The Big Question of our time – what will replace Twitter, is on a lot of our minds.
A number of new social media sites have appeared in the last 6 months. Post.news, Hive, Tribel, Spoutible…the list will no doubt get longer. These sites all adhere to the Twitter model of Everything In One Site. Whether they will reach critical mass, and whether they can scale to have a good user experience, I have no idea, and I don’t think many people know either.
One thing I am sure of is that it is unlikely that any One Site social media platform can reach critical mass without significant financial investment (as in, hundreds of millions of dollars). That implies that the site will have to generate a profit. For a site to generate a profit while not charging users, as we have seen elsewhere, the users become the product. Their personal data and usage data is sold without their knowledge for whatever use buyers find can be monetized, and they are bombarded with adverts. The problem is that right now, even selling data and bombarding users with ads did not make Twitter consistently profitable. Twitter was losing money when Elon Musk bought it. It is probably losing even more money now, because…well, Elon Musk seems to be about as good at running a social network as I am at ballet dancing.
The big question in my mind is therefore when and how any of these new “One Site” social media platform will start charging for use, and what will happen to their user base after that point. It is quite hard to start off free and then try to charge people. Emotionally, users feel like the site welched on a deal. The Twitter $11 a month charge for a Blue Check is going to result in only businesses (of highly variable quality) acquiring a Blue Check. Regular users will mostly ignore the offer.
While people run hither and thither looking for The New Twitter, the federated social media network based on Mastodon continues to hum away in the background.
Ah yes. That Mastodon. The one with the emblem of the extinct pachyderm. Not the rock band.
Mention of the word “Mastodon” invokes a wide variety of responses, many of them negative. Part of this is due to lack of understanding of some of its underlying principles, and part of it is due to the lack of work and low priority that has historically gone into its user experience.
Mastodon was designed and implemented by geeks. Geeks tend to not worry too much about a snappy user experience. They focus on bigger and more important stuff. Like purity to the original concept. (That has already had practical consequences, some of them bad).
The Mastodon user experience is actually quite good…if you are slightly geeky. I am slightly geeky, which makes my family think I am an UberGeek – I am only geeky relative to them. A real UberGeek would grind me to dust.
Mastodon is based on the concept of federation. There is no one single Mastodon site. Instead there are hundreds of Mastodon sites worldwide. Some sites are general-purpose, some are country-specific, some are interest group specific. There is no “one size fits all” Mastodon site. If (for example) you want to start a Mastodon site for lovers of Geraniums, all you have to do is to create a site, register it with the Mastodon federation, and start hosting it somewhere. As long as the site meets fundamental Mastodon criteria such as software versions and security, geraniumlovers.site can be up and running in a matter of weeks or less.
Assuming that geraniumlovers.site is part of the Mastodon federation, you can then federate it to as many other sites as you want. In practice, this means that postings from those other sites become visible to your site, and your site postings become visible to those other sites. The site users also become visible across the federated site collection.
Your geraniumlovers.site moderation policies probably will forbid people from coming in and talking about irrelevant or distracting topics like music or porn (I am guessing). The other sites will probably have different moderation policies. Some sites may have no moderation at all. Moderation is entirely within the control of the individual site owners.
This distributed model is highly resilient. If a single site goes down, the rest of the network continues unaffected. It is not scalable within an individual site without a good deal of infrastructure investment, but proponents of federation would argue that was not the intention of the model. If you want to expand your site, create another one, federate it with the first site, and everybody will be happy.
As you can tell, this does complicate the user experience a wee bit. You sometimes will be interacting with users on your “home site” (where you are registered) and sometimes interacting with users on another Mastodon site that is federated to your site. Mastodon tells you where the users are located, but it can initially be confusing.
Federation is “loose” federation, that does not try to implement any form of Single Sign On based on a single set of security tokens. Every site is responsible for its own security, so you can have the same userid on multiple sites. I try to avoid that because it gets really confusing (and is one of the features that I suspect drives One Site social network users nuts).
Mastodon has three current problems that are deterring people from using it.
- Lack of default sign-up processes that result in an instant positive experience
- An olde-worlde look to the UI on the desktop
- A lack of understanding about federation and how it works in practice
These are all fixable, but the federated model, which gives individual sites a lot of freedom, also militates against the entire Mastodon community collaborating to fix these issues, since they are subjective and do not (for example) affect operations of sites.
An attempt was made to address (1) by creating a script based on questions and answers to try to help a new user to determine what the best server would be for them to create a userid. Unfortunately there is ample evidence that the script is not working properly, so it often dispenses bad advice. In an ideal world, the script would correctly ID the best server for you, and would then create an ID for you on that server and then hand you over to that server to login.
(2) is the single biggest reason why people declare that Mastodon sucks. Mastodon was built on a pull paradigm, not a push paradigm which is used by most mass market social networks. The mass market networks analyze your activity and push adverts, postings and trends to you based on what they determine you will like, often using imagery and emojis to engage your visual senses (music too!). Some of the algorithms are really quite good, but they all carry the risk that this will reinforce your current information flow biases.
The result is that many of the UI “anchors” that people are used to, like Trending, adverts and other “push” features, are absent from Mastodon, leaving a rather plain and unexciting user interface that just is not…well, sexy, and which moves slowly due to the lack of push features, which tend to operate on once every minute or so to keep you engaged.
Fortunately, the UI sexiness issue is being addressed. The Mastodon client for Android and iOS is quite good, and the new Elk desktop client is really good (note – this is still in Beta). It has a threading capability that is actually better than Twitter.
Prospective users of Mastodon should be looking to use newer clients on desktop and phone to get a much snappier and more colorful user experience. Damon the Geek can still use the out of the box UI with 8 columns on his ultra-wide screen monitors, but the rest of us can use a much better UI that more closely resembles the modern social networks.
(3) – well, I just explained federation didn’t I? Seriously, some widely published snappy documentation on federation (what it is, why it is a Good Thing, and how it works), not written in GeekSpeak, would be highly useful. I have to go look to see if such a document already exists.
Additionally, I would add The Big Strategic Problem: Failure to understand that a mass Mastodon movement will require commercial investment and will result in fundamental changes in the entire model. Mastodon was designed for sites with up to 100,000 users. Above that size, hosting a site starts to require dedicated infrastructure which costs money, and given the free ethos, sites can only resort to asking for donations. That only gets you so far in the commercial world. One of the biggest original Mastodon sites, mastodon.social, has been closed to new users for some time, since the site is at capacity.
I believe that the Mastodon federation needs to address that issue. However, in practice, the Mastodon federation government body is actually a German corporation (it has to be, for liability and tax reasons) and there is nothing to stop any other corporation from buying it. Whether that will happen is an open question, but I would not rule it out, especially if a federated model comes to be seen as preferable to trying to create the World’s Biggest Single Social Media Site. The Fediverse enabling technology is open source, like most of Mastodon, so theoretically anybody can create a federated social network using it.