Mike Masnick: Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?

If you haven’t been reading Tech Dirt, and specifically Mike Masnick’s post tracking the Twitter saga and what it shows about social media and content moderation in general, you have been missing out on some fantastic and thought provoking writing.

Recently, Masnick is coming to the same conclusion that I am: I think federated social media (Mastodon, etc) might actually stick with the general public and if it does that would make things a lot better for everyone.

Masnick writes…

For years, whenever people talked to me about the protocols, not platforms approach to things, and asked about ActivityPub, I frequently downplayed it and brushed it off as less serious. My vision wasn’t about federation (where you basically have a large number of “mini” centralized players who can all talk to each other), but something that was truly decentralized, where you controlled your own data, and could choose who can connect to it.

However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.

Mastodon has been a lot of fun and it’s clear that despite a lot of the technology crowd hot taking that the average person won’t understand federation, it’s growing like crazy. I never bought in to the take that people can’t understand federation. Why? Because it’s how email works. When I was explaining Mastodon to my wife not long ago said:

“It’s like email. You can sign up for Hotmail, I can sign up for Yahoo mail, and we can both talk. If Hotmail dies, you can go sign up for a Gmail account and after a brief bit of annoyance moving things over you’re all set.”

“Ah. Ok.”

That was it.

And then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was likely bigger players would enter the market as well. I’ve started wondering about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment.” Some people may not remember, but Google entering the webmail space on on April 1, 2004 completely upended the concept of email. It was so different and so much more useful, that many people legitimately thought it was a classic April Fool’s joke. Prior to that, you either had clunky email from your ISP or you used a slow and complicated webmail provider that would charge you if you used more than 10Mb of storage. And then Gmail showed up with a clean interface, that focused on tags (rather than folders) and drag and drop and (gasp) 1 gig of storage. And the entire email space changed overnight.

Yes, I think it’s a given at this point that if this growth continues someone will come long and be the Gmail for Mastodon. It’s natural, but as long as the federated protocol remains, the choice and the freedom (both in “speech” for the creators and the hosts) stays intact. I’m also very excited to see what other apps and platforms adopt the Activity Pub protocol.

Long link post short: Mastodon has been a lot of fun. You should check it out, if you haven’t already, and you should come say hi: @[email protected]