Mastodon's Eternal September

The latest round of Twitter nonsense (changing the way ‘blocking’ works) has caused another wave of people to abandon that site for pastures new. Nearly every one of them went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon. 1.2 Million people joined Bluesky in 48 hours. I wonder why that is? I bet there’s something about where people draw the line on Twitter’s behaviour and where they choose to go next. But I bet there’s something else to it too.

Personally, I jumped ship right after yr man bought Twitter. I headed off to Mastodon because it seemed like a plucky little underdog and it seemed to be filled with the nerdiest people. This is who I’ve always identified with. I figured if I was going to find a new tribe, this is probably where it would be. As I wrote in late 2022: “With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: ours.”. And by this, I meant “hardcore nerds making their own networks and systems and taking delight in this”, because that’s how I remember the 2000s. It was a fun place. I loved the fact that someone had already set up a mastodon.ie, and everything felt local again, like the heyday of irc.iol.ie.

After a while, most of the people that joined at the same time as me just stopped posting. There are lots of reasons for this. But mostly, I think it was the near-constant scolding. The incredibly tedious reply-guys¹. The lack of space for nuance. The unsaid but incredibly pervasive sense of “this is for us, this is not for you”.

Erin Kissane sums it up perfectly:

I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place. But the longer Mastodon stays in Linux-on-the-desktop mode, the more likely those people are to take their energy somewhere where it’s valued.

It’s over a year since Erin wrote that and I don’t think Mastodon has gotten much better. Disappointingly, I don’t think it’s going to get better. Quote-toots, for example, are useful tools for discovery and for boosting with context and promoting nuance. And they’re finally, slowly rolling out in Mastodon 4.3, the latest version as of this writing. But they’re opt-in. A lot of the hardcore Mastodon heads are staunchly against quote-toots because they can be used for abuse². This means that adoption of that feature is sloooow. Federation with Threads is another contentious issue. Some servers are very much “Fuck Facebook, let’s never federate”. Which is totally understandable! But also, Threads is where a lot of normies are - my friends that aren’t hardcore nerds and don’t want to deal with Mastodon’s technical or cultural bullshit have jumped on Threads because it’s the lowest-friction off-ramp from Twitter. Blocking federation with Threads means Mastodon can’t be someone’s only social network³.

Between its own systemic issues (discovery is a nightmare) as well as cultural ones (in my experience, nerds are naturally wary of outsiders and incredibly gatekeep-y), it’s impossible to get a foothold. If you’re not already part of one of the three or four already-established tribes on there⁴, good luck to you.

On the other hand, Bluesky

Bluesky is less grass-roots. It’s federated, but with corporate interests. But the lack of decentralisation means issues get resolved quicker. Which means the network is pivoting quicker. It’s already got better moderation tools than Mastodon. It’s already got a more vibrant set of communities than Mastodon. There’s less scolding than Mastodon.

The first wave of normies came and stayed, they weren’t scolded away. And that paved the way for the next wave. And the so on. Now there’s a rich tapestry of culture on Bluesky. As an example, take a look at the use of the “#lastfourwatched” hashtag, which people use to show the last four films logged in Letterboxd.

On Bluesky, in the last 24 hours, over 50 posts with this hashtag (50 is where I gave up counting). On Mastodon, used 9 times in the last 7 days.

I realise this is anecdata, and there are factors around this, like Mastodon’s search not being the best, so it might not be giving me the full picture. But it tells me roughly about the types of people on each network, what they’re interested in. And people on Mastodon just aren’t interested in films in that same way that I am. Which is totally fine! But, as someone currently looking for my tribe again, it feels like that’s just a lot easier on Bluesky.

But it also means that with everyone finding their own tribes, figuring things out and having fun, Bluesky currently feels like the best of Twitter in its heyday.

I really do want Mastodon to succeed. Right now, with the collapse of Twitter as we knew it (and Facebook, to some extent), we have a wonderful opportunity to remake the internet as a common social good and I think that Mastodon, as a technology, is the better foundation for this. But I worry that it’s gotten too late for it.

(And I just know there are people disagreeing with me right now. “Maybe I don’t want Mastodon to succeed in that way”. And I’d say to those people: please look at what happened to newsgroups after their eternal September and how their disdain for normies suffocated their own culture).