It’s quite funny that a few days ago people on Twitter were talking about Mastodon again, an anti-Twitter from 2016. At first glance, Mastodon is a Twitter replica: publish text, photo or video, follow users, tags, mentions and blocking users. The chosen name to do the updates, “Toot”, is a reference to the sound of a trunk and it’s the “Tweet” equivalent for birds (they didn’t take a risk with “Retoot” and they’ve left it at “Boost”).
The similarities with Twitter end here. The first big difference is the length of the Toots that is 500 characters instead of the 280 of the birdie’s network. It’s not trivial: 500 characters promote a more nuanced change of impressions rather than Twitter’s inicial 140 or it’s current 280. At Mastodon, trolling and insulting are off limits as they entail an automatic ban.
The other big difference is that Mastodon’s timelines are in strict inverse chronological order; there are no algorithms that determine the relevance with obscure guidelines or sponsored Toots. Eugen Rochko, it’s creator, wrote last year: “I’m not interested in investors, monetization, publicity or anything of the sort”.
But what’s essential, as always, is invisible to the naked eye. Mastodon is free and decentralized: anyone can download the code and install it onto their computer and so, helping to decentralize the network. The result is that the data is not saved on a server owned by a business that abuses it according to their investor’s interests, but instead, the data stay’s property of the users: the data for who ever generates it.
The philosophy behind Mastodon is open code and ethic design: “from people, for people, and under people’s control”, the same one behind projects like Wikipedia, the operative system Linux, the browser Firefox or the content manager WordPress.
The internet is broken, and we are all to blame. Mastodon is the uncomfortable question to which we all already know the answer to.
And if these projects not only work but they also have as a whole an adoption by most users, could the same thing happen with Mastodon? It’s a bad week to ask ourselves this question, after Path, the latest anti-Facebook followed the path of Ello and also announced a permanent shutdown.
Mastodon is a utopic version of Twitter, were users are the owners of their data, of their timelines, where there is no publicity or trolls; a jump in time to when the web was free and open, and when we were twenty years younger. In other words, Twitter and the rest of social networks are the distopic version of the web that gave us the legacy of Tim Berners-Lee. Mastodon may not be the answer, but it definitely presents the uncomfortable question that we are too afraid to formulate. Mastodon is the actual elephant in the room.
