Mastodon

Description

"Mastodon is a microblogging & social network based on open protocols and free, open-source software.

As a decentralized (like e-mail) alternative to commercial platforms, it combats the risks of a company monopolizing your communication. You can interact with everyone else on Mastodon, GNU Social, or other compatible software (together called the "fediverse"), no matter what provider each of you are using." (https://social.coop/about)

Discussion

By Chelsea​ ​Barabas, Neha​ ​Narula and Ethan​ ​Zuckerman:

"Mastodon, a project begun by German software developer Eugen Rochko in October 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter.

Mastodon uses OStatus, an open protocol for federation of microblogging and status update services, which is also used by identi.ca, GNU Social and other distributed publishing platforms. Rochko’s key innovation was around user-experience. Mastodon looks almost identical to Tweetdeck, a popular interface to Twitter initially developed by Iain Dodsworth using Twitter’s API, acquired by Twitter in 2011. (Rochko told a reporter that he kept a window with Tweetdeck open in it while developing the software .)

With an interface familiar to advanced Twitter users, Mastodon experienced a wave of popularity in April 2017. In a single week, Quartz , Vice , Engadget and Wired wrote about the service, identifying it as an alternative and threat to Twitter. Driven by this publicity, the userbase expanded quickly, and now features between 800,000 and 1.5 million users on between 1,200 and 2,400 servers . While the precise number of users changes as servers go up and down, Mastodon has been significantly more successful than any other distributed social network to date, but is still orders of magnitude smaller than successful commercial social networks.

What’s particularly interesting about Mastodon is the geographic concentration of users. Three of the five largest Mastodon instances are based in Japan , and those three sites host roughly 60% of all Mastodon users. The users are not only concentrated geographically and linguistically - they are concentrated in terms of interest.

The largest Mastodon instance globally - pawoo.net - was set up by a Japanese company called Pixiv, and configured so that Pixiv users can easily create accounts on pawoo.net. Similar to US site DeviantArt, Pixiv invites users to share art, often art with strong sexual themes. One of the most popular categories of art on Pixiv is ロリコン - “lolicon”. Short for “Lolita complex”, lolicon is a form of anime imagery that portrays children in sexual situations, sometimes including explicit graphical depictions of sex.

Child pornography is illegal in Japan, but lolicon, which generally features manga-style illustrations instead of photographs, is legal and common in Japan.

Because Mastodon is a decentralized network, it is difficult to maintain an accurate count of users and instances. The Mastodon Network Monitoring Project offers a dashboard that tracks active instances of Mastodon at https://dashboards.mnm.social/dashboard/db/mastodon-network-overview?refresh=1h&orgId=1. Those figures can vary wildly. In the morning of August 17, 2017, the dashboard was reporting 1.48m registered users, while by that evening, it reported only 781,552. In addition, because Mastodon is open source software configurable by users, some administrators have tinkered with code to make their sites misreport user numbers. While MNM filters out the obvious fakes, it is possible that some sites are modestly misreporting their userbases to increase their prominence.

Matthew Scala, who writes about Japanese online culture, argues that growth of Mastodon in Japan is closely related to lolicon . Twitter is extremely popular in Japan, but routinely censors lolicon accounts. When Pixiv made Mastodon accessible to its 20 million users, many quickly adopted the platform as a space to socialize and share imagery. A cursory glance at timelines of the other major Japanese Mastodon instances suggest that lolicon is popular in those communities as well.

This use case for Mastodon confirms our hypothesis that usability matters. Not only did Mastodon make OStatus-based distributed publishing platforms more accessible by wedding them to the familiar Tweetdeck interface, but Pixiv helped build the user base by making it easy for existing users to register for the service. The popularity of Mastodon in a subcommunity suggests another rule for adoption: existing communities may turn to decentralized solutions when they can no longer communicate due to getting barred from centralized social networks. This path to adoption may turn out to be a stumbling block for Mastodon in the long term, as stigma associated with sub-communities that adopt the tool may prove a barrier to wider adoption of the platform." (http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf)

Example

Social Coop

"social.coop: a coop-run corner of the fediverse, a co-operative and transparent approach to operating a social platform

What makes social.coop different from other Mastodon instances?

• Your data in a place you control and trust
• Cooperatively co-own the instance
• Co-create policies, code of conduct, etc (see our bylaws)
• Democratically run our operations (see our Loomio group)
• Co-finance expenses transparently (see our OpenCollective page)
• Participate in a #platformcoop case-study
• Join a community of like-minded people "

(https://social.coop/about)