Move to Mastodon post #21
170
content/posts/moving-to-mastodon.md
Normal file
170
content/posts/moving-to-mastodon.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,170 @@
|
|||||||
|
---
|
||||||
|
title: Moving to Mastodon
|
||||||
|
tags:
|
||||||
|
- mastodon
|
||||||
|
excerpt: |
|
||||||
|
Much like a great number of other people, I have followed the trend towards Mastodon, and have found it to be quite a
|
||||||
|
wonderful experience.
|
||||||
|
published: 2022-11-13T15:38:33.000Z
|
||||||
|
cover: /content/moving-to-mastodon/cover.jpg
|
||||||
|
---
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
This week one of my favourite actors [Stephen Fry] posted a final message to his now closed Twitter account and moved
|
||||||
|
over to the [Mastodon] social network. I first learned about Fry's move when the news showed up on a [Reddit post] on
|
||||||
|
`r/entertainment` showing his last tweet: the message "Goodbye", written in scrabble tiles.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
![Stephen Fry says Goodbye](/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-scrabble.jpg)
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
It seems that Fry subsequently deleted his Twitter account, leaving behind some twelve million followers, of which I was
|
||||||
|
one. I remember that Fry was one of the early adopters of Twitter, and I've always enjoyed his content, even though his
|
||||||
|
tweets were at times few and far between.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
In the same Reddit thread I learned that he had already created an account on the [mastodonapp.uk] instance where, at
|
||||||
|
the time of writing, he has already amassed 51k followers.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<Bookmark
|
||||||
|
url="https://mastodonapp.uk/@stephenfry"
|
||||||
|
title="@stephenfry@mastodonapp.uk"
|
||||||
|
description="Stephen Fry on Mastodon"
|
||||||
|
author="Stephen Fry"
|
||||||
|
publisher="Mastodon"
|
||||||
|
thumbnail="/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-mastodon.jpg"
|
||||||
|
icon="https://cdn.simpleicons.org/mastodon/6364FF" />
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Not wanting to be left out of what appeared to be a growing trend, Fry's departure from Twitter provided the impetus for
|
||||||
|
me to give Mastodon a go. On Wednesday I decided to create my own Mastodon account, on the same [mastodonapp.uk]
|
||||||
|
instance.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
# First Impressions of Mastodon
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
The content that I'm seeing on Mastodon is, for now, really quite lovely. Seeing the updates from [Wild1145] (the site
|
||||||
|
owner of the mastodonapp.uk instance) has been fascinating. He has been routinely tooting updates, along with CloudFlare
|
||||||
|
stats showing the growth of traffic to the instance. I feel that these kind of interactions bring us much closer to the
|
||||||
|
administrators, and really builds on the feeling of community.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Wild1145 was also invited onto [Times Radio] the same morning that I signed up. Scrub to position 1:56:00 to hear the
|
||||||
|
interview. It was awesome to actually hear from him on the same day that I was creating my account.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Another fun discovery was the reporting every hour by [@mastodonusercount@bitcoinhackers.org], showing the increasing
|
||||||
|
number of Mastodon users. At the time of writing this, on a rather lazy Sunday morning, this bot is reporting that over
|
||||||
|
sixty thousand new users have been added in the past 24 hours.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
![Increasing Mastodon Accounts](/content/moving-to-mastodon/example-user-count.jpg)
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Getting a handle on how Mastodon works was quite easy: there are a lot of resources that explain how to use the Mastodon
|
||||||
|
web interface, and the generally accepted behaviour. Detailed information on how to use and operate Mastodon, including
|
||||||
|
hosting your own instances, can be found in the [Mastodon Documentation]. The [GuideToMastodon] repository has some
|
||||||
|
awesome information that I found useful.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
# Reaction by the Community
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Something that has made me consider how we should be behaving on Mastoodon has been the reactions from the existing
|
||||||
|
Mastodon users, prior to this influx of users from Twitter. To be honest, I cannot recall ever seeing any mention in the
|
||||||
|
media about how the existing Mastodon users have reacted.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Rummaging around on the Internet made me think that the reaction by the community seems to be a mix of trepidation,
|
||||||
|
excitement, and resentment. I've found some people who are quite vocal in their dismay at the behaviour of people
|
||||||
|
de-platforming from Twitter and onto Mastodon. I think we should be listening to these people quite a bit more.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
One of the people I found was Hugh Rundle. Hugh has made some interesting points in his post [Home Invasion], which I
|
||||||
|
think is an important read to anybody moving to Mastodon from Twitter. Hugh tells an important part of the story that
|
||||||
|
I'm not sure is being considered.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<Quote author="Hugh Rundle" url="https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/">
|
||||||
|
There's another, smaller group of people mourning a social media experience that was destroyed this week — the people
|
||||||
|
who were active on Mastodon and the broader fediverse prior to November 2022. The nightclub has a new brash owner, and
|
||||||
|
the dancefloor has emptied. People are pouring in to the quiet houseparty around the corner, cocktails still in hand,
|
||||||
|
demanding that the music be turned up, walking mud into the carpet, and yelling over the top of the quiet conversation.
|
||||||
|
</Quote>
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
I really hope that we can behave in a way that doesn't ruin the house party.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
# Verified Links in Account Profiles
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
A nice feature of Mastodon is that it provides a simple means of [verifying] that a link in someone's profile
|
||||||
|
corresponds to their Mastodon account (without paying $8). For example, on my Mastodon profile the link to this website
|
||||||
|
has a green check, as my website has a link back to my Mastodon profile.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
![Verified Website in Mastodon Profile](/content/moving-to-mastodon/verified-website.jpg)
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
This was achieved by adding a `rel="me"` to the anchor that links back to my Mastodon profile in the navigation header
|
||||||
|
at the top of this site:
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
```typescript
|
||||||
|
const MastodonLink: FC = () => {
|
||||||
|
return (
|
||||||
|
<a
|
||||||
|
href="https://mastodonapp.uk/@BlakeRain"
|
||||||
|
title="@BlakeRain@mastodonapp.uk"
|
||||||
|
target="_blank"
|
||||||
|
rel="me noreferrer"
|
||||||
|
>
|
||||||
|
<Mastodon />
|
||||||
|
</a>
|
||||||
|
);
|
||||||
|
};
|
||||||
|
```
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
This is a much simpler approach to verifying an account, and perhaps offers some small defence against imitators that
|
||||||
|
doesn't rely on any centralised verification. Of course, there's nothing stopping an imitator from validating their
|
||||||
|
account against their own website.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
# Final Thoughts
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
For people not familiar with such things, I think it's fairly important to understand that: a) Mastodon itself is an
|
||||||
|
open-source project rather than a closed-source product like Twitter, and b) Mastodon is a _decentralised_ social
|
||||||
|
network.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
As an open-source project, where the [source code] is available on GitHub, Mastodon is developed mostly by volunteers
|
||||||
|
rather than entirely by a large corporation. Depending on your point of view, this can be a blessing or a curse, or
|
||||||
|
perhaps a bit of both.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Being decentralised means that Mastodon has exchanged a set of risks associated with centralisation for a different set
|
||||||
|
of risks. Mastodon instances are mostly run by volunteers, and as such can face a variety of issues such as lack of
|
||||||
|
funding, varying degrees of moderation, and the potential to go offline with little to no notice.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Mastodon uses the [ActivityPub] protocol which, I was happy to discover, is a W3C recommended standard. Unfortunately it
|
||||||
|
seems that [Bluesky], another distributed social protocol that was founded by Twitter, will not be adopting ActivityPub,
|
||||||
|
preferring their own [AT Protocol].
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
According to the ActivityPub specification, servers running the protocol communicate to each other using a specific
|
||||||
|
server-to-server protocol, also called the "Federation Protocol". One advantage of this approach is that it allows
|
||||||
|
administrators to "defederate" other parts of the network.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
A simple example of this might be an administrator finding that they are receiving a large number of reports for toots
|
||||||
|
coming from another instance. It might be that this other instance lacks moderation, or employs a model of moderation
|
||||||
|
that is incompatible with those maintained by the administrator. In this case, the administrator can block the domain of
|
||||||
|
the offending instance, as such blocking content from that instance.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
One risk here might be that users find themselves isolated from the larger networks due to the behaviour of others on
|
||||||
|
their instance, or even the actions of their administrator(s). Of course, there is nothing stopping a user from moving
|
||||||
|
to another instance, but users might find this frustrating.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Some instances share their block list. For example, the [chaos.social] instance share their [block list] on GitHub.
|
||||||
|
Tools exist to facilitate this, such as the [mastodon-defederate] tool, which parses block lists from other servers or
|
||||||
|
from Markdown documents.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
It is not clear to me how one would discover when or if an instance has been blocked. Without any form of
|
||||||
|
centralisation, defederation becomes entirely at the mercy of instance administrators. A more coordinated defederation
|
||||||
|
mechanism, such as one that operates by consensus across a network, might go some way to ease the propagation of block
|
||||||
|
lists and increase transparency.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
[stephen fry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry
|
||||||
|
[mastodon]: https://joinmastodon.org
|
||||||
|
[reddit post]: https://www.reddit.com/r/entertainment/comments/yqfkne/stephen_fry_joins_celebrity_twitter_exodus_says/
|
||||||
|
[mastodonapp.uk]: https://mastodonapp.uk
|
||||||
|
[wild1145]: https://mastodonapp.uk/@wild1145
|
||||||
|
[times radio]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/radio/show/20221109-11630/2022-11-09
|
||||||
|
[@mastodonusercount@bitcoinhackers.org]: https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount
|
||||||
|
[achieved]: https://github.com/BlakeRain/blakerain.com/blob/aa9d84610fef9640d7da45af93f74a38139b35b0/components/Navigation.tsx#L81-L92k
|
||||||
|
[mastodon documentation]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org
|
||||||
|
[guidetomastodon]: https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon
|
||||||
|
[home invasion]: https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/
|
||||||
|
[source code]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
|
||||||
|
[activitypub]: https://activitypub.rocks
|
||||||
|
[bluesky]: https://blueskyweb.org
|
||||||
|
[at protocol]: https://atproto.com/docs
|
||||||
|
[block list]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chaossocial/about/master/blocked_instances.md
|
||||||
|
[chaos.social]: https://chaos.social/about
|
||||||
|
[mastodon-defederate]: https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate
|
||||||
|
[verifying]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/
|
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/cover.jpg
Normal file
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/cover.jpg
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
After Width: | Height: | Size: 11 KiB |
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/example-user-count.jpg
Normal file
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/example-user-count.jpg
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
After Width: | Height: | Size: 36 KiB |
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-mastodon.jpg
Normal file
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-mastodon.jpg
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
After Width: | Height: | Size: 38 KiB |
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-scrabble.jpg
Normal file
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/fry-scrabble.jpg
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
After Width: | Height: | Size: 50 KiB |
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/verified-website.jpg
Normal file
BIN
public/content/moving-to-mastodon/verified-website.jpg
Normal file
Binary file not shown.
After Width: | Height: | Size: 9.7 KiB |
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user