What's Happening to Twitter Could Never Happen to Mastodon

Several Twitter crises ago, my editor pitched me the idea for this story. The suggestion was to explain not just why I thought Mastodon—a decentralized social network for Twitter-style posts—was better than Twitter, but also how it could resist whatever Musk-inflicted wound was in the news at the time. I liked the idea, but I didn't get around to writing it.

A few weeks later there was another crisis at Twitter (there have been so many I honestly can't remember which one) and this story came up again. And again. And again. And so now, I think it's finally time to run down the list and explain why Mastodon is structurally and technically impervious to the madness that is plaguing Twitter.

The Current Situation

Elon Musk paid $44 billion to purchase Twitter in 2022 and began purging employees and mucking up internal processes almost immediately. The result has been an increasingly chaotic and reportedly unprofitable mess for the blue bird social network. 

Mastodon, meanwhile, is an open-source social network that, like Twitter, is for sharing posts. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is built out of volunteer servers that communicate with one another. Also unlike Twitter, Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard that allows it to communicate with other ActivityPub-based social networks. From your Mastodon account, you can follow not only Mastodon users on other Mastodon servers but also people on the Instagram-like Pixelfed or GoodReads alternative BookWyrm.

Could a Mercurial Billionaire Buy Mastodon?

Musk bought Twitter for $44,000,000,000, which I am writing out with all its zeroes to give some sense of the absurdity of paying that much money for a website. Could the same happen with Mastodon? The short answer is no.

In August 2021, Mastodon transitioned to being a nonprofit company established in Germany, presumably with the intent of functioning independently forever. Mastodon's creator, Eugen Rochko, remains the CEO of the nonprofit and has said that he's already rejected offers to purchase Mastodon.

Keep in mind that Mastodon is a decentralized service built on open-source software. There is no single collection of servers and employees to purchase with Mastodon, which is a community of individual communities. Moreover, the guts of Mastodon are freely available for other people to use or build on, and many have. Even if somehow all of Mastodon as it exists today was bottled up and sold, people could just spin up new, independent servers and continue developing the software in a different direction.

Could Mastodon Charge for Blue Check Marks?

Shortly after taking control of Twitter, Musk announced that the company would give a blue verified check mark to anyone who paid $8 a month for a Twitter Blue subscription and remove "legacy" check marks. This is a manifestly bad idea since blue checks were introduced to assure Twitter users that a brand or a person was who they claimed to be. Since launching Twitter Blue, it has already been abused by spammers as well as anyone who wants to impersonate a famous person.

Mastodon does have a verification system, but it's entirely free and not controlled by Mastodon at all. To be verified on Mastodon, you have to place a snippet of code on a website you control, and then point your Mastodon account page to that website. If it sees the code snippet, you get a little check and a green box. It's simple and does work, though it can be abused by anyone willing to put the time into creating a decent phishing site.

However, if all you want is the blue check mark then you're in luck. Many Mastodon servers have introduced the Twitter-verified check as a custom emoji, and adding it to your account is as simple as clicking your mouse. Hell, you can have as many blue check marks as you want.

Could Mastodon Push Certain Users Into Your Feed?

Remember that time Elon Musk got mad that he wasn't as popular on the website he paid $44 billion to own and had his handful of remaining engineers gut the recommendation algorithm so that it would promote his own posts more often, and it went wrong, and then every Twitter user got piles of Musk Tweets whether they wanted them or not? What a time.

Mastodon, meanwhile, is not algorithmically sorted. In your home feed, you only see the posts of people you follow and the posts boosted by the people you follow. They're shown chronologically, and there's no mechanism for ads to be "promoted" into your feed. 

Not having an algorithm can sometimes be challenging, since it's not always easy to see what the big news of the day is on Mastodon. An Explore tab helps direct people toward the latest happenings, but it's entirely optional. The lack of an algorithmic feed is also a challenge to advertisers, who use it to have their products pushed to buyers who meet certain criteria. To this I say: Good.

Could Mastodon Become Overrun With Hate Speech?

One of the most not-surprising-but-somehow-still-surprising outcomes of Elon "Free Speech" Musk buying Twitter was the marked rise in hate speech across the platform. Twitter has always had a problem with the worst people saying the worst things, but I can only assume that Musk sees it as a feature and not a bug. 

Without centralized controls, you might assume that hate speech would be prevalent on Mastodon as well. And it does exist; there are nazis on Mastodon. But many Mastodon admins work hard to restrict and block their activity, and coordinate with other admins to identify bad actors (and even whole servers) and limit their visibility.

It takes a lot of work, and I do wonder as to how it will scale as more people join and more servers spin up. However, hatred is a human problem and it cannot be solved by technology. It will take human work to keep hatred in check.

Could Mastodon Fire Most of Its Employees and Become Wildly Unstable?

Mastodon lists nine employees on its website, which is eight more than it has had for the bulk of its existence. But while Rochko has done the bulk of the work building and running Mastodon, Github lists over 800 other contributors to the open-source project. The vast majority of them are surely volunteers, giving some time and expertise to expand the project. Given that, it's unlikely anyone would be able to hamper Mastodon's development by firing a bunch of people.

As to whether or not Mastodon could become wildly unstable or unusable, that is possible, but it's also possible for any piece of software. 

Could Mastodon Destroy Democracy?

Prior to Musk ponying up an immoral sum of money to purchase a website where celebrities have frequent public meltdowns, one of the biggest concerns with Twitter was the role it played in the dissemination of misinformation. Although the 2016 US presidential election was the poster child for nation-states using social media to try and influence the outcome of an election, it was not the first nor last time Twitter would be used in this way.

Going into the 2022 US midterm elections, the experts I spoke with were still highly critical of the safeguards Twitter had put in place to prevent the spread of misinformation. However, there was cautious optimism. The one caveat was no one knew what would happen if Musk's bid to buy Twitter went through.

While Musk has systematically removed or reduced all of those misinformation safeguards, it's worth noting that Mastodon is not free from misinformation either. It's largely up to Mastodon server admins to set their own standards for what is acceptable on their servers, and then enforce those standards. Fortunately, people do take misinformation seriously, and Mastodon lacks the algorithmic and advertising tools that attackers have abused to spread misinformation on other social media platforms. But if Mastodon ever reaches Twitter-level scale, the problem of misinformation could become a major issue.

Elon Covered Up the "W" on the Twitter HQ Sign to Spell "Titter." Could Someone Make It "Asstodon?"

I'm going to level with you: I'm not even sure this really happened. What with misinformation being what it is and AI-generated images getting so good you can't tell a fake Pope from the genuine pontiff, I have no idea if the pictures of Twitter's sign being modified to spell "Titter" are legitimate. (Update: If the New York Post says it really happened, that means something. Right?)

However, I am certain this could never happen to Mastodon. For one thing, there is no Mastodon HQ and no Mastodon sign to modify. For another, it's a nonprofit organization we're talking about and it would take a lot more effort to get a rude word out of "Mastodon." 

Could Mastodon Change Its Logo to the Dogecoin Shiba Inu for Some Reason?

In case you missed it, Twitter's blue bird was replaced with the Dogecoin Shiba Inu. This led PCMag to correctly ask, "Does it even matter?"

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Mastodon, the nonprofit entity that controls Mastodon's source code, also controls the core branding of the platform. So, in theory, Mastodon could decide that it wanted to go in a more yawn-inducing, joke-from-2011 direction and discard the (adorable) mammoths in favor of the Dogecoin dog.

But there's no reason Mastodon server admins would have to follow suit. Case in point: Rochko initially said that posts on Mastodon would be called "Toots" but later walked back the statement and removed the Toot nomenclature from Mastodon's interface. Not everyone liked this, and some Mastodon server admins modified their individual servers to continue displaying "Toot." 

This is actually one of the more fun aspects of Mastodon. Each server can have its own visual identity, perhaps sticking close to mainline Mastodon's design or heading out in their own direction.

Could Mastodon Block Competitors' Content?

One of the strangest things to happen at Twitter since Elon Musk assumed power has been the petty way the company deals with links to competitors. Previously, links to Mastodon accounts posted to Twitter were flagged as potentially malicious. Later, it was reported that Twitter was making it harder to share posts that had links to Substack stories.

Because Mastodon has little central control over what individual Mastodon servers do, there's no way this kind of blanket ban could be enforced. And without the kind of algorithmic feed manipulation tools that Twitter has, Mastodon likely wouldn't be able to change how certain posts function. 

Now, it's possible that someone could take Mastodon's code, gin up some features that would allow suppressing competitors' content, and then make their own server where they could filter out Twitter links, for instance. However, that would only be true for users of that specific server, and I would imagine that the fiercely independent Mastodon server admins would likely isolate themselves from such a server.

Something Worse Could Happen

Huffing one's own superiority is the traditional role for the open-source evangelist, and while I do sometimes feel smug about how Twitter has fallen apart, I'm not happy about it. I'm also not deluded enough to not see Mastodon's flaws. 

For one thing, the decentralized design of Mastodon requires that new users find a Mastodon server that will accept them and create an account. Although it really doesn't matter which server people sign up with, it's still a big hurdle for acceptance and is what I hear the most about when people talk to me about Mastodon.

And while Mastodon's interconnected servers make it resilient, each one is its own point of failure. Every few months I see news that a server is shutting down—usually from admin burnout—and users begin casting about for a new home on the fediverse. While creating and managing a server is something people can learn, running a community is actually really hard.

Social Media vs. Community Media

These are just a small number of points, and doesn't get into the thorny issues of Mastodon's culture (or if it has or even should have cultural norms) and how it will adapt as more people leave Twitter. But while there are assuredly challenges and drawbacks to Mastodon, it and other fediverse platforms are the most exciting thing to happen online in decades. Now, communities are taking control of social media's power, and their success has been just as improbable as Twitter's demise.

If I missed a plot point or if there's a potential pitfall for Mastodon I haven't addressed, don't leave your thoughts in the comments. Just email me or message me on Mastodon.