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Mastodon is one of a fleet of new tools for so-called decentralized social
networking—and, thus far, it is the most talked-about alternative to
Twitter.Photograph from NurPhoto / Getty

Infinite Scroll


WHAT FLEEING TWITTER USERS WILL—AND WON’T—FIND ON MASTODON

The burgeoning social network is “designed to be against virality,” as one user
put it. Can it be the future of social media?

By Kyle Chayka

November 22, 2022
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Under Elon Musk’s chaotic first month of ownership, Twitter has seen twin
exoduses. Last Wednesday, having already slashed nearly half of his staff, Musk
abruptly e-mailed remaining employees an ultimatum: either stay at the company
and commit to being “hardcore,” or leave with three months’ severance. More than
a thousand reportedly chose the latter option. According to some estimates, as
much as ninety per cent of Twitter’s staff is now gone. At the same time, the
platform has seen a flight of users who have watched with alarm as Musk has
overhauled the company’s verification systems, decimated its content-moderation
teams, tweeted conspiracy theories, and alienated employees and advertisers
alike. By the end of last week, the mood on the platform was half funeral, half
bacchanal, as departing staff tweeted out farewells and others wondered
gleefully whether the site would still be there by morning. It didn’t help when
Musk announced, over the weekend, that Donald Trump would be allowed to
reinstate his banned account. Even if Twitter staggers on, many of us have been
wondering, Where can we go instead?

Thus far, the most talked-about alternative is not a competing Silicon Valley
startup but a lesser-known piece of open-source software called Mastodon.
Mastodon is one of a fleet of new tools for so-called decentralized social
networking, or what is sometimes dubbed the fediverse. This includes various
open-source programs trying to position themselves as substitutes for the major
platforms—Pixelfed for Instagram, PeerTube for YouTube—by letting individual
users run a “federation” of autonomous mini social networks, all of them linked
but each with its own set of ground rules and policies. Until now, these sites
have been niche undertakings, attracting a small set of early adopters. But the
tumult at Twitter has caused Mastodon to see a sudden surge of mainstream
interest. Eugen Rochko, its twenty-nine-year-old creator, told me that in the
past month Mastodon has grown from three hundred thousand monthly active users
to nearly two million. On a recent video chat, he looked haggard and solemn,
like a medical resident on overnight rotation. To keep up with Mastodon’s
influx, he’s been working fourteen-hour days—hard-core by most standards.


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Rochko was born in Russia in 1993, but moved to Germany when he was eleven years
old and eventually studied computer science at the University of Jena. He was a
fan of Twitter in its early years, when it had a thriving third-party-developer
ecosystem, with outsiders able to build on the platform or offer alternative
interfaces. But, as Twitter gradually limited developers’ access to its A.P.I.
and other tools, beginning around 2012, Rochko saw an opportunity to create
something better. He began work on Mastodon in 2016, while still in school, and
launched it the same year, later receiving grants from Samsung and the European
Commission. (It is named after an American heavy-metal band, which in turn is
named after an extinct elephant-like creature.) Mastodon’s interface looks much
like Twitter’s. The text-entry box is on the left rather than at the top of the
screen, and the graphic design is less slick, but the template feels
comfortingly familiar—a Twitter for people who want to get off Twitter.

Yet in other ways Mastodon is designed to cultivate an environment very unlike
Twitter’s. Posts have a five-hundred-character limit rather than Twitter’s two
hundred and eighty, so people often communicate in short paragraphs rather than
in pithy one-liners. Stats such as “favorites” and “boosts,” as Mastodon calls
likes and retweets, are largely hidden in users’ timelines, making it harder to
tell what’s popular. There is no quote-tweet function, and little algorithmic
sorting of content. Mastodon itself runs two of the largest servers,
mastodon.social (two hundred and forty-six thousand active members) and
mastodon.online (eighty-seven thousand active members), but there are thousands
of others that vary in size from hundreds of members to tens of thousands. Iain
Triffitt, a records officer at the University of Technology Sydney, who has been
on Mastodon since 2017, spends most of his time on tabletop.social, a server for
board-game players, and aus.social, for Australia-specific posts. Each server
has “a shared language that doesn’t have to be explained or interpreted,” he
said. Brian Lloyd, an editor at the Irish Web site entertainment.ie, belongs to
mastodon.ie, a server focussed on Ireland with sixteen thousand active members.
Its feed is something like a national digital billboard, offering appreciations
of the regional landscape, TikTok videos praising a butter-and-crisps sandwich,
and historical political cartoons. Compared with Twitter, “you don’t feel the
same level of hostility there,” Lloyd told me, and there’s no “swathe of
American bullshit to cut through.”

Video From The New Yorker

Surfing on Kelly Slater’s Machine-Made Wave



Christopher Fenwick, a British writer and translator who is pursuing his Ph.D.
at the Free University of Berlin, joined the mastodon.online server on November
3rd, a week after the Twitter takeover. “I have an intense, personal dislike of
Elon Musk,” he told me. He’d been part of a literary community of
fellow-academics and critics on Twitter, and he had trouble finding an
equivalent online social circle on Mastodon. So along with Hyo Yoon Kang, a
legal scholar, he created zirk.us, a server devoted to “the circus of arts and
humanities.” It has an elegantly serifed, magazine-esque logo. The name comes
from a URL that Fenwick was saving for an eventual literary journal. Zirkus now
has more than three thousand users, who post about teaching nineteenth-century
literature, reading the Quran in Arabic, watching Yasujiro Ozu films, and, of
course, the antics of their cats. I joined on November 15th and found an
atmosphere like that of an erudite coffee shop, where conversation is murmured
instead of shouted. Mastodon’s software is “better for this kind of small
community than Twitter—it’s generally a friendlier environment, encouraging,
less combative interaction,” Fenwick told me. Whereas Twitter’s current
freneticism can cause some people to clam up, Mastodon’s more intimate setting
encourages the kind of banal, personal diarizing that characterized Twitter’s
early days. Plus, as one user posted, “there is not a constant, fevered
discussion about the erratic but powerful weirdo who owns the place.”



Lacking the oversight of a single company, decentralized social media places the
onus of responsibility on individual hosts. Fenwick told me that “there’s no
need for technical knowledge at all” to create a space on Mastodon, but hosts
must at least run their own data servers or be willing to rent space on one. For
Zirkus, Fenwick used a paid service called masto.host, which handles all of the
upkeep for you—though it’s now closed to new accounts, owing to a spike in
traffic. Fenwick told me that Zirkus currently costs about two hundred and fifty
dollars a month, an expense that will increase as his user base grows. Hosts
often crowdfund to foot the costs; even Rochko’s work in building Mastodon is
funded by a Patreon that has now reached around thirty thousand dollars a month
in pledges. Hosts must also serve as their own safety officers, performing the
daily labor of content moderation. Fenwick said that he and Kang deal with
around ten posts a day that their users have flagged as problematic, most of
them posts from accounts on other servers that are harassing Zirkus users. They
have had to block five other Mastodon servers outright because they were
dominated by racism or hate speech. Just because Mastodon is decentralized
doesn’t mean it’s free of toxic behavior. But, unlike on Twitter, if you don’t
like the policies of whoever’s running your server you can always move your
account to a different one.

Users who want to have a lively, varied experience on Mastodon have to put in
effort, too. On Twitter, you log in to your account and are immediately thrust
into the melee of the “global town square,” for better or worse. On Mastodon,
you can start accounts on as many servers as you like but you have to log on to
each one in turn, as if each were its own separate social network. The server
your account is hosted on is embedded in your username (mine is
@chaykak@zirk.us) and becomes a kind of home base. Mastodon offers various feed
configurations, from a “local” one that shows only posts from accounts on your
server to a more bustling admixture of all the users you follow across any
server. There’s a tool called Debirdify that can tell you which Twitter users
you follow are already on Mastodon. But Mastodon’s built-in friction and
fragmentation make it harder to communicate with many people at once. You can
peer into servers you don’t belong to, like a curious tourist, but you won’t be
able to post to their feeds.

Journalists have always been one of Twitter’s most addicted user bases. We rely
on the platform to share and follow breaking news in real time and engage in
breakneck conversation with industry colleagues. Can Mastodon, with its more
deliberate pace and siloed structure, fulfill a similar function? On November
4th, the journalist Adam Davidson (a former staff writer for The New Yorker)
created journa.host, a Mastodon server for journalists whose identities are
verified before they join. It quickly received funding from CUNY’s graduate
school of journalism and attracted a group of volunteer administrators,
including Zach Everson, a staff writer at Forbes, who told me that he sees it as
an opportunity to let journalists “tailor the rules to what’s best for our
profession, rather than having to follow the whims of a corporation.” Whereas
Twitter is open to anyone, on journa.host the admins determine who should be
allowed to join. Last week, the freelance writer Jeff Maysh, among others, took
to Twitter to complain that the server had rejected him for being unqualified,
and its administrators have already become embroiled in messy questions of
content moderation. I was able to create a journa.host account with my work
e-mail address; so far I’ve mostly found members posting photos of food,
promoting their own stories, and expressing confusion about the software itself.
It may be quieter and safer, but it lacks the sense of urgency that comes from
reporters communicating to wider audiences. A “clubhouse,” as one of the
server’s other admins called it, is a far cry from a public square.

Over the past decade, we’ve been conditioned to think of life on social media as
a relentless pursuit of attention from as many people as possible. The goal is
to yell into the void, loud enough to perhaps reach a crowd of strangers.
Fenwick, of Zirkus, described Mastodon as “designed to be against virality,”
which for many users is exactly its appeal. Rochko told me, “I think we’re
entering a different paradigm of social media.” Part of what makes Twitter
fascinating is the frenetic pace, the crosstalk, the unpredictability. We don’t
yet know what an Internet with less virality would look like, or whether it
would be as compelling as what came before. But it is heartening, after watching
Musk’s erratic Twitter despotism, to imagine community-driven spaces that are
only as good as the hosts who moderate them and the people they attract. Perhaps
we are undergoing a collective period of relearning what we need and want from
our digital lives. Rochko told me, “Some tolerance for slowness is advised.” ♦






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Kyle Chayka is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author of “The
Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism.”

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