The Pirate Ship Model of Federated Social Media
The technology we needed to replace corporate social media was ready for primetime by 2018. The software project that would bring it to critical mass launched in 2016. In 2023, it finally started to happen. But this stuff has been around a long time in internet years, and I can’t shake the feeling that even the people who built it, let alone the people who use it, still don’t understand how to pull this off.
It’s impossible to overstate the damage corporate centralized social media has done to people’s brains and relationship to the internet. The fact that the vast majority of people still use such services more or less exclusively, ignoring the actual web, is testament enough to that. But I spun up my Mastodon instance almost a year ago now, and while I’ve been living in the future since then, it has astounded me the extent to which even people already on the fediverse are conceptually stuck in the past.
The Problem: Micro-Twitters
Anyone who has any exposure to Mastodon server politics has experienced what could still be the fatal flaw in the construction of this future. I would describe its cause thusly: People are willing to experiment a little bit, but mostly only in ways that still feel familiar to them.
When ActivityPub came along and made it possible for different social media applications to communicate, the first project to succeed — Mastodon — was essentially a clone of Twitter.
Likewise, as Mastodon itself grew, the people who stepped up to try its new capability — federation across many servers that could be run by anyone — also essentially cloned Twitter. They started their own micro-Twitters where they (and perhaps a few of their friends) were the Elons, they let in anyone who wanted to sign up, and then they terrorized users with their capricious whims while they slowly ran out of money. Many micro-Twitters on Mastodon have already reached the end game, cutting themselves off from the wider network and driving their users away cruelly and indifferently.
Why has this happened, and why does it keep happening over and over again? The reason is the same as what’s happening at mega-scale with Twitter itself: It is the wrong model.
What’s wrong with it? Let me count the ways:
If someone is not supposed to trust Elon Musk — allegedly the richest man in the universe or whatever — to be a reliable steward of their social media presence and relationships, why should they trust you, a random person they don’t even know who doesn’t have unlimited money to run their own personal social media website for no sensible reason?
Hosting social media websites costs money. It no longer costs very much money thanks to these aforementioned technologies, but here’s the rub: The more people who use your social media website, the more money it costs. Given that you don’t have unlimited money to run your own personal social media website for no sensible reason, why are you allowing tons of people you don’t know to join?
ActivityPub, the protocol that enables all this, has one distinctive feature that provides the obvious hint about what the right model is, but because of the pervasiveness of the wrong model, it has caused widespread heartbreak and outrage, not to mention the development of alternative protocols like AT Protocol and Nostr whose creators now have huge chips on their shoulders and whose existence (sort of) threatens to confuse the issue at the precisely wrong moment. Namely, posts on ActivityPub remain at their original domain forever. You can move your profile (and all its relationships) from one ActivityPub server to another — say, in the event that the one you picked goes down in flames or blocks all of your friends — but if that happens, you lose your posts. Would you like to lose all your social media posts because of some random person you don’t even know? No. So why would you agree to host other random people’s posts?
I could probably come up with more, but these are bad enough. But what I don’t get is, they all seem super duper obvious, as does the solution. I am hopeful that after I describe it below, everybody on the fediverse will go, “Oh. Duh. Of course.” and get their ducks in a row before Threads shows up and everything goes crazy.
The Solution: Pirate Ships
The thing is, if you want a thing to survive on the internet, it needs its own website, and if you have a stake in it, it needs to be your website. I feel like the truth of this is finally getting through to people who consider themselves “creators” insofar as their own work is concerned, and a proper blogging renaissance feels close at hand. But the mass of people online — that is, on social media — consider themselves “just posters,” and while they may care to varying extents about their posts, the survival of the app they post on seems like a matter that’s out of their hands. But thanks to software like Mastodon, it is emphatically well within their hands.
Mastodon really hammers home the truth of the diminutive euphemism “this website” that people often use to refer to their social media app of choice. No, it’s true, though. It really is a website, even though there are apps for it. And what’s new about federated social websites is, you can have your own.
Maybe the problem at the beginning of the fediverse was that you had to be a Jedi-level sysadmin to set up a Mastodon server, but now you don’t. Not only does a-couple-clicks-and-you’re-done managed Mastodon hosting exist, it is hilariously inexpensive, but — and this is the key — only for small servers (see problem #2 above).
Are you getting it yet?
The future is hosting your own server of whatever ActivityPub-compatible application you like.
And if $6 a month feels like too much, consider going in on it with a couple friends. People you know.
STOAT.ZONE, the Mastodon server I run, is about as big of a Mastodon server as I feel like needs to exist for any non-institutional purpose. It costs $14 a month to operate and is currently at about 33% of its capacity at this tier. It has 24 accounts on it, but some of those are alts and others are group accounts operated by the same people, so it’s fewer actual people than that. And here’s the key: I know them all personally, and thus I care as much about their posts as I do about my own.
We agreed to do this together, as a collective. We trust each other. We work together. We’re accountable to each other in actual human-being ways. We just happen to all be very online people, so our online presences are extensions of our real relationships. We don’t need ✌️“rules”✌️ or ✌️“moderation”✌️ because we already live according to rules. Social rules. Like “don’t cause harm to your friends.” We occasionally add new people we know to the server, but we’re never going to let people we don’t know just join our website. Why would we do such an insane thing? Get your own website! Talk to us from there!
I find that people understand this model best when I romanticize it in the form of a pirate ship. We’re a crew. We’re in it together. We’re self-sufficient (basically); if we needed to overhaul our ship from stem to stern, we could do that. We sail the high seas looking for other ships to trade with and islands to explore.
And I don’t know if you heard, but a big honkin’ cruise ship full of booty is on a course through these waters pretty soon.
That’s just it; in the social web future, there are larger vessels around. Lots of them. Ones run by companies and nonprofits and governments and stuff, many of which will have hundreds, thousands, or millions of accounts on them. That’s what a “big server” looks like in a sustainable future: actually big. Big as in too-big-to-fail. Big as in at least theoretically financially sustainable. A Mastodon instance with 40,000 users on it is not big. It’s tiny, and it’s extremely, unsustainably, stupidly expensive. There is no reason for such a thing to exist.
Consider hosting your own ActivityPub application with 1 to several accounts on it. It’s romantic sailing the high seas with your mates. It’s what the internet used to feel like, and it’s what it was always supposed to feel like. The ocean is big. Many vessels can ply its waters with plenty of room to roam.
If you see a ship of wily stoats sailing by, send us a hail.
