Mastodon Isn't Just A Replacement For Twitter

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Mastodon Isn’t Just A Replacement For Twitter

Users flocking to the platform will need to shift their expectations for social media and become engaged democratic citizens in the life of their networks.

Peter Tarka

Credits

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Amy Hasinoff is as associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver.

They recently published “From Scalability to Subsidiarity in Addressing Online Harm” in the journal Social Media + Society.

During Elon Musk’s chaotic first weeks in charge of Twitter, some people have been fleeing to Mastodon in search of a better place to lurk and post. This open-source, Twitter-like platform is a part of a system of noncorporate social media known as the fediverse, along with software like the video-sharing platform PeerTube and the file-sharing platform Nextcloud. Over at Social.coop, the cooperatively governed Mastodon community that Nathan co-founded in 2017, new user registrations have swelled from a trickle to a torrent.

The age of Big Social may be ending, as advertisers shift to platforms like TikTok and streaming video that are more like entertainment channels. For many reasons, we say: good riddance. The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing. As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.”

As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.

Among dominant social networks, the guiding approach to governance has been what the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “scalability.” This doesn’t just mean large scale. It means, according to Tsing, “the ability to expand — and expand and expand — without rethinking basic elements.” It means exponential growth while retaining a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with problems, and it’s what venture capitalists look for in their investments.

Scalability explains a lot of what seems wrong with social media. Content moderation at scale needs to be semi-automated, which often means applying universal rules without context or nuance. And when abuse, harassment and misinformation drive engagement, the incentive is to address it in a way that doesn’t threaten business. Lacking local knowledge in their users’ languages and cultures, platform companies have aided political interference and even genocide. All these problems have led Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to try to outsource moderation decisions, creating independent organizations for “oversight” and “decentralization.” As Musk’s acquisition of Twitter loomed, Dorsey tweeted about the platform he co-founded: “The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.” Even he could see that the business that helped make him wealthy had taken on too much.

“The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing.”

As users migrate to the fediverse, they often bring the old expectations of scalable social media. We are used to someone else being in charge and taking care of the problems that might arise, and we are used to complaining when they mess up.

Users also bring the same racism, sexism and bad behavior to Mastodon that have arisen in other kinds of online spaces. But in the fediverse, we cannot simply rely on a company’s trust and safety department to take care of problems for us. The challenge and the opportunity of spaces like the fediverse is that it is up to us which rules we want to follow and how we make rules for ourselves.

Commercial social media give community moderators in spaces like Facebook Groups or subreddits some tools to address problems, and many of those moderators try to involve their community members in decision-making. Ultimately, however, these commercial platforms limit the scope of community self-governance to suit their interests. The fediverse opens new doors. It allows us the possibility to collectively own and more fully self-govern the online communities we participate in.

But how can genuine community self-governance work at the scale of a global social network? We believe that it is time to embrace the old idea of subsidiarity, which dates back to early Calvinist theology and Catholic social teaching. The European Union’s founding documents use the term, too. It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have...