Since billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the helm, the social media platform Twitter has been all a-flutter.
As former tweeters head over to the new social network Mastodon, we find out how it works.
Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon Photo: Twitter/ @Techxpert
Mastodon was established by German software Eugen Rochko in 2016 as an alternative to the “walled gardens” of Twitter and Facebook, technology commentator Peter Griffin tells Nights.
“[Rochko] was really looking at the social media landscape, dominated by Twitter and Facebook, and said 'we've got to do something as an alternative to this'.
“Here you have two companies that completely control everything that goes on that network. They're closed systems so you can't take all your messages and easily move to another network if you get disillusioned with the place.”
Mastodon, which Rochko developed as an alternative to the social media giants, is a throwback to the early days of the internet, Griffin says.
“It's similar in many ways to email. Some of us are on Gmail, some of us are on Outlook. But some of us have a relationship with our internet provider to send an email and there are common protocols across the internet that make sure that our emails get to the intended recipient, no matter what email client they're using, a sort of an open decentralised system, based on a number of email servers all over the world.
“So he's mirroring that idea instead of having one walled garden controlled by, in this case, Elon Musk, who literally is calling all the shots, let's create a decentralised open source, and advertising free system, to remove all those really toxic incentives that have got us to this place where social media’s imploding, where people are leaving those platforms.”
Whether or not that is sustainable remains moot, Griffin says.
“There's only about 1.6 million daily active users currently on Mastodon, it's growing massively because people are leaving Twitter, Twitter has something like 240 million daily active users and with that scale comes a really good community, you start to see lots of information there and things that you want to be involved in
"Mastodon will really have to struggle with this scale issue, getting to enough people so that it becomes useful for people all over the world. And then trying to deal with those problems that have really affected Twitter and to some extent Facebook, which is how do you deal with content moderation? In a world where there's a lot of hate speech? There's a lot of misinformation floating around?”
Although Mastodon is growing massively - and could have 5 to 6 million users by the end of the year - Griffin says it's still a minnow compared with Twitter.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP
As more and more people join the site, it may be moderated in a similar way to the discussion website Reddit, Griffin says.
“What you have there, which is different from Twitter and Facebook, is you have appointed administrators of each what's called a 'subreddit'. And those administrators decide what goes in that subreddit. If they don't like the content someone's posting, they'll block them, or they'll give them a telling-off and say don't do that again.”
This system is reminiscent of how message boards were moderated in the mid-'90s, he says.
"When you join Mastodon now you will see these administrators who are doing it for free, they’re just enthusiasts about that community, and they want to keep the standards high, they will be keeping an eye on things, and making a call about what is acceptable based on what the people in that community want.”
Currently, Mastodon is “a little bit of a ghost town”, Griffin says, but he hopes it will succeed.
“This feels to me like an opportunity to shake things up, an opportunity that hasn't been given to us in the last decade, at least as the social media networks have got bigger and bigger.
"We know people are disillusioned with them because Facebook is running out of steam, it has big, big problems, it's losing momentum in terms of growth of that network. The same with Twitter, everyone's going to TikTok.”
In general, people are tiring of social media, he says.
“Social media itself is sort of almost becoming extinct, or on the track to be, so can Mastodon and these other open-source social networks in what they call the fediverse, because they're all using the same protocols, the same open technology to operate can they revive it?
"And I hope they can. When I joined Twitter 10 years ago, it was exciting, and it was really useful, and it's become less so in recent years.”
Photo: Davide Bonaldo
