0:00

This

0:00

is Brooke. Welcome to the Midweek podcast.

0:03

What follows is a longer conversation

0:05

with Clive Thompson about Mastodon.

0:08

The more edited version will be on the show

0:10

that posts on Friday.

0:15

At the base of the Statue of Liberty,

0:17

there's poem that bears some famous

0:19

lines. Hit me, you're tired,

0:21

you're poor, you're huddled masses

0:24

yearning to breathe free. the

0:26

wretched refuse of your teeming

0:28

shore, send these the

0:30

homeless, tempest tossed.

0:33

to me. Were

0:36

the words for a new start, but

0:38

in twenty twenty two, they could easily

0:40

address a distinctly different

0:42

huddled mass in search of a more

0:45

specialized refuge.

0:46

We'll turn out of a turmoil at Twitter,

0:48

the social media giant appeared to be

0:50

in disarray after as many as

0:52

half of its employees were laid off

0:55

under new owner, Elon Musk.

0:57

How's this for a first message

0:59

from your new boss? A staff wide email that was

1:01

sent in the middle of the night, Elon Musk,

1:03

suggested the company could go into bankruptcy

1:05

as executives are resigning, advertisers

1:08

are fleeing, and trolls are running rampant.

1:10

The latest turmoil at Twitter this morning

1:12

more than fourth thousand contract workers

1:14

were terminated over the weekend. As

1:16

a result, millions of Twitter users

1:18

are exploring another little known

1:20

platform called Mastodon. Mastodon

1:24

originally created by a German programmer

1:26

named Eugen Rochko in

1:28

twenty sixteen. While the

1:30

two platforms share a general

1:33

resemblance, the similarity is merely

1:35

skin deep. For example, what

1:37

think of as a tweet button on Mastodon

1:39

is called a toot. Although as

1:41

of this week, toot has been retired

1:44

being too easily employed in double

1:46

entendres, So the button now

1:48

just says publish. And

1:50

also, what you post can be a lot

1:52

longer. And to join Mastodon

1:54

means joining a group that acts as your

1:57

home base that group is called a

1:59

server

1:59

or an instance.

1:59

There's no universal group

2:02

with all users. Plus,

2:04

Mastodon's original

2:05

source code is publicly available

2:08

and changeable. All this

2:10

because Mastodon just doesn't

2:12

wanna be like Twitter. why

2:15

I hear you cry? Does any of this

2:17

matter to those of us who really couldn't

2:19

care less about Twitter, much less

2:22

mastodon.

2:24

Clive Thompson is a

2:26

tech journalist whose work appears in the New

2:28

York Times magazine, Wired and

2:30

Smithsonian, His most recent

2:32

book is coders, the making of a

2:34

new tribe and the remaking of

2:36

the world. He's offered a kind of

2:38

explainer. In a recent medium

2:41

and he says that Mastodon. Some

2:44

of the stuff is very similar when you make a little

2:46

post. Yes. It's typically called

2:48

a toot because mastodon's symbol,

2:50

which is, you know, a mastodon, has

2:52

elephant like Snow, and so the idea is that

2:54

you're tooting. Of course, because tooth

2:56

has these really terrible other implications that

2:58

the creator was not aware of. In English,

3:00

many people running Mastodon software will

3:03

voluntarily sort of change the code

3:05

on their server to say, yeah, this is a publish

3:07

button, this is not a toot. But it's basically the

3:09

same thing as a tweet. Often, people

3:11

install it, so there's kind of longer length

3:13

the one that I'm on, you can write, like, five hundred characters,

3:15

which is, like, you know, almost twice as much as a

3:17

tweet. That starts to kinda become almost like a blog

3:19

post, which is kinda nice. And then there's a button,

3:22

if you see something awesome, kinda like

3:24

retweeting on Twitter, you can hit

3:26

that button and it's called boosting. So

3:28

it won't it'll take what someone else said

3:30

and show it to everyone who's following me.

3:32

We're gonna get

3:33

back to all of that, but sticking to the

3:35

vocabulary for a second, a

3:37

particular server? Like, I'm

3:39

on the Juno

3:40

server. Yeah. Are you on Juno

3:42

dot host? Right? Is that the way you're on? No.

3:45

Yeah. So basically, what's a little different

3:47

is when you join Twitter, you just go

3:49

to Twitter. But the way that Mastodon

3:51

works is it's what they call a federated

3:54

bunch of Mastodon servers.

3:56

Sometimes also called Mastodon instances

3:58

just to make it even more complicated. Yeah. The point being,

4:00

someone can set up their own Mastodon server

4:03

a friend of mine did it. And he said, hey, Clive, do you wanna

4:05

join mine? And I said, sure. And so there's like fifty

4:07

of us, and he's running it. And there are thousands

4:09

and thousands and thousands of these servers. You're

4:11

on one that's run by a bunch of journalists. journal

4:13

dot host. And there's, like, two thousand

4:15

or so journalists there. This is one of

4:17

the first kind of weird things. Right? Like, we're accustomed

4:19

to a social network being just one site that

4:21

you go to. And this is not like that. These are

4:23

all thousands of sites that are, quote

4:26

unquote, federated. They can kinda talk to

4:28

each other. You know, anyone on any server

4:30

can generally more or less talk to

4:32

people other servers, the other piece of

4:34

lingo is they call this the Fediverse,

4:36

the federated universe. Right? It's

4:38

there's actually a a bunch of things out there

4:40

in this federated universe, Mastodon's only

4:42

kind of one piece of software. But because

4:44

it's it's so much like Twitter, it's kind of the one

4:46

that's taken off recently. The

4:48

Federation aspect of this is

4:50

one of the big differences, as you've

4:52

said. And the default is

4:54

that all the various servers

4:57

or instances can see

4:59

other ones, but that's just the default.

5:02

Each server or instance

5:04

makes its own rules.

5:07

And it can also just

5:09

decide to block another

5:12

server if they find it too toxic.

5:14

Yeah. Make it so that you can't

5:16

see it and it can't see you.

5:18

You're exactly right. There are servers you

5:20

know, that I've been on, and I've been on different

5:22

Mastodon servers for years now. And

5:25

they'll each set up rules saying,

5:27

hey, guys, here is what we consider

5:29

to be good behavior and a loud

5:31

behavior on our server. You can't be a

5:33

racist idiot, you know. You you can't

5:35

say stuff that we consider to be massaging by

5:37

the people on this community. If you do that, we

5:39

have the right to kick you off the server. And there are

5:41

other servers that are like, yeah, we don't have any rules. You can

5:43

kind of say whatever you want. So it's almost like

5:46

belonging to a neighborhood where there's neighborhood

5:48

rules. Right? And if the neighbors decide, you know,

5:50

you're being a terrible neighbor, they could

5:52

say, you know, you're not allowed to be on this neighborhood

5:54

anymore. But the really interesting thing

5:56

is that if someone comes to me and like starts

5:58

harassing me in d m's or in or

6:00

replies to me, I can I can mute or

6:02

block just that one person. And I

6:04

can also decide, hey, you know, the server

6:06

that person is on is filled with dirtbags. So

6:08

I'm gonna block that whole server. I don't wanna

6:10

see anything they do. I don't want them sing

6:12

what I say. And that's great. That's actually very useful,

6:14

but there's this extra layer where

6:16

an entire server like my entire server

6:19

like fifty people on it could decide there's a

6:21

bunch of other servers over there that are just filled with

6:23

terrible people who are harassing us.

6:25

So let's put a block from

6:27

our entire neighborhood to theirs. Our entire

6:29

server to theirs. Mhmm. So nothing that

6:31

anyone does on our server can be seen

6:33

by them. Little sort of federated

6:35

nation states like early medieval

6:37

Europe.

6:37

It's really interesting and You

6:40

wrote an article recently on

6:42

Medium explaining that Mastodon

6:45

is compared to not just Twitter, but

6:47

almost all other social media sites It's

6:49

explicitly antiviral. It

6:52

prioritizes friction.

6:54

And there's a number of

6:56

ways in which it does that.

6:58

I mean, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube,

7:01

they want big viral surges. They're

7:03

designed that way to push

7:05

things to get more popular. how

7:08

does Mastodon push against

7:10

virality and why?

7:12

There are two ways in

7:14

which masted on

7:16

software and the people who've

7:18

been using it push against virality.

7:20

The first one is at the level of kind of the

7:22

code, like the way that masted on software

7:24

is designed. there's a couple things

7:26

in there that are very different from the way things

7:28

work on Twitter. Because if you think about Twitter,

7:30

a lot of the way it's architected is

7:32

designed to sort of encourage

7:35

massive joint attention of millions of people

7:37

on some hot

7:39

meme or joke or person that is just blowing

7:41

up right now.

7:42

trending. It's trending. It's trending.

7:44

It's trending. Exactly. It's like, we're all looking

7:46

at it. We're all talking about it. The way that Twitter

7:48

does that is that it it has a couple tools

7:50

to encourage virality. It has an

7:52

algorithm that says, well,

7:54

if a tweet is starting to take off,

7:56

then let's amplify it further. Let's push

7:58

it to the top of other people's algorithms.

8:00

other people's feeds

8:02

so that, like, it's a rich get richer phenomenon.

8:04

Right? And there's other things like the quote tweet

8:06

button, you know, that basically allows me to

8:08

go someone just said this thing, here's what I think

8:10

about it. That's another thing that often you

8:12

see whenever you see a big viral surge, it's

8:14

often based around these quote tweets. Right? Now

8:16

neither of those things exist in the

8:18

traditional Mastodon software. For example,

8:21

the feed, it's just ranked in reverse

8:23

chronology. So whatever you're looking

8:25

at is just what happened at this moment

8:27

and it goes backwards and time downwards.

8:29

Mhmm. And there's no universal search.

8:32

you can

8:32

search your own post, you can search your home

8:35

server for maybe a post you wanna get back to.

8:37

On Twitter, if you wanna search

8:39

Clive Thompson, you can search all of

8:41

Twitter for those words. Mastodon

8:43

doesn't do that. Mastodon doesn't

8:45

allow --

8:46

Yeah. -- quote tweets. Yeah. Exactly.

8:48

I

8:48

don't understand why. That one is

8:50

pretty pretty controversial. Why

8:53

not? What's the point of these

8:55

changes?

8:55

Well, the

8:56

creator of Mastodon and the

8:59

early community of users thought

9:01

that quote tweeting on Twitter

9:03

had led to too much negative

9:05

quote tweeting of the form

9:07

of, like, wow, would you look at this stupid

9:09

crap this person just said? By

9:10

sardonically pointing to it,

9:12

you're actually promoting

9:14

stupid crap. in their view, you're sort of

9:16

adding to the, like, nasty

9:18

corrosive sardonic quality of a lot of

9:20

Twitter discourse. That's how they it.

9:22

Right? And so they were like, you know, let's just

9:24

not do that. Let's not have that possible

9:26

so that, you know, we don't

9:28

have that culture. But underneath that, there

9:30

was quite a subtle thing going on,

9:32

which is that the crater of Mastodon, and

9:34

and again, the early community of users who were

9:36

very influential. Where were they

9:38

based? they were over the world, frankly.

9:40

Early users of Mastodon were often

9:42

people that sort of fled Twitter

9:45

because they were being harassed there. And

9:47

they regarded a lot of these viral

9:49

surges as being related to

9:51

the harassment that they'd seen. So

9:53

where Twitter tries to make things go

9:55

fast, the design of Mastodon and

9:57

kind of the norms of the community were

10:00

to make things go more slowly.

10:02

And that's why you don't see quote tweets.

10:04

That's why you don't see algorithm

10:06

that tries to find viral utterances

10:08

and make them even more viral. Mhmm.

10:10

But but the upshot is, you know, it can

10:12

be quite weird for someone to come from

10:14

Twitter and look at what's happening on the

10:16

Mastodon communities. Right? Because that

10:18

literally had journalists show up on Mastodon and

10:20

ask me, who are the must follows?

10:22

You know, where's the hot conversations? I'm

10:24

like, guys, you know,

10:26

there really aren't any. I mean, there

10:28

definitely are people that have more followers than

10:30

others, but they don't sort of

10:32

loom large in people's feeds

10:34

the way they do in Twitter. But are

10:36

there conversations? I'm new to the

10:38

site. Oh, yeah. Can you learn lots

10:40

of stuff? Oh

10:41

my goodness. Yes. In fact, actually, I

10:43

would tell you that in the

10:45

last kind of week that a lot of people have

10:47

flooded on and maced on. It is

10:49

really kinda transformed in

10:51

a good way for me. I'm getting

10:53

much better quality conversations on Mastodon

10:55

than I am on Twitter and that maybe I've had

10:57

on Twitter in years, frankly. Mhmm. And

10:59

I think it's due a little bit to some

11:01

of these differences in the way things work. Like, people

11:03

are more encouraged just to sort of

11:05

talk about ideas and not as

11:08

incentivized to say something that is

11:10

you know, gonna go viral. Because one of the

11:12

things about antiviral design

11:14

that you see in places like, you know,

11:16

the photovirus and mastodon is

11:18

that once people sort of orient themselves and go

11:20

well, is not exclusively for sort of self

11:22

promotion and trying to make things take off,

11:24

it kind of changes what you want to say

11:26

in the first place. Twitter is sort

11:28

of trying to encourage hot

11:30

emotionality so that something can really explode, you

11:32

get a kind of the opposite thing. You get a

11:34

little more quieter muttering conversations that

11:36

go in weirder places. I quite like

11:38

that. So

11:39

prior to Elon Musk's takeover with

11:41

Twitter, You quoted right on programmer

11:44

Robyn Sloane saying an

11:47

industrialist may soon purchase

11:49

Twitter, Inc. His substantial

11:51

success launching reusable spaceships

11:53

does nothing to prepare him for

11:55

the challenge of building social

11:57

spaces. The latter calls

11:59

on every liberal art at

12:01

once, while the former's just

12:03

rocket science. Okay.

12:06

So, Clive. Even with all

12:08

these features designed to prevent

12:10

Mastodon from becoming what Twitter

12:12

is and has been at its

12:14

worst, can Mastodon

12:17

really immunize itself against

12:19

the plagues of traditional social

12:21

media like harassment and hate

12:23

speech and trolls? Yeah. That's

12:25

a really good question. I mean,

12:27

definitely, it is easier

12:29

for people on a Mastodon

12:31

server to block

12:33

themselves off from really

12:35

terrible actors. And we saw this

12:37

years ago, there was this famous moment

12:39

when a bunch of, you know, just common Nazis

12:41

decided that, hey, all these

12:43

folks, these early adopters of

12:45

Mastodon came from Twitter because

12:47

they wanted to get away from Rachel

12:49

Horassment, there was a lot of queer and trans

12:51

communities that were trying to get away. So the

12:53

Trolls said, let's just follow him over

12:55

there. Exactly. Exactly.

12:57

and what the controls discovered was that once

13:00

they got up in people's grills, a couple

13:02

servers said, alright, we're blocking you. And the thing is

13:04

those server administrators, the people

13:06

running those servers, they talked each other. Right? I'm a

13:08

participant in helping run my server. And

13:10

we will talk to people that run other

13:12

servers to find out, okay. So, you know, how are things

13:14

going? What problems you're running

13:16

into? We'll sort of trade stories

13:18

of terribly behaved other servers, and we

13:20

will jointly block them all. And this is exactly

13:22

what happened to the influx of Nazis. We

13:24

said very rapidly, they discovered that every

13:26

other server had just unilaterally blocked them

13:28

and they were sort of in the corner of of the federer's

13:30

just talking to themselves. And so in

13:32

one sense, that's great. There aren't

13:34

much more powerful tools that I think exist in

13:36

Twitter. But you know, there's a lot of vulnerabilities

13:39

too. Twitter had some of the

13:41

world's top engineers working hard

13:43

on security. it was harder to hack

13:45

into Twitter and steal data. If you have

13:47

thousands of people who are kinda

13:49

like me or only slightly more

13:51

technically sophisticated than me running their

13:53

servers, the security is gonna be nowhere near as

13:55

good. And so there is

13:57

probably going to be, I would imagine a lot

13:59

of trolls and even nation states

14:01

hacking in to Mastodon instances if

14:03

they think there are people on those servers

14:06

whose information they wanna steal or they

14:08

wanna screw when I saw that there's a journalist instance,

14:10

I thought, well, that's great. Probably a good thing for there to

14:12

be a marathon instance just for journalists. But

14:14

it's also kind of a honeypot. Right?

14:16

You know, you could imagine a lot of actors

14:18

wanting to get in there and steal that information. Wait

14:20

a

14:20

second. Is Mastodon collecting

14:23

data? I mean, is their data

14:25

stored somewhere that can be hacked into? Or

14:27

are we just talking about the substance of

14:30

people's posts? Well,

14:31

direct messages. one person

14:34

to another, unmasted on, which are

14:36

putively private, but could easily

14:38

be stolen. Most people

14:39

wouldn't like say who

14:41

their anonymous

14:41

sources in those context.

14:44

You would hope so. The

14:46

people say a lot of stuff in DMs.

14:49

Right. And then there's just, you know, login information,

14:52

passwords, stuff like that. could be reused in other

14:54

places. So tell me more about the

14:56

downsides then. There are some big

14:58

cultural downsides to this kind of

15:00

antiviral culture. One of them is

15:02

that, you know, for all of the sort of

15:04

bad stuff that we've seen from big

15:06

viral surges on Twitter, there's

15:08

also really good stuff. Right? Like, some of the

15:10

biggest issues of our

15:12

day like Black Lives Matter

15:14

or Me Too. Mhmm. These were issues that

15:16

had been ignored by the mainstream media

15:18

for a really, really long time. And

15:20

it was working with these

15:22

mechanisms of virality that a lot of

15:24

these issues came to the fore, to

15:26

the mainstream. Right? I don't think there

15:28

would have been as robust a conversation

15:30

about massaging in the workplace, about

15:32

the treatment of black Americans

15:34

by police, if it weren't for these

15:36

viral surges on Twitter. Those are really, really

15:38

good things. There's also

15:40

some fantastic black academics

15:42

who have been thinking about the problems

15:44

that are caused by not having something

15:46

like, quote, tweets. For example,

15:48

jotlin flowers, academic. It just wrote this

15:50

fantastic series of tweets and

15:52

series of posts I've mastodon saying, look,

15:54

black Twitter was a huge phenomenon, and it

15:56

was incredibly important for black

15:58

communities all across the world and in

16:00

America. And it relied

16:02

heavily on quote tweeting because that

16:04

tapped into the sort of calm response

16:06

culture. that was generations old in

16:08

black America and around the world. It

16:10

also brought their words,

16:12

their quoted words

16:14

more to the fore. I hear what you're

16:16

saying and I know that there's a real

16:18

push to get Mastodon to

16:20

do quote tweets. Right. Quote,

16:23

toots. They're called booths or quote

16:25

booths? Booth. Yes. And one

16:27

of the problems is, of course, that

16:29

because it is you know,

16:31

federated because I'm running

16:33

with some friends. I'm running a

16:35

copy of Mastodon on my server and there's

16:37

thousands of other people running them.

16:39

The only way to get everyone to

16:41

have, quote, tweets or quote,

16:43

tweets would be for everyone to update their

16:45

software in exactly the same way. And

16:47

it's not clear that everyone would wanna

16:49

do that. Right? because the whole point is to

16:51

have local control.

16:52

However, Twitter, though

16:54

a dumpster fire, is not

16:57

fed nor are all the

16:59

other virally driven

17:01

social media platforms? I mean,

17:03

they're still there. Does Mastodon

17:05

have to

17:05

be one? this is

17:07

really on point. A lot of people have been arguing

17:09

long before me that Mastodon

17:11

and the other services on the Thetaverse.

17:13

not even supposed to be replicas or

17:16

substitutes for Twitter. They have an intentionally

17:18

different way of being and of

17:20

encouraging conversation. And

17:22

so you shouldn't look to it to replace Twitter

17:24

in the first place. Personally,

17:26

I hope that Twitter doesn't go anywhere for

17:28

all the reasons you talked about sure

17:30

it's a dumpster fire, but it has some amazing, amazing things that

17:33

come from shoving everyone in this

17:35

one room and having these weird

17:37

rangey conversations. I think that's

17:39

powerful. I hope Elon Musk doesn't drive

17:41

it into the ground. I'm a little worried he

17:43

is. I'm terrified it's just gonna turn into

17:45

a whole pile of 404 error

17:48

pages any day now. Let's be real, that bad

17:50

thing for certain aspects of public discourse. A

17:52

lot of people like to pile on Twitter,

17:54

including myself, but they would really miss it

17:56

if it were gone. I

17:58

was going to ask you if you think this

17:59

kind of social media is

18:02

sustainable, whatever that

18:04

may mean.

18:04

Yeah. I don't know if

18:05

any particular kind of

18:08

social media is ultimately

18:11

sustainable. One -- Yep. keeps

18:13

being supplanted by another, I mean, friend

18:15

stir anybody. So what

18:17

do you think? Is it?

18:18

I actually think that

18:21

masted on and these other experiments on the

18:23

Fediverse are extremely

18:25

sustainable for the following reason

18:27

because they're all small local

18:29

experiments. you only need a

18:31

small number of people to say, hey, I wanna keep this

18:33

going, to keep it going. And it reminds me

18:35

a little bit of this sort of

18:38

massive dark matter world of

18:41

inexpensive to cheap to free discussion

18:43

boards devoted to hobbies. Right?

18:45

I play guitar. So I am on, like,

18:47

four different guitar pedal and

18:49

guitarist discussion groups, and they're all

18:51

run using free software on

18:53

some rented server somewhere that costs like

18:55

a dollar a month. there's like three hundred

18:58

regulars. And we don't care if anyone else In fact,

19:00

we don't want anyone else to show up. There's three hundred

19:02

of us. That's all we need to talk about guitar

19:04

pedals until the sun explodes. and we're completely off the

19:06

radar and we like it that way. And there

19:08

are hundreds and thousands of communities

19:10

like this around the world. They

19:12

constitute sort of the dark matter of

19:14

social media. While everyone's talking about Twitter and

19:17

TikTok because those are legitimately important

19:19

sites, there is just this long

19:21

thriving, like decades thriving.

19:23

world of social media below that.

19:26

That's much more human scaled and to a

19:28

certain extent masked on is like

19:30

that. It's having its moment in the

19:32

sun right now and it might grow to be

19:34

huge. But even if the attention of the

19:36

world were to move away from it, it will

19:38

absolutely sustain itself. because

19:40

it only requires a bunch of

19:42

committed people to say, hey, I wanna do this.

19:44

Things like that are very robust. Now

19:46

part of the reason traditional

19:49

social media promote engagement,

19:51

which is often expressed in

19:53

ugly interactions. Is

19:56

that those interactions prompt

19:58

clicks and views and and

20:01

emotions that drive up ad revenue.

20:03

How does Mastodon make money?

20:06

It

20:06

doesn't it doesn't make money at all. It is

20:08

software that individuals run to

20:10

provide a service for themselves. Is it

20:12

like Wikipedia or something?

20:15

can you contribute to Mastodon? Like

20:16

Mastodon again is just software that I

20:19

and a bunch of friends run. So

20:21

we have a bill for a server

20:23

every month. and we have to cover that bill. And

20:25

so we just sort of pass the hat and we

20:27

have a Patreon. There's some much

20:29

larger servers that have it more formalized. They're

20:31

like, okay, you know, if you want

20:33

to be part of the server, you kind of have

20:35

to kid in this amount, you know, a month so we

20:37

can pay not just for the server cost,

20:39

but for someone to run it and make sure

20:41

it works. there's a whole range

20:43

of ways this can work. Very, very

20:45

different from a regular social

20:47

network like Twitter where there's a central place that

20:49

has to pay for employees. This is

20:51

like thousands of little places that are

20:53

all like little, you know, anarchist

20:56

gatherings. And I I say, anarchist in the positive

20:58

sense, like, not lack of a rule, but self

21:01

rule. So

21:01

I'm curious

21:02

curious

21:03

why you got

21:04

unmasked on -- Yeah. -- ahead of all

21:06

of us. You said it prioritizes friction

21:10

Becca, the producer of this segment, had

21:12

a great praise. She said it's like

21:14

old school communication using

21:16

just a quarter cup

21:18

of silicon valley to make it palatable.

21:21

Do you think people will enjoy

21:24

it? That's a

21:25

great question. I originally got

21:27

a marathon because, you know, I was

21:29

interested to see what this new

21:32

thetaverse was like. And I joined like a

21:34

server filled with open source software

21:36

nerd. k. This is talk about this. We could

21:38

go really deep and nerdy without me bothering

21:40

my Twitter followers who would have no interest in

21:42

hearing me talk about Linux drivers for

21:45

antique webcams. But I was attracted to the

21:47

idea of this sort of self run

21:49

non corporate world, and I could see that

21:51

people are behaving differently, and I wanted to

21:53

understand why. Now the question is,

21:55

is this attractive to enough people that

21:57

a lot would wanna do it? If you'd asked me

21:59

three weeks ago before Elon Musk started

22:01

driving people in a panic, away

22:03

from Twitter. I would have said, I don't think

22:05

a lot of people are gonna wanna interact

22:07

in the way that, you know, Mastodon's

22:11

community and technological affordances

22:13

allow you to do. But lo and

22:15

behold, there are just tons of

22:17

folks now who've joined Mastodon that I'm

22:19

following and they're from every walk of

22:21

life. Someone joked the other day they posted

22:23

something on Mastodon saying, I don't know, man. People

22:25

keep on saying Mastodon is

22:27

hard to joined, but I just got a note from my retired

22:29

mother saying, oh, yeah, I just followed you on the

22:31

elephant site, you know. And

22:33

It's impossible to be right

22:35

about this stuff. it's impossible to

22:38

prognosticate. It's a real mugs game.

22:40

But

22:40

let's acknowledge, first of all,

22:42

that Twitter isn't even close to the

22:45

most popular social media site. It's no

22:47

Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram,

22:50

Snapchat. That said and

22:52

this is a question we always ask

22:54

and people who've gotten far into the interview

22:56

are wondering why we haven't asked it

22:58

until now. Why do you think

23:00

a migration from Twitter is

23:03

worth paying attention to

23:05

even if you've never

23:07

used Twitter and will never

23:09

use Mastodon. Does it

23:12

matter? the

23:12

way people use Twitter or don't

23:14

use Twitter or the alternatives they go

23:16

to does matter for the following reason.

23:19

Twitter has, for better and

23:21

for often both at once become kind of

23:23

a fulcrum for various

23:25

aspects of civic discussion and civic

23:27

debate. It's designed to

23:29

be really fast. It's designed to be

23:31

really easy. It's text heavy. There's

23:33

definitely pictures and videos, but Twitter

23:35

is fundamentally one of

23:37

the last big social medias that heavily prioritizes

23:39

text and writing. And that gives

23:41

it a type of a skimability

23:44

and speed that something like discourse

23:46

on YouTube doesn't have because you have to watch

23:48

the ten minute video. That's sort of

23:50

why Twitter has had this outsized

23:53

force. in public debate. Partly

23:55

also, you know, there's a lot of journalists there, there's a lot

23:57

of celebrities there, but I honestly think it's

23:59

because of this this text based discursive

24:01

format. And I'm not the first person to point this

24:03

out. In fact, there was a great tweet thrown by Taylor

24:05

Lorenzo, the Washington Post a while ago saying it's

24:07

sort of exactly this. Right? So in

24:09

that sense, yes. Even if you don't use Twitter, that's

24:12

why it matters. It's because it has that outsized

24:14

influence. And therefore, if

24:16

people even a significant chunk

24:18

of people are just enchanted with Twitter or forced off

24:20

Twitter to the point they go somewhere else. Those

24:22

other spaces also have

24:25

an impact. The really interesting thing is that the

24:27

long term users of

24:29

Mastodon on the Fediiverse are not

24:31

entirely thrilled with this

24:33

new migration of

24:35

people who are being driven off Twitter

24:37

because they're kinda like, look guys, we had this kind of

24:39

quiet space that was working really well for

24:41

us. And now there's a ton

24:43

of new people running around

24:45

with very different cultural assumptions,

24:47

very different behaviors. They're a little worried

24:49

that kind of the conventions and the

24:51

culture of Twitter. including some of

24:53

that thirst for morality, will

24:56

be injected into the DNA of the

24:58

culture of people using Mastodon. That's

25:00

interesting too because, of course, it

25:02

isn't just technology, it's culture, how people

25:04

want to behave, and spaces change

25:06

when people's cultural expectations change Clive,

25:09

thank you very

25:10

much. I'm glad to be here. That was a lot

25:12

of fun. Clive Thompson

25:15

is a tech journalist whose work appears in

25:17

the New York

25:17

Times Mac Aisine Wired and Smithsonian, his most

25:20

recent book is coders, the

25:22

making of a new tribe and the

25:24

remaking of the world. You can

25:26

find on the media on

25:28

mass to Don searching at on the media

25:31

at journal dot

25:33

host.