Birdsite migration accelerates as tweeters fly to Mastodon

The amount of coverage of Elon Musk destroying the social network he bought may seem surprising at first. Web forums, messengers and social media companies and the like don’t seem to be long-lived.

Think about Myspace, Bebo, Livejournal and others. They’ve fizzed out or become quiet spaces you don’t hear much about.

Not so Twitter. I won’t lie. You don’t want to miss the often hilarious insanity playing out in real time on Twitter as bogus “verified” accounts impersonate real ones.

The chaos has hit Twitter revenue and Musk is already talking bankruptcy for the birdsite.

It is amazing that verification, a security feature meant to protect users against the malicious impersonation of well-known accounts, is behind Twitter burning and crashing into the ground.

Account verification may end up being a problem for the much quieter, but rapidly growing Mastodon network although I suspect its volunteer admins would hit the delete buttons on their virtual servers if the situation got to that stage.

The birdsite migration is gathering pace with plenty of lovely people I interact with on Twitter having opened Mastodon accounts.

Mastodon isn’t the same as Twitter though; far from it. It’s not the tech. Don’t believe people who say you need a post-grad degree in Linux administration to be on Mastodon; setting up an account and posting are both easy.

But, social media posting needs content moderation, no matter what free speech absolutists like Musk, who has very thin skin and suspends accounts that offend him, claim.

Content moderation is difficult. Journalist Quinn Norton pointed to the US and UK, with their shared language and culture as an example.

Norton noted that in the UK “to smoke a fag” means to have a cigarette. In the US, it means to shoot a gay man.

Here, Twitter mostly ignores nuances and errs on the side of saywhat-you-like until users go berserk and moderators have to step in and slap them down.

Mastodon is the opposite, with a complex, multi-layer moderation system designed to shield users from abuse from the get-go.

This includes acceptable use policies (AUPS) that admins can tailor to their liking, and which vary from site to site. It follows from that, that it really does matter which server you connect to.

Before setting up an account and posting to a particular Mastodon instance, read its AUP carefully to see if the rules fit your views. Don’t sweat if you get it wrong though, you can easily move yourself and your users to another instance.

Most Mastodonts take safety seriously and they post screeds of helpful advice on what to say and how to communicate it.

Another content moderation feature allows admins and users to block Mastodon instances they don’t agree with. This stops content from the blocked sites from appearing in the federated timeline on the server you connect to.

It’s a double-edged sword that for example prevents troll Mastodon farms from poisoning the discourse, but could also hide content you may wish to see.

You might want to share a fun or interesting “toot” elsewhere, or report on it as a journalist, but some servers ban quoting of content despite it being published on a public forum on the internet. Anyone who doesn’t heed that rule could be blocked.

I’m not totally sure that I’ve got all attempts at engineering out unkindness right, but they feel like spontaneity killers that suck the fun out of posting as you worry about offending others.

Ah yes; I think we’ll miss Twitter, the warts and all hellscape that it is.