Good Morning Friends! I’ve been talking quite a bit about the Fediverse or as the media is damned determined to refer to it Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is the software that most ActivityPub federated instances run, and the flagship instance is run by its originator Mastodon.social. Side note: I would never suggest anyone create an account there because it is a bit of a mess that is constantly struggling to maintain itself… both mechanically and from moderation terms. I refer to the whole proceedings as Fediverse or the community of websites that federate with each other utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. While most sites run Mastodon there are also a lot of sites running Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, or Funkwhale just to name a handful of alternates each designed for their own purposes. While we have a habit of referring to things by the “brand name” version… I personally am going against that practice here.

There are a lot of things about the Fediverse that come off as odd to someone migrating from Twitter. I’ve talked about this at length in a number of other posts, already so I won’t labor those points now. One of the almost immediate quirks you will notice on day one… is that most people are extremely reluctant to ever say the word “Twitter”. You will see it referred to as things like “Hellsite” or simply “That Other Site”, but most commonly you will see the term “Birdsite” used. At this point I am used to it since like I have said before, I first came to the network in 2018 during the Wheaton Exodus. While I do not have the exact reason for why the popularity of the term has taken hold, I will attempt to give you my understanding and why I chose to adopt it myself.

The WoW Tourist Problem

This is something that likely only MMORPG veterans are going to understand, but when a brand new game launches it is inevitable that general chat will be filled with an endless stream of fights about World of Warcraft. It is natural for something new to be compared with the industry leader, but it also gets really annoying when you are trying to experience something new… and you are constantly being reminded of the thing that you are not actually playing. To be truthful this is one of the big reasons why I almost always turn off general chat in any game alpha/beta that I am testing because I know without a doubt there is going to be a pissing contest between those who hate World of Warcraft and those who seem required to defend the game’s honor.

For all of the folks being transplanted into the Fediverse from Twitter, there is always going to be a group that is sick to death hearing about it. They have moved on past it, and keep getting dragged by chat back into dealing with it. Sure you can say “well just don’t read local or federated feeds” but a lot of the experience of the Fediverse is the browsing nature of being able to read what people you are not following are saying. Being on an Instance is in many ways like playing an old-school MMORPG with a fixed server population. While every Instance is effectively an island… the other folks are your neighbors on that island. Even if you don’t follow each other, you notice the folks who are regularly chatting.

The Trauma Problem

I’m a CIS White Man, and when I use twitter I have the privilege of not really drawing the attention of many attackers. Sure I got some DDOS attacks during the height of GamerGate for some comments against it on this blog, but I’ve never had to suffer any real lasting consequences of my social interactions. That was not the case for a lot of folks on the margins of what was considered acceptable by certain segments of society. There are folks who live on the Fediverse now that came there to escape torrents of abuse that they received on Twitter. The Trans community especially has been actively hunted down and made to suffer by conservative groups on Twitter, and now for some… the mere mention of the platform brings up deep-seated trauma.

This is the reason why I try not to use the word Twitter while on the Fediverse, and have adopted the local custom of “Birdsite”. I don’t really personally care one way or the other, but I know the decision of choosing to buck this custom means that I might be causing someone else out there unintended harm. On Twitter, your voice only carries as far as those who are actively following you. On the Fediverse your voice is out there in an unknown number of federated feeds. Basically, I worry about how my actions might impact someone else out there, and if I can make a simple change that means nothing to me personally… I am going to always err on the side of doing less harm.

I Care About My Impact on Others

Ultimately at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that I care about my potential impact on others. There are a lot of words that I used to carelessly use before knowing how tangible their impact was on unintended targets. I’m thankful that I have had friends willing to call me out on my shit, and as such, I have evolved constantly as a person to adopt better practices and abandon those causing harm. For me, it was never about being “woke” or some sort of performative action, and entirely about being a better person. While it is unlikely that someone is going to call you on using Twitter regularly, I personally made the choice to stop using the term while on the Fediverse.

It is my way to adopt the customs of the environment I am in, so long as those customs are not harming anyone. It was a simple choice for me. It was not a hill I was willing on dying on, because I had no real attachment one way or the other. Four years later, I just sort of do it as a relfex without even thinking about it.

This weekend I made some drastic choices and have started to begin evaluating what I actually want out of social media. Saturday afternoon while listening to an extremely great synth rendition of the Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers soundtrack, I started removing follows. I went through my list a single person at a time and asked myself… “is this someone I actually remember interacting with at some point”. That seems simple enough, but over the years I have been very liberal with who I followed in a search for more friends out there in the void. Roughly an hour later I had paired down my list and nuked about 500 follows. I am certain that I made some mistakes in this process and there are some folks I accidentally removed that I will regret. However, it was the first step in a process to try and return to the roots of why I originally started using the internet.

The internet for me at least started out fairly simple. There was a certain novelty in being able to communicate on my computer with people from all corners of the globe. It was this communication that was front and center and I hungrily gobbled up as much information about other peoples and other cultures as I could. I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment, in a very small town, in the middle of nowhere, and due to all of this, my world was pretty small. The internet cracked open a window that I never wanted to close. In those early days, we were just bits of text on a screen, and as a result, our value was in our ideas not necessarily the metrics associated with them.

Even the “realest” folks that I know adopt a carefully curated person when they present themselves online. That persona may be very close to reality, but it still exists both as a safety net to keep things from getting “too real” and to filter our thoughts through. In the early days of the internet, there was less need for this pretense. If you saw someone out on the broader internet, it was guaranteed that they too were a geek or a dork because the sheer act of getting there required a lot out of the user. AOL existed as a walled garden, a sort of uber BBS that gave folks some measure of taste of the “information super highway”. However, if you made your way to IRC, it meant you had shaken off the shackles of that garden, found your way to a full-service ISP, and begun your journey into a much larger world.

There is a time I remember fondly when every piece of content you consumed from gopher to wais, to even the fledgling world wide web was “user created”. The creation was a labor of love and there were countless web farms devoted to all manner of nonsense. It was a time when there was very little corporate presence online, and the majority of infrastructure was run out of academia. The bright hubs of commerce were places like WUSTL.edu or WISC.edu where their public FTP sites served as a clearing house for all of the content that mattered from the latest doom wad file to the latest release of mIRC. All of this infrastructure and content was run and created by the denizens of this fledgling internet.

As time passed the internet was tamed by corporations and bent to their whims, all for the purpose of converting our free time and hobbies into currency. Social networks consolidated what was once a series of disconnected GeoCities and self-hosted websites, into an easy-to-use structure that allowed you to communicate with your friends. I remember clearly a time when I was using Blogger and others were using Xanga or Live Journal… but we had connected up a ragtag cluster of websites via links or connections to web rings. Each person in that “community” had complete freedom over the content that they were presenting to the world even though they were functionally operating on someone else’s network.

I think MySpace was the beginning of the modern era of social media, and with it introduced metrics like “friend” counts and the introduction of the aspirational “top 8” list. Attributing numerical success to your internet efforts only got worse with the introduction of Facebook, and subsequently Twitter. Entire infrastructure like Social Blade shown above was erected to prove numerically who was “winning” the internet. I remember when we were dabbling in Google Plus, playing with a tool called Klout and being fascinated by how it boiled a user down to a value. I hate that I cared even for a moment about the supposedly “value” something like that was providing. If I had known how much of the internet has become about chasing clout and popularity, I would have hissed and slowly backed away from it.

I hate everything about the influencer culture that has spawned around internet content creation. My friends jokingly refer to me as an influencer, partially because I have always been way more socially engaged than they are, and partially because they know it pisses me off. In the art world, there is a concept called “Outsider Art” and I like to think I am that, but for internet media. I’ve been plugging away at this blog for almost fourteen years, and the podcast for almost nine years… and while I try and share both freely the popularity or lack thereof doesn’t make me any less interested in the act of creation. I will likely be over here in my corner continuing to do whatever I want to do and continue to be absolutely allergic to trying to monetize it.

As far as modern social media goes though, Twitter was my home. I originally launched my Twitter account as a way of interacting with other bloggers in the Blog Azeroth community, and as a way of promoting my posts. Over the years I have met some of my best friends through this medium, but year after year it seemed to get harder and harder to make any real and lasting connections. Gamergate was a wake-up call and threw a cold glass of water in the face of online social interactions. Getting DDOS’d as a result of my random comments on Twitter, made me way more guarded about what I said there and fear of malicious attacks did the same to others. The Muskrat coming in and threatening to dismantle what little safety net there was there… has made me deeply contemplate what presence I still want to have on that network.

I’ve dabbled with Mastodon/Fediverse since 2018, but I can’t say I have really ever set up permanent residence there. This weekend I attempted to change that, and the pairing down of Twitter was the first step in that evolution. I have to say the interactions that I am having on this alternate social media platform continue to be refreshing. Using the Fediverse feels like stepping back in time to my IRC days when people seemed to just genuinely want to make friends on the internet and share their ideas and dreams. Having conversations on my local feed feels like popping into random IRC channels and getting to know the regulars. Ultimately making friends is the only thing I ever really wanted from the internet, and over time it became one of the hardest tasks to accomplish.

I’ve also been dabbling a bit with a platform called MeWe, where a handful of friends have erected a bastion in honor of the glory days of Google Plus. It has been delightful so far, but the platform as a whole seems to have way fewer guardrails than I might like. The madness of the alt-right seems to have infected some corners of the platform, and there are some questions about just how open everything is. For me though my interaction circles around a handful of individuals and as a result, it is working as intended.

I’ve also spent at least a summary amount of time exploring something called Cohost, which appears to be a Live Journal clone. I am not certain if I will keep using it, because it doesn’t seem to be a great discovery engine. That is the challenge with branching out into new networks is that you ultimately have to carve a place out for yourself and figure out if and how it is going to add value to your life. Having a good discovery engine helps to make finding new people out in the void a bit easier, which is admittedly one of the key complaints that I see leveraged against the Fediverse, and being so fragmented. That said I also feel like no one seems to have a memory of how obtuse Twitter was in 2009 when I started trying to figure out how to find friends to follow.

I wrote this over the weekend and I still believe it. Something feels different this time. In the past folks would start using the Fediverse and then within hours/days/weeks run straight back to the platforms they originally came from. Sure a handful of people would stick around, but the end result created this cycle of “vacationers” and “townies”. I think social media has reached this breaking point where the cycle of chasing clout is unsustainable. The Muskrat making some broad sweeping changes to the platform he now “owns” is merely the trigger of something larger that has been sitting below the surface. I think there is a broad sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the way online human interactions have functioned for the last decade. That said it could just be me projecting my own general sense of dissatisfaction on the whole ordeal.

I have no control over the broader internet, but I do have control over my small corner of it. Going forward I am shifting how I consume social media. It is about human interactions and less as a broadcast medium. I will still shout into the void about the things that are making me happy or excited, but I am going to care far less about whether or not the void answers back. I have this feeling that the Twitter pair-down was only the beginning, and there will likely be more waves of that in the future. For now, I am enjoying yet another honeymoon period with the Fediverse or more particularly Mstdn.social that I migrated to last April. If you too have a general sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the direction they have been going, then you are more than welcome to join me in any of my nonsense.

I’ve written about the Fediverse a number of times, but the two most cogent tomes are my general primer and how to migrate instances. As always I will still be here, on the only platform I have any real control over… my blog, and my podcast.