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Twitter’s model is between an individual and their followers, which is bad for organisations because the individual leaves and takes the followers with them. M

Twitter’s model is between an individual and their followers, which is bad for organisations because the individual leaves and takes the followers with them. Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their server. For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected. Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support. They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own plugins rather than being dependent on the API. I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention, rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to hang out.

paulgb 4y ago
I agree that this is an eventuality, but is anyone actually doing it yet? Everyone I’ve known who has migrated has either been to community-run or self-hosted instances, and I haven’t encountered any corporate or university domains when lurking around.
- blowski 4y ago
  No, I haven't seen anyone doing it yet. I might just be voicing some wishful thoughts.
- tpm 4y ago
  One often mentioned example is the EU. https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more One swallow does not make the summer though, as we say in our country, so we'll se if there will be more. Edit: there is also on for the German Federal Government. https://social.bund.de/about https://social.bund.de/about
  - xg15 4y ago
    > One often mentioned example is the EU. From one toot in the timeline: > Our Director and Head of Translation Department paid a visit to @EMSA_EU@twitter.com ...wait a minute, which instance is that? :) But seriously, it's amazing to see institutions and official account getting on the Fediverse!
amadeuspagel 4y ago
This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations. Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet. (Nor would any organization want to be associated with any fleeting thought that an employee has.) And what's fun about twitter is precisely that it's a neutral ground where everyone, from every organization, dukes it out. Of course, this model is possible in the fediverse as well, just as it's possible with email. (And note that many people prefer a gmail address to one that they'll lose when they get fired.)
- blowski 4y ago
  > This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations. Sweeping generalisation. Some people care about some individuals more than the organisation to which they belong. Think Trump funs who would vote for Trump whichever party he stood for, or Tucker Carlson fans who would watch him on any network, or Tom Brady fans who would follow him whichever team he played for. But for every Trump, Carlson or Brady, there's a 1000 Liz Trusses or Huw Edwards, in whom most interest is solely because of the organisation to which they belong. And there's no reason an individual can't have both an organisation account and a personal one. Even aggregate accounts which pull everything together. Mastodon offers a lot of opportunities to do things differently.
- vvillena 4y ago
  > Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet. Tweeter is the poster child of personal branding. A near totality of the high-visibility posts are transactional in nature. The posts are either crafted by PR people, meaning someone got literally paid to tweet, or are done personally with the aim of increasing personal branding or as part of a contract.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    That’s only mostly true for the high follower accounts. Which is why some folks, including me, keep their account at a purposefully low follower count by tweeting dry unengaging stuff as well. And avoiding all topics, such as political discussions, where there are incentives to virtue signal.
blitzar 4y ago
Half formed thought ... however. I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I am also on @mastodon.art. I should really only talk with my work hat on @work and my art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated universe? Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician, rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or server.
- blowski 4y ago
  Maybe both? With a meta account that aggregates from all your other accounts. If the BBC are giving you a megaphone, it's useful that they can take away that megaphone when you leave. You can always choose to speak without the megaphone.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    The "email" version - your work email is for work and personal for personal. The @x part certainly confers an authority and verification of sorts. But when it comes to social networks, part of the idea at least seems to be broadcasting and merging of identities. Back in the day / still barely in existence - keybase cross verified your identity on multiple platforms, and I suspect that in a federated world this function becomes more important and probably needs to exist even more than before.
    - blowski 4y ago
      That's part of the idea of adware social networks that want to track everything about you as an individual. It's not an intrinsic requirement of all social networks.
nirimda 4y ago
I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. I understand it can be particular bad for women and minority journalists, because some people will make sexualised or sexists and racist comments in response to an article the truth of which they cannot contest, but the existence of which they abhor - in order to discourage such journalists from writing on this topic. Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from positive participants, nor harassment from negative participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling effect on the next generation. I think the interest of journalism companies in having their own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world, perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust their moderation. Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email is.) A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.
- blowski 4y ago
  > I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools. > It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter. Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.
thinkingemote 4y ago
The federation aspect is the most interesting to me and has the most potential but it also the least important to most users. So much so because moderation issues, computing power and maintenance and simple powerful network effects all point to centralisation. That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a federation of things. There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if there's some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see why federations are useful. Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations might actually show the difference in moderations in the fediverse.
- ignaloidas 4y ago
  Out of the things you listed, moderation is for sure one that gets harder to deal with the more centralized the network becomes. All large instances have comparatively bad moderation, and that's a fairly well known fact among the older users. For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over the years couldn't have done it without decentralized moderation. And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event" - there have been several. There are several collections of instances that are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly, that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they should be able to close themselves off from them. The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an instance of about 100 active people in their free time is what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more people makes it a job, and from what I've read from professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a nice one.
- blowski 4y ago
  Sure, people have been choosing that approach for the last 10 years. But there's no law baked into the universe that says it will be ever thus.
telmo 4y ago
I love the idea of Mastodon and I would love for things like that to take us back to the less centralized and less corporate internet of before, but I am pessimistic that it will happen anytime soon. The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place to hang out now that I mention it :) I would also point out that, in my experience, internet communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream. Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users that want to fight for their political tribe with high hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good times are over.
- ignaloidas 4y ago
  Oh, these tribal migrations have happened before. Most people indeed leave, but some do actually find that they like it more each time such a wave happens. Fediverse is in the best sense of the word, weird. You have to embrace the weirdness to understand it. Not everyone can, or will. It would take a lot of time for that weirdness to be ironed out so that most people would be comfortable using it, but I don't think many in the community developing it are interested in that.
  - telmo 4y ago
    I agree. I like the weirdness, and I don't think it can survive mainstreaming. Mainstreaming always means blandness.
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    To be honest though, I’ve been in many weird enough places on Twitter that I can confidently say that Mastodon is really dull, quiet, and less diverse compared to there.
ekidd 4y ago
> If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The Mastodon software actually allows moving an account between instances fairly easily, though it requires cooperation from both the source and the dest instance. When you move an account, you keep all your followers and everyone you follow. But your old posts stay on your old server. I do agree that it probably makes sense for big organizations to have official instances, however.
asdff 4y ago
It's no different than email, though? If you sign off all your blog posts with your BBC email address, and you leave BBC and no longer have email access and can no longer log into your blog or wherever else you have grown dependent on that address for, then you are rightly an idiot for putting all these eggs in a basket you don't own. No one says we have to reengineer the email protocol, they just say to have an email address you control.

paulgb 4y ago

I agree that this is an eventuality, but is anyone actually doing it yet? Everyone I’ve known who has migrated has either been to community-run or self-hosted instances, and I haven’t encountered any corporate or university domains when lurking around.

blowski 4y ago
No, I haven't seen anyone doing it yet. I might just be voicing some wishful thoughts.
tpm 4y ago
One often mentioned example is the EU. https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more One swallow does not make the summer though, as we say in our country, so we'll se if there will be more. Edit: there is also on for the German Federal Government. https://social.bund.de/about https://social.bund.de/about
- xg15 4y ago
  > One often mentioned example is the EU. From one toot in the timeline: > Our Director and Head of Translation Department paid a visit to @EMSA_EU@twitter.com ...wait a minute, which instance is that? :) But seriously, it's amazing to see institutions and official account getting on the Fediverse!

amadeuspagel 4y ago

This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations. Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet. (Nor would any organization want to be associated with any fleeting thought that an employee has.) And what's fun about twitter is precisely that it's a neutral ground where everyone, from every organization, dukes it out. Of course, this model is possible in the fediverse as well, just as it's possible with email. (And note that many people prefer a gmail address to one that they'll lose when they get fired.)

blowski 4y ago
> This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about individuals, not organizations. Sweeping generalisation. Some people care about some individuals more than the organisation to which they belong. Think Trump funs who would vote for Trump whichever party he stood for, or Tucker Carlson fans who would watch him on any network, or Tom Brady fans who would follow him whichever team he played for. But for every Trump, Carlson or Brady, there's a 1000 Liz Trusses or Huw Edwards, in whom most interest is solely because of the organisation to which they belong. And there's no reason an individual can't have both an organisation account and a personal one. Even aggregate accounts which pull everything together. Mastodon offers a lot of opportunities to do things differently.
vvillena 4y ago
> Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet. Tweeter is the poster child of personal branding. A near totality of the high-visibility posts are transactional in nature. The posts are either crafted by PR people, meaning someone got literally paid to tweet, or are done personally with the aim of increasing personal branding or as part of a contract.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  That’s only mostly true for the high follower accounts. Which is why some folks, including me, keep their account at a purposefully low follower count by tweeting dry unengaging stuff as well. And avoiding all topics, such as political discussions, where there are incentives to virtue signal.

blitzar 4y ago

Half formed thought ... however. I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I am also on @mastodon.art. I should really only talk with my work hat on @work and my art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated universe? Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician, rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or server.

blowski 4y ago
Maybe both? With a meta account that aggregates from all your other accounts. If the BBC are giving you a megaphone, it's useful that they can take away that megaphone when you leave. You can always choose to speak without the megaphone.
- blitzar 4y ago
  The "email" version - your work email is for work and personal for personal. The @x part certainly confers an authority and verification of sorts. But when it comes to social networks, part of the idea at least seems to be broadcasting and merging of identities. Back in the day / still barely in existence - keybase cross verified your identity on multiple platforms, and I suspect that in a federated world this function becomes more important and probably needs to exist even more than before.
  - blowski 4y ago
    That's part of the idea of adware social networks that want to track everything about you as an individual. It's not an intrinsic requirement of all social networks.

nirimda 4y ago

I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees. I understand it can be particular bad for women and minority journalists, because some people will make sexualised or sexists and racist comments in response to an article the truth of which they cannot contest, but the existence of which they abhor - in order to discourage such journalists from writing on this topic. Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from positive participants, nor harassment from negative participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling effect on the next generation. I think the interest of journalism companies in having their own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world, perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust their moderation. Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email is.) A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.

blowski 4y ago
> I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their employees That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools. > It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter. Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.

thinkingemote 4y ago

The federation aspect is the most interesting to me and has the most potential but it also the least important to most users. So much so because moderation issues, computing power and maintenance and simple powerful network effects all point to centralisation. That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a federation of things. There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if there's some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see why federations are useful. Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations might actually show the difference in moderations in the fediverse.

ignaloidas 4y ago
Out of the things you listed, moderation is for sure one that gets harder to deal with the more centralized the network becomes. All large instances have comparatively bad moderation, and that's a fairly well known fact among the older users. For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over the years couldn't have done it without decentralized moderation. And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event" - there have been several. There are several collections of instances that are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly, that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they should be able to close themselves off from them. The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an instance of about 100 active people in their free time is what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more people makes it a job, and from what I've read from professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a nice one.
blowski 4y ago
Sure, people have been choosing that approach for the last 10 years. But there's no law baked into the universe that says it will be ever thus.

telmo 4y ago

I love the idea of Mastodon and I would love for things like that to take us back to the less centralized and less corporate internet of before, but I am pessimistic that it will happen anytime soon. The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place to hang out now that I mention it :) I would also point out that, in my experience, internet communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream. Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users that want to fight for their political tribe with high hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good times are over.

ignaloidas 4y ago
Oh, these tribal migrations have happened before. Most people indeed leave, but some do actually find that they like it more each time such a wave happens. Fediverse is in the best sense of the word, weird. You have to embrace the weirdness to understand it. Not everyone can, or will. It would take a lot of time for that weirdness to be ironed out so that most people would be comfortable using it, but I don't think many in the community developing it are interested in that.
- telmo 4y ago
  I agree. I like the weirdness, and I don't think it can survive mainstreaming. Mainstreaming always means blandness.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  To be honest though, I’ve been in many weird enough places on Twitter that I can confidently say that Mastodon is really dull, quiet, and less diverse compared to there.

ekidd 4y ago

> If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The Mastodon software actually allows moving an account between instances fairly easily, though it requires cooperation from both the source and the dest instance. When you move an account, you keep all your followers and everyone you follow. But your old posts stay on your old server. I do agree that it probably makes sense for big organizations to have official instances, however.

asdff 4y ago

It's no different than email, though? If you sign off all your blog posts with your BBC email address, and you leave BBC and no longer have email access and can no longer log into your blog or wherever else you have grown dependent on that address for, then you are rightly an idiot for putting all these eggs in a basket you don't own. No one says we have to reengineer the email protocol, they just say to have an email address you control.