It’s a funny title to write, for someone who spends almost all of their internet social time on mastodon, has made (hopefully) lifelong friends there, will excitedly tell their IRL friends about the technology, and also plans to keep spending time there.

Note though, I don’t actually recommend people join mastodon. This is because I have higher standards for other people than myself. Because my standards for myself are fucked. And unlike a lot of the “discourse” on this matter, I don’t hold my personal tolerance of being abused against people who have higher standards than me.

If you’re on the mastodon, there’s nothing stopping someone from calling you a slur.

Much digital ink has been spilled on both the technical and the moderation aspects of this phenomenon. On the technical side—yes, unlike twitter, facebook, and effectively threads and bluesky—mastodon is federated. That means that basically anyone on the internet can message you and call you slurs. The defense against this is, yes, moderation. Any adequately-run instance should have moderators who will defederate—aka block—users and instances who behave poorly. Ideally proactively, but what you soon learn as a moderator on mastodon is the best tool you have for this is literally just a hashtag. After much groaning and gnashing of teeth, mastodon admins at long last have the ability to import a list of instances to block (as opposed to one at a time), but updating that list is still a wholly manual practice. Yes, there are third parties working on plugging these gaps but (a) third parties and (b) they’re largely still WIPs and their usage is controversial. Nonetheless, I’m digressing. My point is here, even if you have a well-moderated instance, it is very difficult to block out the bad actors, your tools are limited (and using them is apparently controversial), and anyone who’s adequately determined to call you a slur can spin up a new instance and let loose on you, over and over again until you give up and leave mastodon forever.

How social media changed our expectations of the internet

But I’m not going to pull out the clickbait of “dead on arrival” and just summarize things you’ve heard before. Let’s talk about expectations, the notions of public and private, and mastodon.social.

Once upon a time, the internet was a bunch of web pages. Some of them had comment sections. There were chat rooms and public boards too. And people got harassed on them.

But this was kind of expected. If you go out in public, yeah, there’s a non-zero chance that some rando’s gonna yell slurs at you on the street. It sucks, ideally it wouldn’t happen, but when you’re out there in public, you don’t really have control over who else is out there with you. This was the olden internet.

Then social media happened. And the internet became...less public. In the walled garden of facebook, twitter, and so on, you had a body of people running the place. They could throw people out if they broke the rules, like calling people slurs. And maybe if they didn’t want to do that, they could also just quietly shuffle those people around so the slur-callers were less likely to see posts from the people they wanted to yell slurs at. They also tended to group you up with like-minded people who you wanted to hang out with, and soon these semi-public places started to feel more and more private. Less like a public street and more like, maybe, a table at a cafe, a club room, maybe your own house. Places, definitively, where you don’t have people hurling slurs at you.

So enter mastodon, post the dawn of social media. Built on top of the idea of “hey maybe social media should have a standard protocol” (aka ActivityPub). I can’t say what the original impetus of mastodon was, but it might’ve been something like this:

“Can we make our own version of social media that isn’t controlled by a single powerful entity?”

And this is why mastodon is dead on arrival.

Is mastodon a public street or a cafe?

If mastodon (and activity pub) had arrived ten, fifteen years earlier, it would’ve been dealing with olden internet expectations. The public street expectations, if you will. People’s expectations would be ‘yeah, every once in a while some troll’s gonna come in and call you a slur. Just ignore them and move on.’ But, since it arrived after centralized social media, people, weirdly, got used to not getting called slurs. So when mastodon rolled up with its old-internet style access controls, people, expectedly, said, what the fuck.

Now, some people might argue that this expectation isn’t “reasonable”. After all, under the hood, we’re dealing with old-internet access controls. It’s not “reasonable” to expect the kind of protections you get under a single powerful entity.

But here’s the thing: mastodon bills itself as equivalent to corporate social media. It’s trying to punch weight-for-weight with the big boys like threads and twitter. It’s promising to be a drop-in replacement for the place where you hung out with your friends and community and the only thing standing in your way is picking an instance to make your account. Heck, they’re even trying to make that go away by funneling new users to mastodon.social by default. So, in fact, if you take in all of mastodon’s own messaging, it’s incredibly “reasonable” to expect to get all the same kinds of protections that big tech social media provides.

Compare and contrast with if its messaging was more along the lines of “hey, we’ve got a tight code of conduct but we’re pretty small. To compensate though, you can use the same account to talk to other people on other social media networks. But also because of them, we've got a troll problem, but we’ll try our best to protect you from it”. In fact, outside of the mastodon.social and camp this is how most mastodon instances talk about themselves. Unlike camp big social media, they’re not trying to have their cake (streamlined convenience corporate social media experience) and eat it too (lax olden internet access model). Because the truth, “we’re trying to be just like twitter but also we can't stop people from sending you slurs,” is a terrible value proposition.

But, that said, while setting “reasonable” user expectations certainly helps, it’s not the end of the problem.

The old internet should stay dead

Do you remember “tits or gtfo”?

The old internet sucked. Yeah, women were allowed to be there, but they weren’t allowed to be women there. I certainly was never asian there, and I’m sure that black folk were very hesitant to be black there too. And gods help you if you were outspoken about any of those things. That’s what it’s like on mastodon today. Heck, that’s what it’s like on a public street today. We don’t accept that behavior there, it’s incredibly “reasonable” to want better. Honestly that might be why corporate social media was so successful: it offered all these people who were being told “hey that’s life, toughen up” a place where they didn’t have to put up with that bullshit.

And it absolutely is possible to give that experience without a big corporate entity playing cop. There’s huge room for creativity and problem solving in this domain. Sibling instances and networks of trust. Partially-limited federation. Separate inboxes for trusted and untrusted messages and replies. Automatic forwarding of reports and blocks to sibling instances. All these things add complexity that moves these projects further away from the dead-simple centralized control of twitter, but they keep people safe. Meanwhile, the mastodon team is still debating over which instance “owns” a reply and how abusive is the concept of inlining a toot with your own commentary.

That said, these features will come to the fediverse. Promising federated projects that aren’t mastodon, like GoToSocial, are making headway on these problems, perhaps because they have no aspirations to become New Twitter. My suspicion is that only at that time, when people become accustomed to other fediverse projects that actually meet these basic needs, will mastodon adopt these features. I am eagerly awaiting this time, because in spite of all the criticisms levied here, in spite of the occasional deluge of harassment, trolling, and reply-guying, the fediverse is fun and useful and filled with cool people that I can interact with in a way that I never found on corporate social media.

So until then, I’ll be enjoying my social media with a side of slurs.