Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

online

The Mastodon Hunters

Nov 22nd, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Well, I didn’t expect this, though I probably should have: A huge wave of former Twitter bluechecks and their followers have descended upon the Mastodon Federation, and–sunuvugun–they’ve started throwing spears at each other.

First of all, for those who have never heard of it: Mastodon is a social network modeled superficially on Twitter. It’s distributed, in that anyone can create a server instance of Mastodon, and connect to other Mastodon instances through an underlying protocol called ActivityPub. It’s very cool in its own way, and brings other (ancient) distributed social networks to mind, like Fidonet and Usenet. Within a server instance, members can post and read tweet-ish things called “toots.” Theoretically, any Mastodon instance (there about 7,000 of them) can trade traffic with any other Mastodon instance. Content moderation, codes of conduct, and control of what other instances can share traffic are entirely under the control of the members of a given instance. There is no centralized management. Each instance governs itself.

So NPR’s Adam Davidson set up a Mastodon instance called journa.host, mostly targeted at journalists fleeing Twitter. The journa.host instance now has about 1,600 members, though that number doubtless changes hourly. I’ve cruised some of the posts, and it looks a great deal like the sort of stuff we’ve always seen on Twitter: some interesting, some blather, and some complaining about the indiscretions of others. Here’s the weird part: Almost immediately, fights broke out.

Maybe that’s not weird. Maybe that’s just how social networks operate. In this case, it had repercussions: A great many Mastodon instances, told by one malcontent or another that journa.host was transphobic, decided to block journa.host entirely. If you read Twitter, look for posts by @ajaromano, a bluecheck journalist who’s been trying to figure out why journa.host is being blocked so much. There’s a threadroll here. She’s trying to pin down what makes journa.host transphobic, and so far she got nuthin. Someone linked to a transphobic NYT article? Seriously? The NYT?

What this leaves us with is basically a Twitter-flavored forum with 1,600 members, shunned by all the other major Mastodon instances. So much for having 75,000 followers.

Now, why? I seriously doubt journa.host did anything transphobic or Aja Romero would have found it by now. I think the problem is much simpler and more mundane: Longtime Mastodon users think the wave after wave of Twitter refugees are ruining the neighborhood. The federation network can’t crash, but massive activity spikes can slow things down enough so that it might as well have crashed.

I’m not sure why it should be so, but I’ve read that Mastodon leans left. So in a way it’s the perfect solution for people who hate Elon Musk enough to bail on Twitter, leaving their blue checks and their thousands of followers behind. Alas, right now it looks a lot like Mastodon’s fediverse is the Holy Roman Empire of social networks: thousands of dukedoms, city-states, and strange little scraps of intellectual backwaters and walled fiefdoms that just don’t talk to anybody else and occasionally start throwing rocks.

What happens next? Nobody’s saying it out loud, but I’ll hazard a guess: They’ll soon be back on Twitter. How soon? A month or so. We won’t know for sure because they won’t want to admit it, but Twitter is successful because it’s big. Musk will eventually figure out how to make it pay. The real interesting question is what shape the Mastodon fediverse will be in come the new year. What’s the sound of one instance banning?

Silence. Heh.

The Twitter Damn Breaks

Apr 26th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

Twitter’s damn has broken. That’s not a typo. The word “damn” means “to cast into the outer darkness.” Twitter is famous for doing that. Well, alluva sudden I’m seeing reports of the Twitter-damned finding that their accounts are live again, and they suddenly have thousands more followers than they had a couple of days ago.

Ok, I’m not one of them. A couple of days ago I had 612 followers. Last time I looked it was 614. But people I know personally suddenly have a thousand or so new followers, and on Twitter itself I see people claiming that they have gained thousandsof followers in the last day or so.

Something’s happening.

And it’s happening too soon. Musk and Twitter have not yet closed the deal. You can’t sleep in a house until all the papers are signed and the money changes hands. So why is Twitter suddenly casting the gates wide again and allowing–conservatives, urk!–to rejoin the global conversation?

Makes no sense, not like that’s a new thing for Twitter. But as a Fluffy the Puppy in my novel Dreamhealer said to Larry the Dreamhealer, “Sense is overrated sometimes.” I can think of two (related) reasons why Twitter is suddenly unbanning the damned, and giving them their followers back. This is speculation, obviously, but if you have any better crackpot ideas I’ll hear them:

  1. Twitter’s current rank and file are terrified of Musk. Not sure why. It’s not beyond imagination that they fear Musk using their own censorship machinery against them–and so they’re dismantling it. I doubt our man Elon is dumb enough to try something like that. But an awful lot of people with ivy degrees think he’s the devil incarnate. Or:
  2. Twitter’s management wants to erase all records of their banning decisions, as well as all operational details of whatever algorithms they employed to do the dirty work. What they fear is the general public finding out how pervasive Twitter’s censorship was, and how laser-focused it all was against a fairly narrow demographic. The worst outcome they can imagine is Musk taking over the company’s servers and posting all the details of how it once worked where the public can easily see them.

There may be more to it than that. We won’t know for awhile what Musk actually intends to change in Twitter’s daily operations. I’ve often wondered if the whole thing is theater, and that something will magically turn up at the last minute that makes the whole deal go belly-up. If so, well, Elon has made his point: Free speech is worth something, and it isn’t free if half the discussion is artificially suppressed.

Again, it’s too soon to be sure of anything. Sooner or later, we’ll know. In the meantime, the water’s over the damn and the damn is in ruins…wich is how all damns richly deserve to be.

Quo Vadis, Twitter?

Apr 25th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Elon Musk just bought Twitter. For 44 billion dollars.

Egad, I could think of several thousand better ways to spend $44B. In fact, I brought the topic up ten or fifteen years ago, in an entry here called “If I Had a Billion.” Funny how I can’t find it now on Duck Duck Go, or I’d post a link. Maybe I just imagined it. Maybe I’ve been canceled. Maybe too many people want to talk about being billionaires and my post is down in the noise. No matter.

So what is the guy actually going to do with his new toy? It’s tempting to think of the acquisition as a shot across the bow of social networking, in essence saying, “You can be bought. You won’t like being bought. So lay off with the censorship already.”

Threats of that sort aren’t his style. My best guess is that he’s going to tweak a lot of noses by focusing on Twitter and allowing real discussions about formerly forbidden topics, like climate, race, COVID treatments, and such–you know, the things that have gotten a lot of people thrown off Twitter in recent years. I haven’t gotten thrown off because I’m careful about what I post. Being careful (and not spending half my life there) means I won’t get a lot of attention. (I will admit that mentioning my books on Twitter always sells a few. Otherwise I might have quit long ago.) I don’t talk about politics. And this is why I have 611 followers, rather than several thousand. Being famous is hard work. And if I’m going to be famous, I’d rather not do it on Twitter.

He could also order his techies to add an edit function to Twitter. Dare we hope?

I’ll hope. I won’t assume. Anyway. He could do a number of things to make the service worthwhile:

  1. Add edit functionality. Ok, that’s too easy.
  2. Expand the size of a tweet to 1,000 characters. Or 2,000? At their current length, tweets are most useful in online fistfights. Real discussion requires more space than that. Give users more space, and the quality of the dicussions almost can’t help but go up. I hope.
  3. Slow down replies and retweets. I’ve written about this here before. The idea is to exponentially increase the time it takes for a given tweet to “go viral.” One reply, instantly. Two, one second. Three, two seconds. Four, four seconds. Five, eight seconds. Etc. This would put a huge damper on Twitter lynch mobs. And one would hope that that the psychotic hotheads who comprise those mobs will get bored and go somewhere else. In their place will be slower, and (with some luck) more rational conversations. Read the entry I linked. I think it would work. I don’t think Mr. Musk will do it.
  4. Eliminate the “blue check” status game. Have one color check (which color doesn’t matter) indicating that the poster has proven that he or she is who they say they are and are not a bot. Require that “checks” use their real names. You’re either real or not real. Twitter has no damned business deciding who is important and who isn’t.
  5. Charge users by the tweet. Really. Retain free memberships, but limit the number of tweets that free memberships can post. Create brackets of paid memberships in which the highest paid memberships can post unlimited tweets, with less expensive memberships allowing fewer tweets. This would probably cut the number of Twitter users in half (if not more) but would bring in enough revenue to make the system pay for itself. And I can’t help but think that the people who would quit would be the people who make the most trouble. The quality of dicussion would almost certainly improve.

That’s what I have so far. One thing that I think would be very useful but I doubt anyone will ever do is create a federation API allowing different social media services to share messages among themselves. Maybe Twitter should become a back-end for systems that want to participate but also want to curate the content that their network allows. In other words, if people on the left want to toss out people on the right, and people on the right want to toss out those on the left, Twitter would take everybody and let individual users choose to follow whomever they please. Let the crazies have their bubbles. Make Twitter the Big, Here-Comes-Everybody bubble.

A system like that would take some thought and some serious work. It wouldn’t be impossible. (There’s something called Mastodon that has gone some distance in that direction, albeit at a much smaller scale.) And what it would create would be infinitely better than what we have now.

G’wan, Elon. Give it a shot. You own it. Now do what you do best, which is…surprising us.