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I've been having some thoughts about Mastodon lately. Well actually I've been having these thoughts for a while.
I've been using Mastodon for a good few years now and I do think the fediverse is a positive step in the right directon to what I think social media aught to be.
However there is one thing about Mastodon in particular (though this may very well apply to other fediverse instance softwares) that gives me pause.
Mastodon is still modeled on Twitter.
Twitter, like all the corporate run social media sites was designed to maximise engagement.
Mastodon doesn't prioritise engagement the way Twitter does which does allow for quality of life features Twitter would never implement (such as CWs), but by still following the Twitter blueprint Mastodon is still going to be susceptible to at least some of the same dopamine-fueled habit forming effects on those of us who use it, however unintentional.
Mastodon still has the likes, the boosts (retweets) that exploit people to keep them addicted to social media.
Now I'm not trying to say that Mastodon is just as bad as Twitter/Facebook .ect, like I said Mastodon is a positive step in the right direction for social media, I think Twitter exists for profit while Mastodon and the fediverse exists for the public good.
But Mastodon is a Twitter clone at the end of the day and like Twitter I'm willing to bet people still habitually scroll through their Mastodon timeline on their phone every morning and still seek out popularity to get more likes, boosts and followers on the platform.
It's understandable why Mastodon is designed to work like Twitter, because that's what people want.
But I can't help but think that the reason people want that is because Twitter has conditioned them to want that.
It seems to me that Mastodon is to Twitter what vaping is to smoking, it's better for you but it's still not great for you.
People vape to quit smoking, but ultimately you kinda want to stop that habit all together and get to the point of not needing to puff on anything if you can.
Now I don't think it's entirely analogous I'm making here isn't to say we should just entirely dump the whole idea of social media and give it up entirely.
I don't think the concept of social media is entirely bad, but I've deliberately described Mastodon as a *step* in the right direction, not the ultimate goal.
You may remember early social media sites like Myspace or Bebo (which was pretty widely used in the UK), they did not have "the feed", or the upvotes/likes/boosts that are so standard for social media sites today. To express approval for a post you had to actually express it in a response rather than pressing a like button, to check what your friends have posted you had to consciously check their profiles, rather than habitually and unconsciously scroll your timeline.
Being FOSS, decentralized and federated, having CWs and banning nazis is all well and good but perhaps we need to fundamentally re-think how social media sites work, rather than just taking the exploitatively designed corporate models and decentralizing them. I think we need to confront and address the bad habits that the capitalist social medias have cultivated in us.
All this being said I still think the fediverse is great and I think Mastodon is far preferable to the likes of Twitter, I think decentralization and federation is the way to go and in my experience the community is far better on the fediverse.
In terms of alternatives the fediverse platforms like Mastodon or Peertube are much preferable to the conspiracy and Nazism addled dumping grounds of those who've been banned from Youtube and Twitter that are the likes of Bitchute or Gab.
Those platforms don't take any efforts the re-think or challenge the big-tech platforms besides being a safe haven for bad people.