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Thoughs on Mastodon and Decentralisation --------------------------------------- Or "In Defence of Counter.Social" Recently psztrnk wrote an entry about Twitter Evancuation Day[1] (which I did not participate in, having never used Twitter in the first place), part of which was a criticism of the Mastodon instance Counter.Social. psztrnk claimed that Counter.Social was no better than or different from Twitter, and that those who had left the latter for the former had made a mistake. In this entry I intended to (respectfully!) disagree. I will also respond to some extent to Jandal's wonderings on Mastodon[2]. So, let's start with some background for the unfamiliar. Counter.Social is a Mastodon instance based on the philosophy that what's really wrong with social media is that people from "evil countries" (like China, Russia and Iran) are exerting undue influence over public discussion (I'm not sure if these are supposed to be "ordinary people" from those countries or people working in some kind of official capacity, as some kind "intellectual agent provocateurs", PSYOPS or whatever). They are proud to be the only social media service taking active counter measures against this, which I take to mean that they do not allow registrations from IP addresses which geolocate to one of the evil countries, and do not exchange messages with other Mastodon servers in those countries. Psztrnk describes this as "basically destroy[ing] the most important idea behind Mastodon by breaking the federation", describes the administrators as "autocratic" and bemoans the principle of "my money -- my server -- my rules", behind which that administrator stands in defence of their geoblocking. Now, let's get some things out of the way. Do I think influence from non-Western nations is the biggest problem with modern social media, or even amongst the 10 biggest problems? No, I very much doubt it. I don't doubt that some of those country's governments probably *do* engage in PSYOPS on Twitter etc. This is probably quite likely, and I think it's just as likely that major Western governments do the exact same thing in response. I DO doubt that blocking certain countries based on IP address geolocation is an effective countermeasure against this. Let's be serious, anybody who has used the internet for more than a year knows that IP geolocation is broken and stupid. It is very easy, very cheap and perfectly legal to circumvent it by routing your traffic through an intermediary. I do this every day, and you can get your bottom dollar that official propaganda agents from Russia and China do it to. So, I think Counter.Social are implementing naive and ineffective countermeasures against a very small problem, and that's silly. Folks who don't realise this and think they are doing something that matters probably aren't very knowledgable and probably have lots of silly political ideas about the inherent superiority of the Western world and its "rightful ownership" of the online world. I suspect plenty of the folk there aren't folk I'd like to hang outwith regularly. So, Co.So is not my cup of tea. But I also do not think they are engaging in any great evil, nor are they actually remotely unusual in Mastodon space. Anybody who has paid close attention to the sudden and rapid integration of Mastodon into the Fediverse knows that the idea that there is one integrated and harmonious Fediverse where every server federates with every other one is not even close to correct. Heck, Mastodon itself, by introducing non-standard and poorly-documented extension to the de facto standard OStatus protocol, caused a lot of problems with federation between Mastodon and non-Mastodon servers. Holding Mastodon up as being all about universal federation is a little bit of a joke. This is especially true because the *flagship Mastodon instance*, mastodon.social, is well-known in the Fediverse for its very extensive block-list. Many of the earliest and largest Mastodon instances have nearly perfectly insulated themselves from "the old Fediverse", i.e. any nodes running GNUSocial, PostActive, Pleroma or other platforms. This is usually because of the unwilligness or technical inability (see below) of these servers to enforce conduct standards which the admins of those Mastodon standards consider necessary. Jandal asks, as a non-Mastodon user having a hard time getting a feel for Mastodon from the outside (I strongly decry the fact that Mastodon instances hide their local timelines from non-users, this is ridiculous and makes it very difficult for people to "shop around" for a commmunity which suits them, even though this is supposed to be the point), whether or not the ideology of federation and decentralisation is well understood and embraced on Mastodon. He observes accurately that many people are piling onto a very small number of "super instances", which is not very decentralisy. My observations are that the ideology of decentralisation is very little understood by many Mastodon users. Anybody who has paid close attention can tell you that for most of the users responsible for Mastodon's meteoric rise, the "killer feature" is not, at all, decentralisation or federation. It is the fact that Mastodon admins can impose stricter social norms of conduct than are enforced by Twitter and thereby do more to create "safe spaces" from trolls, bigots, "nazis", etc. Some instance admins will block your instance not only if you don't have terms of service up to their standard, but also if you do not yourself block other instances who don't meet those standard! Another "killer feature" is Mastodon's built in "content warning" functionality, as well as the widely accepted norm (enforced by admins) that these should be used very widely indeed. Now, most Fediverse servers have a long-standing policy that if you post e.g. sexually explicit or graphically violent content you should tag it as #nsfw, and most software recognises this tag and hides/blurs that post until you click a button afirming that you really want to see it. Mastodon has extended this idea to a kind of "eggshell society" where it is the moral obligation of every party to carefully consider whether anything they say could, conceivably, be upsetting for some minority segment of the online community and, if so, tag it with an appropriate content warning. Anything to do with politics, with health issues, with body image issues, with gender/sexual identity issues, with drug or alcohol use, should, in this school of thought, be flagged as such. For many people, this is an ideal view of the world, and Mastodon is the only software that caters to this idea (many Mastodon servers block non-Mastodon OStatus servers, e.g. GNUSocial servers, simply because their users do not use content warnings, regardless of the fact that they literally *cannot* use CWs because these are a non-standard OStatus extension invented by Mastodon and not yet supported by most other servers). I belive many of these people would *happily* join some kind of social media platform which was centralised and non-federating so long as it had these and similar features and anybody who did not use them correctly was warned and eventually blocked for failure to do so. As an indication of how little understood the nature of Mastodon is, I have literally seen somebody ask, in all apparent seriousness, "should corporations even be allowed on Mastodon?". I am baffled by this. It's not that I love corporations and want to see advertising on my timeline - I don't. It's that I don't understand what it would even mean for them to be "allowed" or not on Mastodon. This is as sensible as asking if corporations should be "allowed on email", or "allowed on the web". It's decentralised, people! It's literally impossible to stop corporations joining the network, and *that's the point*! I don't think this is widely understood or appreciated. I think a lot of non-technical but ideologically inclined people who have grown up on social media, used to having their activities controlled by Silicon Valley megacorps, see Mastodon as some kind magical new world where they are free to make up the rules that they want, and have the power to ban those who do not follow them, a freedom that they do not have at Twitter. And Mastodon does give them that freedom, and that's great! But it gives that *same* freedom to the folk who run Counter.Social (and it even gives that freedom to Nazis). All this is to say, Mastodon is *all about* "my server, my rules"! This core principle of electronic self-ownership is *vitally important* and should not be decried but embraced and defended at all costs! The same power that lets Co.So block people based on IP address lets others create, say, LGBT-only Mastodon instances. It goes without saying that not everybody who wields this power will do so in the same way. That's okay. One size does not fit all. I do not think we should make a virtue of every Mastodon instance federating with every other Mastodon instance unconditionally (which is already not what we have). This will only leave all communities unahppy. I do not think it is accurate to call Co.So's policies autocratic. They are very upfront and clear about their policies. Their users know what they are signing up for, and have probably actively sought it out. If anybody finds they were mistaken or changes their mind, they can leave Co.So for some other Mastodon instance, and unless their new instance is in an "evil country" they can probably still talk to many of the same people they spoke to from their Co.So account. Moving servers is a relatively low-cost affair, so a server's policies are not really thrust upon the user. I also do not think that people leaving Twitter for Co.So does not represent progress. The real problem with Twitter is that if you're on Twitter, you can't talk to people who aren't on it, and if you aren't on it, you can't talk to people who are. This leads to the well-known "network effect", whereby 90% of the planet ends up on the one service, Twitter, and the flow on effects of this are the real problems: