Touching Grass and Fencing In Mastodon
Bobby finds that eBooks are less rage-inducing than social media, and wonders whether he's starting to lose interest in microblogging entirely.
Published:
I picked away at this post over a few weeks, so if the flow feels strange in some sections, that's why!
eBooks, eBooks, eBooks!
Something I've noticed since ditching YouTube is that I'm a voracious reader. Time that I would've previously spent watching LGR videos or Linus Tech Tips has become filled with social media posts, RSS feeds, and printed magazines such as Computeractive and MacFormat.
I've noticed though that social media and online articles have made me grouchy and bad-tempered, perhaps because they're almost exclusively downbeat, highly partisan, and sensationalist. I think there's a fine line between staying informed about what's happening in the world, and receiving an up to the minute feed providing a blow-by-blow account of the most nasty and ill-informed behaviour being perpetrated by every frightened little hate gremlin that screeches and claws at the world for refusing to fit into their extremely blinkered worldview or permit them to dictate who's allowed to be a human.
I think I've mentioned before that I spent much of taking a break from Mastodon. I'm sticking with it for now, but I have metaphorically fired my Bluesky and Reddit accounts into the sun. I've also taken the time to set up filters on Mastodon that hide the most rage-inducing categories of fediverse post behind a content warning so that I don't have to read them if I lack the mental energy to do so. My life quality has improved significantly.
I've also noticed a significant uptick in my mood and motivation to get things done around the house. I'm currently using my new-found free time to read eBooks for pleasure. More specifically, I'm working my way through Spike Milligan's war memoirs and Jeremy Clarkson's old newspaper columns. I have a bucket list of classic books in the public domain, and I'm looking forward to reading those while taking dumps.
The Pidgin Fediverse
Whenever I'm on Mastodon, it feels like I'm metaphorically living on a hitched canal barge. I avoid mentioning caravan owners, because they're DEAD to the canal barge community. If I want to talk to someone who lives in a house then I have to book a hotel room to talk to them, because the other canal barge owners think house-dwellers are dicks and will sail off without me if I invite one over. Rowers are also viewed with suspicion because their boats were sold to them by a creepy dude with bad vibes, but they're still tolerated because they traverse the same waterways as canal barges.
None of that is actually true in real life, but anyone that's been on the fediverse for more than a few years probably recognises something in that analogy! I recently read a blog post titled "The Fediverse is Already Dead", and its analysis led me to think more about my own sense of ennuis with the federated ecosystem that's emerged and developed since I started using Mastodon myself, albeit with occasional breaks, in .
My original objective was digital sovereignty, so my dream scenario would've been having a single self-hosted social media profile from which I connect to other social networks, like a modern equivalent of an RSS feed that talks back to me without having to be spammed with advertisements, manipulated by algorithms designed to upset me, or reliant on moderation teams that view my humanity as an interesting thought exercise worthy of a both-sides debate with bigots that want to abolish me from public life and/or murder me for being gay.
I think that's why I've gravitated towards having a single user Mastodon server. I can view posted text, videos, pictures, etc through Twitter-style feeds that pass through filters and lists that I've curated. I can also use instance admin resources to determine the other servers from which I should de-federate to avoid metaphorical skid-marks on the underpants of the Internet.
The Future of the Fediverse
I haven't yet de-federated from Threads on my single user instance, but I have limited accounts from there by default because I don't know how much of a hassle it's going to be to moderate for myself. I suspect there might be fewer problems than I anticipated to begin with though, mostly because of the sheer number of Mastodon instances that have pre-emptively blocked Threads, and that may mean that fewer Threads posts boosted into my feeds for the time being.
I'm half-expecting a new cultural norm where de-federating from Threads becomes a precondition for continuing to federate with LGBTQ+ friendly Mastodon instances. Meta's moderation behaviours don't align with existing fediverse norms, they're highly unlikely to join a private Discord server to negotiate over moderation decisions, and Meta has a history of allowing bigotry and hate to run rampant on their social networks.
The Mastodon-first approach is great if the end point is for everyone to be on Mastodon, but as someone that was around when "The Year of the Linux desktop" wasn't a cruel joke, my experience tells me that it perhaps isn't a realistic expectation. Even when Microsoft was at their most dominant, the world didn't communicate exclusively over MSN Messenger. People had to create Pidgin so that we could connect to every chat network across our social graph in one app instead of having to install and run half a dozen of them. Federating across a common protocol would have been a better fix for that problem and given people free choice over which desktop client app they wanted to use.
I suspect that, given the current fragmented state of microblogging across Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Twitter/X, and others, there might be a temptation for hobbyists to engineer similar Pidgin-style solutions, with client apps or websites that connect to several different microblogging services via their REST APIs and cross-post.
Alternatively, we may end up with a scenario where there's a Mastodon-dominated fediverse, and then a separate outer fediverse with which the commercial social networks connect to varying levels, which then becomes more popular over time due to the sheer volume of non-techies.
The collapse of Twitter has led people to flee to several different social networks, and those social networks adopting ActivityPub might be what triggers an actual, rather than imagined, "Eternal September" for Mastodon. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as a cosy pleasant community is better than a large rubbish one, but it does highlight a flaw with the idea that federation alone will save us from the worst excesses of online capitalism.