Mastodon will have to change if it were to replace Twitter
Regardless, social media needs to be regulated.
Three weeks ago, when thousands of Twitter users set up Mastodon accounts, mastodon.social, the instance1 of Eugen Rochco, the founder and benevolent dictator of Mastodon, slowed to a crawl. mastodon.social also happens to be the largest single instance of Mastodon in terms of user numbers.
Conceived by Eugen, Mastodon holds some of the promise of the early web. It is part of the "fediverse", which is a network of federated (i.e. seperate but connected) instances that provide web publishing functionality and file hosting, but that also communicate with each other — while being independently hosted. So Mastodon is to a large extent2, like the early web, distributed, not centralised.
Fediverse services can be distributed because of protocols designed for this purpose, like ActivityPub, the W3C protocol on which Mastodon runs these days.3 Both ActivityPub and Mastodon are also designed so that thousands of users can be hosted on a single install of the Mastodon software. Hence the size of the mastodon.social instance.
The political economy of Mastodon
In the past, the cost and institutions required to publish and distribute media, was of massive political and social consequence. The arrival of the web, dropped the cost of publishing substantially. Still come the year 2000, only 7% of the global population had internet access, and only a fraction of these had published anything in public online.
Still come the year 2000, only 7% of the global population had internet access, and only a fraction of these had published anything in public online.
Then, then suddenly, the affordances of so-called Web 2.0 made it free and easy to publish from a user perspective. Pubishing on the Internet moved from being the preserve of a tech aristocracy to near everyone.
But for the platforms that make this publishing possible the costs are not insubstantial. Hosting thousands of users requires considerable computing resources, engineering and administrator time and therefore — money. In the last few days, as more users signed up to Mastodon and servers slowed, the issues once again came to the fore.
How much does it cost to host a Mastodon instance? That really depends on who you host it with if you don't have the wherewithal to do it yourself. You also need to know how fast you want your server to be and how many users you want to use your instance.
According to masto.host, a dedicated Mastodon host, hosting currently cost between $6 per month for an estimated 5 active users and $20 per month (plus tax) for an estimate of 100.
That's also not the whole story. The cost also depends on what kind of users you host. On social media, some users are more equal than others. Two weeks ago, British broadcaster and celebrity, Stephen Fry joined Mastodon. This prompted developer Aral Balkan to blog about hosting costs when a user is very active and has a large following. Aral then had 23,000.
That's not the whole story. It also depends on what kind of users you host. On social media, some users are more equal than others.
Aral hosts what amounts to a single user instance at masto.host. He shares his instance with no one. What prompted him to write about this topic was that it was his birthday, and as a result, he was very active on Mastodon. He posted an image of himself and received 230 replies from well-wishers. All of them were answered by Aral.
Hugo Gameiro, who runs masto.host, explained to him his instance’s performance:
You just get a lot of engagement and that requires a ton of Sidekiq power to process.
For example, let’s look at your birthday post … besides requiring thousands of Sidekiq jobs to spread your post through all their servers (you have 23k followers, let’s assume 3k different servers), as soon as you create the post 3k Sidekiq jobs are created. At your current plan you have 12 Sidekiq threads, so to process 3k jobs it will take a while because it can only deal with 12 at a time.
Then, for each reply you receive to that post, 3K jobs are created, so your followers can see that reply without leaving their server or looking at your profile. Then you reply to the reply you got, another 3K jobs are created and so on.
If you replied to the 100 replies you got on that post in 10 minutes (and assuming my 3K servers math is right). You created 300K jobs in Sidekiq. That’s why you get those queues.
Reading this, particularly the part in bold, implies that having users on the same server, most probably has efficiency advantages. But multi-user instances have also been struggling, partly no doubt because as they grow in users, the amount of ties to users on other services must grow exponentially.
As for his costs, Aral says:
Prior to the latest Twitter migration, I was paying around €280/year (or a little over €20/month) for my Mastodon instance on a custom plan I had with Hugo from the early days. This week, I upped that to a roughly €50/month plan. And that’s still not enough as my birthday post just showed so Hugo, kindly, has suggested he might have to come up with a custom plan for me.
Single user Mastodon and paying your own way
Aral points out that Stephen Fry, who joined the instance Mastodonapp.uk, and already has more followers than him, will bring substantial costs to that server and potentially do what amounts to a denial of service attack - overwhelm its capacity so its stops working if they don’t add resources.
He argues eloquently that Mastodon and ActivityPub should be redesigned so that all installations are single user ones. Then, everyone pays their own way. Aral believes that Mastodon could make single hosting cheaper, too, if it and ActivityPub were designed to encourage true decentralisation (i.e. single installs), it could be simpler, and "having more instances in the network wouldn't be a problem".
To him, ActivityPub and Mastodon are designed the same way Big Tech is: to encourage services to host as many "users" as possible. Says Aral:
"Today, we equate the size of mastodon.social (the instance run by Eugen) with how successful Mastodon (the software created by Eugen) is. This is very dangerous. The larger mastodon.social gets, the more it will become like Twitter."
On this I am in partial agreement with Aral. On Mastodon on the 31st of October, I wrote:
A social network (like Twitter) can not be run well, by using old-school email-like distributed technology (in email's case, the SMTP protocol).
It will be slow, updates, and messages will arrive asynchronously, and algorithms will necessarily be dumber.
In the end, everybody will gravitate to the best-run and governed Mastodon server. An economy of scale. But it will be expensive.
To finance it, it will require ads.
Where I differ from Aral, who regularly rails against "surveillance capitalism", a concern which I think is largely overemphasized by many4, is that a Mastodon instance becoming more Twitter-like, is neccesary — if we want something Twitter-like.
Why?
What’s the matter with Mastodon?
Firstly on cost: These (even $6 per month) are not insignificant costs, especially for Twitter users in a place like South Africa. Advertising in wealthy countries subsidise service and even internet access in developing countries. Because Facebook was earning enough through advertising, it could promote and pay for Facebook 0 (zero-rated access on mobile phone networks) in many developing countries. Unlike Facebook, in India Twitter caters only for the most wealthy layer of society, partly for this reason.
Techichal decisions have performance and affordance implications. Centralisation vs distributed is one such case. One reason the distributed Bitcoin protocol could never be widely used as a electronic medium of exchange is because it is too inefficient and slow. Gmail certainly would not be as good at recognising and catching spam if it was distributed. Shopify shops experience very few chargebacks and fraud, because the platform can monitor behaviour across thousands of shops on a global platform level and spot patterns of behavior. It is hard to imagine how something as powerful and useful as Google Search could be architectured in a distributive way.
Similarly, you simply can't use the power of machine learning, data and other algorithms to surface the kind of personalised and serendipitous content, nevermind quickly, as you could on Twitter — with a distributed design. The other features that would make Mastodon more Twitter like, like searching for a user by name, or toots that link to a URL, is best done in a centralised way.
Of course all these things that make Twitter so powerful, is also what can make it toxic - or a place where misunderstandings, harassment and disinformation are rife. But rather than enschew this kind of technology, we would be better served by regulating it.
Of course all these things that make Twitter so powerful, is also what can make it toxic - or a place where misunderstandings, harassment and disinformation are rife. Rather than enschew this kind of technology, we would be better served by regulating it.
Mastodon’s onboarding and discovery user experience (UX) is neccesarily poor because of its distributed nature. This will mean one of two things. It remains the domain for more technically literate users, or centralised services will be built on top of it to compliment it.
It remains to be seen how Mastodon will cope with spam and moderation once it grows in size. Early signs (here and here) are that relying on distributed intances with their own rules, volunteer moderators, and server admins with god complexes, will make for even worse and more arbitrary decisions than on Twitter.
The power of weak ties
Distributed Mastodon instances are often organised around a profession, a topic or an identity. And as several studies show, this homogenuity will probably make Mastodon less good at sparking new ideas and creativity for the average Mastodon user than Twitter. There is strength in so-called “weak ties.”
By highlighting all this, I don’t mean Mastodon is a failure, but that it is different. Mastodon is probably better at facilitating smaller scale and stronger communities (so-called strong ties) and probably will enable more in-depth exploration of a subject.
Because of the lack of algorithms selecting content on Mastodon, who you follow matters a lot more. As does your time zone and when you are online. You could still get a lot of novel information if the follows of your follows are very diverse and smart, but you will have to look harder or miss stuff that’s important to you. So Mastodon has its advantages and value over Twitter - like for institution building and mobilising groups to get things done.
Embrace and Extend
There is also a flaw in Aral's argument. As he says, email and its protocol SMTP were also designed for us to communicate in a distributed way with our contacts. Then Gmail came along, which now hosts millions of email accounts. Aral acknowledges the consequence of this:
Do you know what happens to your email if Google says (rightly or wrongly) that you’re spam? No one sees your email.
If, however, in a counterfactual world, each email user had to manage their own SMTP install on a server, Gmail's appeal would have been so much more potent when it came along. Do you have enough disk space for email? Do you manage your own spam list? Are hackers targetting your server to hijack your SMTP instance to send spam? Good luck with expecting the public to be concerned with all that. In this single-user counterfactual world Gmail would have dominated much faster and to a greater extent.
As long as Aral's single user instance is built to communicate with others via a shared protocol, it is possible that somebody builds a client, probably in the cloud, that is so superior in terms of UX, ease of use, not to mention — cost, that people will gravitate to it, and comes to dominate the system.
This strategy for dominance is’nt new, it’s called Embrace and Extend, and the most celebrated case was countered, not via a techical solution, but in a court of law. I’m taking about the anti-trust case against Microsoft, who embraced HTML, but added it’s own features to its browser and operating system in an attempt to make its software indispensable when using the web. Until the law put a stop to it.
If, however, in a counterfactual world, each email user had to manage their own SMTP install on a server, Gmail's appeal would have been so much more potent when it came along.
And just look at Web3 today. To keep things simpler, the Ethereum protocol is necessarily limited in the functionality it provides, especially to a user that interacts with the protocol using a client and not a server. So innovation needed to happen on top of the protocal to make it accessible to the general public. And these solutions are centralised services.
As Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike blogged earlier this year: Almost all Ethereum’s distributed apps use either the centralised Infura or Alchemy services in order to interact with the blockchain. That’s because those things that are truely distributed move at a glacial pace. But centralised services can rapidly iterate. It’s no contest. I agree with Moxie when he says:
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.
Markets, technology or opting out of politics
All kinds of issues can be solved through market solutions, according to the neoliberals. For libertarians, technology can often achieve the same ends, especially if without any government intervention. Left-wing anarchists meanwhile, want to opt out and use technology to roll their own, for "freedom". It leads them all to a similar place in one key respect. If tech and the markets solves all our problems, we would not have to do messy politics, and the institution building and compromises it often implies.
I’m not for opting out, or simply relying on the market. I’m for shaping the technology we want. In his wonderful essay, Do arfitacts have politics, Langdon Winer writes:
For that reason, the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of high ways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.
We do not have to accept that technology, the “tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts” are deterministically just the way it is. And the best long term way to shape our technologies for the best of society, is with “the institutions and practices of politics proper”.
Or as Yochai Benkler recently summarised:
technology develops as a function of institutional choices; that it is the subject of politics and the site of politics; and that it makes a difference.
It does not help that all the big social media companies are under the legal jurisdiction of the United States, a place where politics is so divisive, the political system is so sclerotic, and the constitution so simplistic and dated. But that Mastodon and many of its largest instances are based out of Germany means we should be able to rely on politics and law much more.
If Mastodon is going to replace Twitter, it will most likely have to become more Twitter-like. Regardless, what we need is properly regulated social media.
If Mastodon is going to replace Twitter, it will most likely have to become more Twitter-like. Regardless, what we need is properly regulated social media.
Principles for regulation of something like Twitter
What could sensible regulation of this Twitter-like site look like? Not everyone would agree on all of these, but off the top of my head, here are some principles that could guide regulators above and beyond existing laws on defamation and hate speech.
Users should be able to use pseudonyms and have multiple accounts, but from the platform’s perspective, all must be KYC’d (know-your-customer) like in banking;
User identities should only be revealed to law enforcement upon the issue of a warrant and only in democracies with the rule of law.
Bot accounts must be registered by a KYC’d human.
The larger your follower count, the greater an account’s responsibility for the content they create or share.
Sharing another user’s content makes an account as liable for damages or criminal prosecution, suspension or banning as writing it.
Users must be able to export all their content, including a list of their connections, in a non-propriety format which makes it readily available to be parsed by common digital tools.
Users should have the right to hide their content and their profile from public search.
Worth considering: In light of this research, and my speculating here, limiting the maximum amount of followers an account can have (say 10,000), or requiring social media users to get a “driver's license”5 and make a Hippocratic oath before they can have more than a certain amount of followers.
An instance is an install of the Mastodon software on a server. Typically you’d have one per server.
One way Mastodon is not distributed is its governance and production, which is gatekepted by Eugen.
Mastondon, launched in 2016, preceding ActivityPub, which was published in 2018. Mastodon first ran on the OStatus protocall.
Where they are tested on their knowledge of issues such as identifying misinformation, the impact of toxic content and how information spreads.