of the crew. During Ash’s death, he says, “I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”. You would think he was talking about some Mastodon users.

You see, I work in tech and I follow a lot of tech accounts. Everyone was excited about Mastodon and the potential of an open-source network of interoperable applications called the Fediverse. It was hard not to be caught up to it until Zuckerberg showed up.

Zuckerberg spearheaded Threads, a competitor to Twitter and he made it Fediverse compatible. This angered a lot of folks in the Mastodon community. There is some justification. Zuckerberg has made some highly unethical choices when it comes to data and privacy. There’s a reason you no longer see Facebook widgets on websites anymore. They were actively tracking users and monitoring behavior.

With this in mind, there was a big push to “de-federate” threads. That is, block them from the network. This soon turned into a purity test. These people are Fediwarriors, fighting for their version of digital paradise.

My feeds quickly filled with anger and in-fighting. Instance owners demanded defederation with Threads, threatening other instances of being blocked should they not follow suit.

It was very tiresome. The largest instance, Mastodon.social, was often blocked because of its pro-federation policies. When a server is blocked, members of both servers cannot communicate with each other. These people may have been clueless about the whole situation yet now they can no longer post to each other due to arguments by their instance owners.

In the end, I blocked all the Fediwarriors who appeared in my feeds. I did end up following some Thread accounts but it was a one-way connection. I could respond to posts, but the people on Threads wouldn’t see it.

That said, the few Fediwarrios I meet seem to have shifted targets to Bluesky, but that’s another article.

Moderating the sludge

I’ve been on various social media platforms for a number of years. I’ve seen some disturbing stuff from time to time, but scrolling through the Mastodon feeds, I’ve encountered the most disturbing images in all my time on the internet. The images showed war photos to acts of self-mutilation.

This content was not moderated or gated by any content warning. This is the danger of an under-moderated network. There is a reporting feature, but I’m hesitant to use it. On small instances that post such nightmare fuel, the poster is the actual instance owner. Reports don’t go to a central authority. They go to the instance owner who takes action.

My advice, be wary of the Live Feeds from other servers. While it’s interesting to see what’s new in the firehose, the results can be more than you bargained for.

Do as I say

Believe it or not, I actually give a pass to the sludge. That’s the nature of an open network. It’s horrifying but humanity has a lot of horror stuffed into its closets. Its the reason content moderators on large networks often suffer from PTSD.

Thankfully, on large public servers, most of the sludge is contained and should you stay on a “well-lit path”, you can avoid it. The thing you can’t avoid is the people. I’ve found people on Mastodon to be free thinkers and very vocal about their opinions.

Each instance of Mastodon is its own community and such communities favor certain ways of thinking. Posts that match this thinking have elevated engagement so they appear in the Explore tab. Mastodon.social has a wide variety of people that have strong views on technology and social values. It’s not exactly liberal. It’s more like left-leaning libertarianism if there is such a thing.

Regardless, there are a lot of strong opinions on subjects with sometimes aggressive pushback for counter opinions even for very minor disagreements. Should you enter into a disagreement that draws the attention of an instance owner, you have the potential to lose your account with zero recourse.

Not long ago, Mozilla announced a new advertisement API in the browser. People were upset, but the discussion devolved into fights about the better replacement open-source browser. It would have been laughably comic had not the participants been so aggressively earnest.

This is the worst of social media. It’s not communicating with each other. It’s yelling at each other for engagement points. The best and easiest way to farm this engagement is to agree with “groupthink” and point out deviations. By “groupthink”, I’m not short-handing liberal or conservative politics. Rather, I refer to people rigidly believing in the same views without tolerance of deviation.

For instance, an anime community may all dislike the show One Piece because it’s too popular. Having watched the show and liked it, I may write some nice words about it. This is kicking the hornet’s nest. For the next day or say, my post will be slammed with negative reactions. Some people may agree with me, but the prevailing sentiment is for those people to keep silent or risk becoming targeted as well.

This was my experience. I found myself engaging less and less on Mastodon until now I hardly visit at all.

The future

As is, my current network of choice is Bluesky. It’s another decentralized network like Mastodon based around account portability and the like. On top of that, it provides tools that prevent people from targeted harassment.

For instance, there is a common tool in a lot of micro-blogging networks called quote posting. That’s where you add commentary to an existing post and you send it to your followers. On Twitter, quote posts made it easy for people to go viral and receive unwanted attention. Bluesky allows users to detach their posts from something going viral or if you find yourself pulled into an unwanted conversation.

Bluesky still does have some limitations. It doesn’t have post editing and the posts are somewhat small. There isn’t a lot of fighting at the moment and there does appear to be a bot problem. Also, there needs to be a better verification system. That said, “its got the juice” and the firehose (live feed) is pretty awesome.

If you find yourself over there, you can find me here: https://bsky.app/profile/jezner.com. Let me know if you came from Jezner and I’ll happily give you a follow back.