Mastodon — Piper Haywood

So Mastodon’s getting a lot of love! If Musk’s Twitter purchase is what ends up making Mastodon a mainstream thing, then hey, silver linings I guess?

I’ve been on since 2019 as @piper@vis.social but other than a brief flurry of activity, I haven’t used it loads. The main problem was the classic “it’s not where my closest friends are”. The other issue is that I would normally enjoy browsing this sort of thing on my phone, and I didn’t love any of the apps available for iOS. That may have changed, I need to investigate.

But part of it was also that the majority of the conversation on the vis.social server wasn’t quite what I would normally engage with. At the time it was definitely the closest to my preferred content out of all of the instances I could find. But a lot of it is slightly too niche for me or over my head a bit.

At any rate, I’m going to stick with vis.social for the time being since they seem like a lovely bunch. I’m also going to start contributing financially; these things cost money because they’re not financially supported by selling our data! But I’m definitely interested in starting my own instance at some point.

For when that eventually comes around, see Simon Willison’s 5 Nov post about Mastodon, and Darius Kazemi’s unbelievably thorough runyourown.social.

It’ll be interesting to see how significant this move to Mastodon is ultimately… SB and I were talking about it and he made the very good point that it really needs to turn in to something like email at some point, something that people see as so basic that companies like Apple and Microsoft start offering Mastodon clients baked in to their operating systems by default. I think that’s probably right, or at least it would be the clearest indication that it’s here to stay.

Besides that, the vocabulary… It can be hard for people to wrap their heads around “federation”, “instances”, etc. Part of me was thinking, do people really even need to understand that? I mean an unbelievable number of people use email, but they don’t usually need to understand the difference between POP and IMAP and that sort of thing. I guess that comes down to solid email clients and providers smoothing over that abstraction though (return to point above about native Mastodon clients). We need better apps and better metaphors.

In a recent Guardian opinion piece, George Monbiot calls for “political rewilding” to fight against demagoguery.

At the moment, the political model for almost all parties is to drive change from the top down. […] I believe the best antidote to demagoguery is the opposite process: radical trust. To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities to identify their own needs and make their own decisions.

Makes a ton of sense at first glance. But isn’t “political rewilding” just the best of libertarianism repackaged, the freedom of choice and voluntary association? I can understand why he didn’t use that word. The worst of libertarianism — civil liberties at all costs, at the expense of others, the earth, and more — has usurped the rest of it ideologically. “Libertarian” is to the left as “socialist” is to the right.

Related, but separate: in his article, Monbiot draws attention to Finland’s impressive (and seemingly successful) efforts to teach their populace how to spot fake news. In the CNN article he links to, the former secretary-general of the European Schools Kari Kivinen cautions that “it is a balancing act trying to make sure scepticism doesn’t give way to cynicism”.

That line hit home. Reading the news, parsing Twitter, fielding well-intended but misguided email forwards from loved ones. I’ve been living in the barrel for a while now, and it’s exhausting.

On the upside, I’ve joined Mastodon on the vis.social server. My handle is @piper@vis.social, and I’ve downloaded Toot! for iPhone since I like their stance against servers that spread hatred. I’m excited to give a smaller community a whirl, hopefully it will expose me to a more human and humane part of the social web.