This week, we got even further in the weeds!
We talked about the promise of the fediverse and ActivityPub, along with Mastodon, which is built on ActivityPub. There is something interesting (and esoteric) about Mastodon. I have been trying to replace my Twitter usage with it, but what I’m finding is actually happening is that I am just using social media less, because Twitter is not worth my time anymore (if it ever was). I believe deeply that Mastodon is worth my time, for several reasons I’ll explain, but getting through the initial slog of setting up a new social media account has been a challenge.
David Golumbia retrospective, part 1: "Is Wario cyberlibertarian?" – Literally 2 Cents About Content!
Here’s some additional context for the episode:
A vocab lesson
Mastodon has a steep learning curve, and in my opinion, the vocabulary lesson necessary to understand ActivityPub / the fediverse makes it less appealing for folks who just want a plug-and-play social media experience. For this episode of the podcast, I went to my never-touched Mastodon account and put some good-faith effort into setting up my profile and learning how to use the service. Here’s a list of all the vocabulary words I found would make it at least marginally easier to understand Mastodon from the jump:
- servers
- instances
- federated
- decentralized
- defederated
- open source
- siloes
- “fediverse”
- ActivityPub
Now, some of these I didn’t have to look up because my brain has been destroyed by content (e.g., siloes), and some of them are connected and can be extrapolated if you know the definition of one of them (e.g., federated and defederated), but for the most part, if you don’t have a background in technology marketing or computer science, the inner mechanism of Mastodon is a black box.
Deep breaths! We are going to get through this together.
Let’s go to work
In this episode, Alex and I do a pretty deep dive into the weeds of the fediverse and what, exactly, a federated server means and what APIs are… But I’ll reiterate it here, in hopefully layman’s terms, in service to a point I want to make in a minute.
Imagine a big office building. As you go up the elevator, each floor is the entrance to a different company that has rented space in the building. Some have atriums or waiting rooms, but all have traditional office space with desks, computers, filing cabinets, and staplers. On the exterior of the building, giant block letters denote MASTODON, big enough for the people riding the Green Line to work every morning to read the name and wonder about what kind of magic happens in a building named for one of the most famous creatures of the Pleistocene era.
ActivityPub: The Ground Floor
In the most basic sense of things, the ActivityPub protocol is like the foundation of the building — it is the mechanism via which things like Mastodon are possible. It is the foundation and ground floor, where the elevator deposits workers at the end of their day and takes them up to their desks at the beginning.
Mastodon servers: Building tenants
Each company or corporate tenant in this building represents a different server in the federated network of Mastodon instances. Each server runs the same software (Mastodon), just as each tenant rents space in the same building, but they are separate instances, run by different people or groups of people.
Each server is unique. For instance, I am on a server called “dice.camp” and Alex is on “mastodon.social”. In my metaphor, as users of the service, we are in the same Mastodon office building, but we work for different companies.
What does this new model mean for the public sphere?
I think that Mastodon and ActivityPub offer an interesting way to do social media in today’s world. Instead of Twitter, which in our office building metaphor would just own the entire building, and everyone on every floor works for the monolithic entity that owns the location, we have a decentralized kind of internet that allows us to interoperate. In the perfect world envisioned by ActivityPub, different social media platforms would interact with one another. You would share a post via Facebook, for instance, and folks on Twitter would be able to interact with the post without having to share it there.
ActivityPub or another decentralized model like it could also undergird even more interoperation between websites. You can read more about that in The Verge. It’s a really cool concept.
In the episode, we talk a lot about the technologies behind Mastodon and what a decentralized, federated social sphere might look like in a post-Twitter world. I am mostly interested in what this means for how people communicate — how we are interacting with each other and with the technologies around us. It’s fascinating to think about how social media shapes the way we talk to each other.
In their paper, Phillip Staab and Thorsten Thiel note that while social media (the monolith) ostensibly exhibits the hallmarks of a public sphere, these platforms are increasingly performing a function of a marketplace instead of being able to foster true discourse and political discussion.
The design of social media platforms is consistently and unconditionally oriented towards [marketplace activities]. They ultimately form ‘proprietary markets’ (Staab, 2022), arenas of capitalist exchange whose rules are determined by the platform providers. Data behaviourist promises of control are used as bait to sell access to singularised demand. This structure no longer distinguishes between citizens and consumers or between political public spheres and private worlds of consumption. The public sphere of social media is instead a market privatised by the respective platform providers.
Something Alex and I talked about for a while on the episode is about how Mastodon, as a decentralized platform not really beholden to one monolithic entity, is the anti-Twitter in terms of monetization — there are no ads on the site at all. It even feels culturally weird to promote your own work. I think that this is a refreshing break from the over-promoted material on the platforms that you see now. Discourse is sometimes stifled by ads and “click on my link” posts. Maybe Mastodon is onto something with this decentralized, federated way of doing social media.
I think Mastodon is going in the right direction, and as I said at the beginning of this post, I think it’s worth my time to try to build a community there. It’s going to take some time, and I have the usual issues with social media-based community-building in that it can seem disingenuous. But I am going to continue to try to figure it out.
If you think it’s worth your time, too, go ahead and give me a follow, and we’ll figure it out together: https://dice.camp/@lizcultivates.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern 
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