If you read my blog, you probably noticed that I’m not a fan of social media. I used to have a Facebook account when I was still in high school, when Facebook was still a new thing, and seemed like a cool place to hang out with your friends. I closed it few years after, and seeing how Facebook became a privacy-violating, soul-crushing spying and advertisement machine, I made the right call.
Every commercial social media platform operates on the same formula: provide service for free, attract as many people as possible, then start selling that attention to businesses in form of advertisement. Once people cannot leave without losing all their connections, and businesses cannot leave without losing their marketing channel, do everything in their power to squeeze as much profit as possible, enshittifying the platform and ruining the experience for everyone.
In order for those platforms to keep growing their profits, they have to come up with all kinds of creative ways to harvest as much private data of their users as possible. In addition, they put enormous resources at finding new ways to monetize all the data they have, like refining their algorithms to prey on people’s addictions, aplifying hate and outrage because that makes people to engage more in their ecosystem. When you follow people on their platforms, you don’t really ‘follow’ them in a traditional sense, but training their algorithm which then is used against you.
There’s an argument to be made that the algorithm is what makes these platforms useful, because it serves content that you might be interested in, and I get that point. Not for me though - I’m not looking for mindlessly scroll just because I’m bored or I crave for a dopamine hit. I follow people because I’m interested in hearing what they have to say, and nothing else. If there was an application that allows me to receive posts from different social media platforms in a format that I want, I would use it. But it does not exist, because the data is what makes those platforms so much money, so they protect it at all costs. If you attempt to do anything like that, you’re exposing yourself to huge fines that would financially ruin you. And it doesn’t matter if they did the same thing for their competitors when they were small. Now when they accumulated so much wealth, they’re abusing the IP law to trample any attempts to give them a taste of their own medicine.
When Mastodon started to get traction (especially after Musk acquired Twitter), I was reluctant to say anything about it. I’ve seen the many times how new platforms come into picture, promising to be different, and ending enshittified as everyone else. Mastodon has distinctive differences from everyone else, though. First, it’s not a platform per se. Mastodon is using something called ActivityPub, a protocol defining how information should be shared between different websites that work upon the same protocol. In other words, you could have a number of completely different websites, and people would see their friends posts across all of them. Imagine if someone posted a tweet on X, and people on Facebook, Snap, WhatsApp, Instagram and any other website would see the post on their feed, allowing them to like or respond, and their response would appear back in X. This is what federated platform is - instead of having one website controlling everything, you have many websites working on their own, sharing information with each other in the process. The protocol is the platform.
It also helps that Mastodon is a non-profit, which reduces the chances of it getting enshittified, even though its not a guarantee (see OpenAI case). But the fact that it’s the protocol that its built upon, I’m not forced to trust Mastodon as a company. I can use any other website using ActivityPub and fully participate in the discussions with people using Mastodon. I can even run my own website with sole user (me), and be a full-fledged citizen of the Fediverse.
The fact of one company controlling the platform was one big reason why I avoided social media, but the Fediverse and decentralized platforms makes this reason not valid anymore. I also sometimes feel the urge to share some small things (especially when I started to learn music production), but don’t want to write the whole blog post about it, so Mastodon could fill that gap nicely.
With all being said, I’m tempted to give Mastodon a proper go. I had an account for a few years, just following some people to test the waters, but haven’t commited to post anything… yet. But I think you’ll see me on the Fediverse sooner rather than later.