Grant McLravy Social media has radically changed the world – I don’t think there’s a person on this planet that would disagree with that.
Social media is also in a bit of an upheaval phase right now. Twitter has been bought out by an insane billionaire intent on changing the company to a profitable free-speech haven, while Facebook is dumping billions of dollars into moonshot “metaverse” projects to maintain their relevance as their core product becomes less relevant.
Social media giants typically have incentives that don’t exactly line up with what the user wants to see in social media.
For example, social media companies make their primary source of revenue through advertising – they want to show you as many ads as you’re willing to tolerate while keeping you on the site as long as possible. They accomplish this by showing you algorithmic recommendations of post they think you might enjoy rather than just content from people you follow or are friends with.
Many users would prefer fewer ads and a return to true chronological feeds, but this would not be in social media company’s best interest, so they don’t provide these options or bury them behind confusing settings menus.
Back when I first signed up for a Facebook account, the chronological feed of just posts from my friends enabled me to clearly see when there was no more content – I knew when to log off the Facebook page after catching up with all the things my friends cared to share. Years later, my Facebook feed was filled with posts from groups or pages I had not decided to follow, yet Facebook served to me anyway because the almighty algorithm determined those posts would get me to stay on the site longer.
In 2021, I deleted my Faebook account after a few months of contemplation. There was not a whole lot of difference between a Facebooked life and a de-Facebooked life – the biggest difference wasn’t the lack of the news feed, it was Facebook Messenger that I missed the most. My family group chat was Facebook Messenger, so I had to convince them to switch to a Matrix group chat through Element.
A few months later, I deleted my Twitter account as well. I was more of a lurker with Twitter – using it to keep up with news and culture. However, Twitter is also excellent at being a time suck, and tends to breed negativity.
Social media still has value, but I didn’t want to be beholden to a corporate overlord to decide what I was going to see.
Enter Mastodon.
Mastodon is an open-source federated social media platform. That’s a bunch of buzzwords. Let me break that down for you.
Mastodon is open-source, which means the code for the project is readily available for anyone to read or edit. To be precise, Mastodon is released under the AGPLv3 license, meaning that the code MUST be available – any distribution of the software without code available would be breaking the license agreement. Due to the open source nature of the software, if there was a feature I though was missing from Mastodon, I would be able to add it to the software, then submit it to the project maintainers to add to the original project.
Mastodon is federated, meaning that it follows a consistent format to allow communication from different servers. For example, my mastodon instance at mastodon.granto.cloud allows me to follow George Takei despite the fact that he joined the universeodon.com mastodon server, not the granto.cloud mastodon server. It’s also compatible with other social media sites using the ActivityPub – the biggest name is soon to be Tumblr – for more info see here.
Right now I’m posting out to the void, just like I am with this blog. Zero mastodon followers so far, but it’s a really cool concept to completely own the the social media prescence. I know exactly where my data is being hosted – currently about 15 feet from me as I type this blog post out.
Feel free to follow me on Mastodon – I am @[email protected] – or you can go to https://gran.to/social.