A Mastodon Explainer (Robert Wright & Harry McCracken)

You're listening to Robert Wright's Nonzero Podcast.

Hi, Harry.

Hi, Bob.

How you doing?

Great. How are you?

Cannot complain. Let me introduce us. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of Nonzero Newsletter. This is the Nonzero Podcast. You're Harry McCracken, esteemed tech writer, currently at Fast Company where you are the what, global technology editor? Is that your title?

I am the global technology editor, although I'm still unclear what the global part means.

Well, is there like a regular technology editor that you can pull rank on there and just kind of remind them who's in charge?

That must be it, although he's really good, so I tend not to do that.

I would if I were you. If I were you, I'd be going Donald Trump on him, man. His self-esteem would be in the ground. I would take advantage of a title like that. But I digress. Well, let me say a little more about you because, you know, I had forgotten until I looked at your Wikipedia page this morning that, uh, you had this, uh, great moment of integrity in your career. You were, you were editor of PC World magazine.

That's right.

Which first of all, back in the days of physical magazines, as some of us remember, was one of the big Windows, uh, platform computing magazines, right? I think of their, of like PC and PC World as the big ones. There was also a PC Compute or something. Am I—

there's PC Computing, which was started by the PC Magazine folks to try to squeeze PC World from both sides. PC World, I believe, at its height was the largest circulation technology magazine of any kind. Also bigger than the big business magazines. We reached a circulation of 1.25 million.

So it was a big deal. You were in charge, and, and in 2007, I guess, you started getting pressure from the business side, in fact, from the person who was CEO of PC World. To, let's just say, not be too harsh in your coverage of certain advertisers.

And it was, it was one specific company, uh-huh, Apple, to be exact.

Well, it's funny that you were even covering Apple as a, as a basically a Windows platform magazine, right? But you were—

we kind of started— I mean, we certainly spent many years just covering, um, the IBM PC and stuff compatible with that, but this was the period where Apple was resurgent And so we did start to write about it quite a bit. And actually, sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. Go ahead. Tell the story if you want.

Well, the, um, the dispute was actually not about advertising. Um, uh, PC World was part of a company called IDG, which was a large global tech media company. And, um, we also put on Macworld Expo, which at the time was this very large and successful conference, and one of the reasons it was large and successful was because Steve Jobs tended to announce his new products there, such as the iPhone, which was announced at Macworld Expo in 2007. So it's fair to say that the CEO was a bit sensitive about stuff that Apple might take negatively, and he got upset about a story we were planning to run called, I believe, 10 Things We Hate About Apple, which we were planning to write and publish at the same time as the story called 10 Things We Love About Apple. So, the CEO said, "Sorry, you can't run the negative story." And through a weird series of unlucky decisions, he actually had an unedited draft of the story he disliked. Normally, the CEO would not see that, but he did see it before it had been edited and essentially told me we couldn't run it. My stance was that as editor-in-chief, I got to decide that and that I would be happy to have a dialogue with them. But if he just said, you can't run it, I did not want to work there. And so I resigned.

And then he was transferred to a different part of the corporation and you were reinstated, right?

That's how it worked out. After about a week, I came back and he went to his previous job, which was basically at headquarters rather than running PC World.

So a rare triumph of truth over power.

I think it's a good comment on— IDG was actually, and hopefully still is, really good about editorial integrity.

So that's good.

Our chairman and founder took the side of the editor rather than the person in charge of the whole outfit.

Okay, well, we're honored to have a person of such courage and integrity on the podcast. Now we're about to talk about something that I don't think risks anyone losing any advertising dollars because Mastodon does not advertise. That's, that's part of, part of kind of what it is. It's, it's, it's, it's not a company. What we're going to do is, I hope, answer questions that have been on a lot of people's minds, including mine, about Mastodon ever since it became, you know, this, this conjectured alternative to Twitter in the event that, you know, developments at Twitter should lead people to seek an alternative. Can't imagine what those developments would be, but you never know. So anyway, a lot of people have become aware of Mastodon lately, and I think you're the perfect person to talk about it because you're not like a Mastodon evangelist. It's not like you've been on Mastodon forever. But you are very technically conversant and you have been in recent days doing what some of us keep saying we'll do, which is kind of explore and get clearer on what the deal is with Mastodon, right?

I've been trying at least. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm like a lot of people who, when Mastodon was first announced, I checked it out very briefly. And then went back to Twitter and I'm back now. And it's so much later that I can't remember how I signed up for Mastodon in the first place. And I had to start all over again. And I certainly do not claim any expertise, but I have been enjoying digging into it over the last year and a half.

You're ahead of the rest of us. And that will be helpful, I think. So maybe we should start out with the first thing people realize when they go there is like there's this decentralized quality to it. It consists of kind of multiple servers. Technically they're called instances, I guess, and you gotta choose one, right? So you wanna talk a little about what that is?

Sure. Well, I mean, the confusing thing about Mastodon is it's both a Twitter clone in the sense that it looks an awfully lot like Twitter and has many of the same features. But under the surface, it's essentially an anti-Twitter in a lot of ways. And that starts with the fact that it's not running on servers maintained by some large company in San Francisco. Like you say, it's completely decentralized. Anybody can start a Mastodon instance. There are plenty of people who start one just for themselves. So their instance is running on a server they control, and they might be the only member on that instance, or it might just be them and a few friends. And then there are also large instances that have tens of thousands of people on them, but they're all independent and they're federated, which means they talk to each other. So no matter what instance of Mastodon you're on, You can post something which will then be distributed to all the other instances, except in the unlikely event that your instance is blocking some of those instances. So, so stuff travels around, but you have a home instance, and your first task as a Mastodon newbie is to figure out which instance you want to sign up for.

Okay, and I want to turn to that, but, but first, let me just drill down slightly on something that I also hope we'll revisit in more depth later. This business of, you know, if you run a server or an instance, you can block any other instance. I mean, like suppose the good news for Alex Jones is he can just start his own instance, right? You can't keep Alex Jones off of Mastodon. The bad news is once everybody hears he's got this instance, a lot of the instances will probably block him. Some certainly would. Now, my question for you is, uh, does that work both ways? Uh, in other words, he can't— he can't see the, uh, my— what do they call tweets in Mastodon world? Maybe we should just call them, uh—

well, they were originally called toots and still are in a lot of places, uh, although I believe the official Mastodon app now calls them posts, which is a little more dignified.

What do you think we should go with for purposes of this conversation?

I feel really stupid calling them toots, but that's probably what most people do.

Yeah, we'll see. Uh, okay, so you're— I'll try it and see if I can bear it. Uh, can Alex Jones see my toots? So clearly I can't see his if I'm on a server that's blocked him. Can he see mine?

Uh, yeah, I think that he— unless he chose to block— okay, the server you're on, he could see them. Um, although, um, although just thinking this through, um, I'm actually not entirely sure. It might, it might be possible for your server to say that Alex does not get access to your stuff.

And in fact, maybe that's true, but we think that would be a separate decision. That's your guess? In other words, it's not a default condition of my server blocking him?

No. And actually, there was a scenario quite similar to that, which, um, is that Gab, which is one of the most hardcore right-wing Twitter-type alternatives, is based on Mastodon. And when it launched a few years ago, all the other Mastodon instances pretty much decided to block it and wall it off, and it became a forked version of Mastodon. And so I'm not even sure whether other instances could get access to Gab anymore. And Truth Social, Donald Trump's social network, is also based on the Mastodon code. Mastodon is open source, so you can take it and change it and do whatever you want with it, as long as you agree that your changes are also open source. So there are these other things based on the Mastodon code, which are not necessarily part of the greater Mastodon network, and that's fine.

Because they've been blocked by so many instances.

Because they've been blocked or they could also, if you didn't want to be part of the greater Mastodon network, you could just take out all that code and create something self-contained in the way that Truth Social is self-contained. And at first they were not entirely upfront about the fact that they were using the Mastodon code until people realized it was completely obvious they were. But in that case, they just chose to build a walled garden, but they used the Mastodon code to get up and running quickly.

So not only can you create your own Mastodon planet, you can create your own universe if you get together with a few other planets that want to just wall themselves off as a separate universe.

Yes. Hmm.

Okay. So now let's get back to the question then of why it matters, if it matters, which instance you choose to belong to. Now, one obvious thing, given what we've already said, is you probably wouldn't want to belong to an instance that is indiscriminate in its blocking or whose blocking doesn't align with your values. And I don't know if that becomes a real problem very often, but that's the one reason I can think of why it would obviously matter which instance you choose.

Yeah. I mean, people who start Mastodon instances have to agree to this covenant which involves things like telling them they have to moderate their instance, they can't let stuff like hate speech on it. But within those general guidelines, different moderators and instance owners can moderate the way they like. And it seems like in a lot of cases, what gets controversial is not them doing something like allowing hate speech on or being too aggressive in policing controversial stuff. In a lot of cases, it's just like a lot of people who run instances don't like political stuff. And there's this feature in Mastodon where you can hide sensitive content, which you would totally do if you were posting something kind of adult. But there are people who run instances who say you should also do that. If you're posting any kind of politics because a lot of people went to Mastodon to get away from the politics. In a lot of ways, Mastodon kind of reminds me of the days of bulletin boards, which were run by sysops, and they were also part of greater networks because there was technologies like PhytoNet that let you post in one bulletin board and have that roll out to other ones, but every sysop got to decide the rules on their own BBS. And it's very much the same way with Mastodon.

And I assume each server kind of lists something that helps you figure out what its values and policies are. Like if you go to the server, there's something obvious that you can click on and see, or you can see what it has blocked probably, right?

You will often have to agree to a code of conduct. There are some servers where you basically need to fill out a form before they even let you on. So they don't let anybody and everybody in. I should say there's another huge issue with the server you choose, which is, since these are all basically run by individuals, the people who run them are responsible for making them actually work. And if you just have like a handful of people on your Mastodon instance, that's probably not too hard. But the more people who sign up, as people are doing now, as they get interested in Mastodon, the more likely it is you might just run out of RAM. Or disk space, or your server might just start to get unreliable for a variety of reasons. And I'd say to some degree that that argues for choosing one that's been around for a while and is relatively large, and at least there's some sign they know what they're doing. Also, along with values, there are a lot of instances which basically try to cater to people with a particular interest. So I joined one called, SFBA.social, which is for people who live in the Bay Area like I do. There are ones for artists. In some cases, you might want to join one where the smaller community of just the people on your server have a shared interest. And then there are ones that are not like that, they're just general interests too.

Yeah, so my question is, what are the reasons that matters? I mean, community? I can imagine one reason, I guess. Another is why does it matter what the community is? Some of them have, as you said, more of a community flavor than others, I gather. And some of them, like, they will say it in the title. Like, you know, and actually, quick question, quick digression that this leads to before we get back to community flavor. So when you sign up for one of these servers, your identifier, kind of the equivalent of a Twitter handle, looks like an email address, kind of, in the sense that, like, I used my Twitter handle. I signed up for one of these, haven't done anything at all, and maybe it was the wrong one to sign up for, I don't know. I did this days ago, but I used my Twitter handle, Robert Reider. But then it's like, I think it's the sign, but in any event, there's a whole extension, which is the name of the server. And some of them, a journalism one might be journa.something, a very big one, I think, is mastodon.social. But in any event, my question is, is this: suppose you got kicked off of your server or your server just went out of business. Well, does that mean everyone who is following you now has no way to find you if you move to another server because your whole email address, so to speak, your whole server address is defunct because the server died? Or is, is the part, uh, is the Robert Reiter part unique? Like now that I've taken that on one server, can nobody else take that or what?

You, you know, somebody else could be Robert Reiter on another server. It's like a story.

This sucks because email, because what happens if my server dies? And, uh, so all my followers just, I've lost all my followers.

That could potentially happen. And in fact, um, Last night, the server I'm on went down. They were trying to upgrade to Mastodon 4.0, which is this new version which introduces features such as editing, and they had some trouble with that. So there were several hours where I was kicked offline. And in fact, I think right before it went down, I posted a toot saying we were doing this podcast and I asked people what we should discuss. And then the server went down and when I I checked again this morning, it was back up, but I didn't see that message I had posted. So I think there was a small amount of data loss. That said, Mastodon does have this feature that lets you move to another server. So as long as your old server was still up, if you decided you wanted to move, you can, you can take your followers with you, although it's a little bit glitchy maybe. But they did anticipate the idea you might want to move from one server to another.

So in theory, there's a way to do it so long as you do it before your server just implodes.

Right. If your, if your server is down, then you are cut off from Mastodon. And, um, that does happen. And, um, and they're also just poorly maintained Mastodon instances where you might notice that you're only getting notifications hours after something happened just because they're running slowly.

So you should go to one with Go ahead.

They have to be hooked up with email to send out notifications, and sometimes that doesn't work so well. In fact, the one you mentioned, mastodon.social, is the official Mastodon instance. Right now they're not taking on new people because they basically maxed out their ability to send email, and so they're not going to grow until they have the resources to do so. And like, and like all the other Mastodon instances, it's, it's not a money-making enterprise. It's something somebody is doing because they want to.

Okay, it sounds like you should pick one that has something of a track record. I think you'd be pretty sure it's not going to die overnight. And then if for any reason you decide you want to leave, um, you can, uh, take your followers with you. Uh, you said it's glitchy, but in principle it's automatic, right? I mean, you do it in a way such that they are just still following you and they don't particularly notice a big difference.

You can also kind of do like a, um, a forwarding message. So your, your old, um, account is still alive, but it tells people to follow you at, at your new one.

Now back to the community flavor issue. So one reason the community matters is you want them to share your values just to, just to minimize the chances that they'll be blocking a lot of stuff you wouldn't block, I guess. But what about this specific kind of subject area interest thing? Like where this is a, here's a tech one, here's a journalism one. It's not obvious to me why that matters, right? I mean, you're, you're, because you're, what you're doing is treating the whole universe as what Twitter was and finding the people anywhere that want to follow you and vice versa. I mean, is there ever a case or is there some mode you can go into where you're just kind of immersed in your community, whether or not you're following the people on it or something? I don't get this.

Yeah, I mean, basically on Mastodon you have two timelines. You have the federated one, which is everybody that you're following across all the instances. So it's roughly comparable to the Twitter timeline except that there's no algorithm involved. It's like the original Twitter timeline where it's the newest stuff at the top across everybody you follow throughout Mastodon, but then you also have your local timeline, which is a timeline of people on your local instance. So if you had joined a journalism instance, that at least in theory would be very journalism heavy. And like I say, I joined this one for people in the Bay Area, although when I check out that timeline, it does not seem particularly Bay Area specific. That's also sort of general conversation. But, But in theory, at least, if you join an instance with a well-defined topic and you follow that local feed, you might get great stuff on something you care about. But I think that varies a lot from instance to instance, the degree to which that's actually the case.

Well, that's an interesting feature that you can switch back and forth between the two modes, and you may find yourself very comfortable in the community you've chosen, and that would be kind of cool, I guess.

One thing I would like to, That I wish were easier on more Mastodon clients is to look at other instances, like you might not belong to journo.host, which is a journalism-centric one, but you might still want to read that. And there are quite a few Mastodon clients, and a lot of them are kind of buggy and not working all that well. And I think that's also due to the fact that there's a sudden influx from Twitter. And so I've found ones that claim to let you read other instances' timelines, but I haven't really been able to get it to work in a reliable way yet. But I personally am interested in reading other timelines on stuff I care about beyond the one I happen to join.

Now, if you join in a discussion, like let's say it's your own community's timeline, your own, your own instance's timeline. If you see something that's interesting and you kind of inject yourself into the conversation, What you say is still only seen by people who have chosen to follow you, or is it seen by the whole community?

I want to make sure I'm accurate about this, or if I'm inaccurate, at least want to acknowledge it. But I mean, I believe if you start talking to people on your local instance, the other people on your instance will be able to see that.

Mm-hmm. But of course they can always—

that—

yeah, go ahead.

That's, that's distinct from the larger timeline, which is based on, on the people you follow on any instance.

So, um, yeah, I guess it follows. Yeah, yeah, you must be right when I think about it. But, but the, um, now you can do the things you can do on Twitter, right? You can block an individual person. or you can do things like that. Is that right?

It has it in a lot of ways. Um, Mastodon feels like, like Twitter, um, in the relatively early days before it had built out much in the way of rich features. So yeah, it does have those tools. Um, it has stuff like, um, direct messaging, uh, although that works a little bit differently than the Twitter equivalent and it's not encrypted. So you, um, You better trust the person running your server, and even then you might want to be careful about what you say in a direct message.

Yeah, well, I gather that some people are being more careful on Twitter than they used to be now that half of the staff has been laid off, and you never know totally who exactly was included in that and what their job was. So, uh, and another difference I've heard— so, so, well, first of all, So it's like Twitter in the kind of, you might say, pre-algorithmic days. In other words, everyone you, if you follow 'em, you will see all their tweets or toots in the order in which they happen. If they just like something, assuming, is there a kind of a like function on Mastodon?

Yeah, there is a like, but because there's no algorithm, the only thing that, yeah. The only thing that like achieves is the person whose thing you like sees that you liked it. So you give them a little ego boost, but it's not used to determine what goes viral. And in fact, just in general, stuff does not go viral on Mastodon in the same way that it does on modern Twitter because modern Twitter was totally tuned to be viral. And on Mastodon, one of the founding ideas of the service is that things going viral is kind of lame. And so they have not done any of the things they would have done if they wanted virality to be a primary part of the experience. So it really does have kind of a cozy feel and it's much more about the people you have chosen to follow and talk to. And it's much less likely that other stuff will intrude, although there is a feature called boosting, which is essentially the equivalent of retweeting. So you may well see stuff from other people, which, which right now is probably a good thing because I think most people on Mastodon are attempting to find interesting people to follow. And if somebody you did follow boosts something, that might be a sign that whatever they boosted might be worth following.

And is boosting work like retweeting used to? In other words, if somebody I follow retweets something, I will definitely see it in my timeline.

You will see it, but Another decision they made was there's no equivalent of commenting on something you're retweeting. They decided that a lot of the time if people comment on a retweet, they do it to dunk on whoever they were retweeting, and so it was freighted with a certain amount of negativity. And so you can boost, but you can't comment on that boost. The boost just stands alone.

You can't quote tweet, as they say now. No.

There's no like quote boost, and that's to prevent people from insulting each other or being snarky.

Yeah, that has pros and cons. I mean, the quote tweet can be used constructively. God knows I've used it to— geez, I dunked on Kari Lake last night. I feel bad. Is that her name? The one who lost her governor? So, but it is handy. I mean, if you remember the old days in Twitter, when if you wanted to do the equivalent, it had to be the case that the person's tweet was much less than 140 characters because you still only had the 100. You could write RT, meaning you were retweeting their thing, and then you would put in front of RT any comment you had. And well, so you can imagine the constraints. You know, it's like if there's 100 characters, you've got 40 to work with. And so I was really gratified by the development of the quote tweet. Makes things a lot easier. But I can see it's an interesting question. It probably is used mainly for dunking, but sometimes for constructive criticism that leads to dialogue. Of course, if you want dialogue, literal dialogue, you can reply to the person, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, quote tweeting really does have a terrible reputation. I think if I audited my own use of it, it's usually pretty positive, but that's not what people think of when they think of quote tweeting, they think of dunking. Incidentally, speaking of character counts, Mastodon is 500 characters, so you really have quite a bit of elbow room, although at least in my experience so far, most people don't seem to come anywhere near consuming all 500 characters, they're still pretty succinct.

Yeah, it's amazing what the difference between 140 and 280 made, uh, you know, that itself was incredibly liberating. So, um, let's see, what was I gonna ask? Um, oh, uh, just to be clear, to be clear, on Twitter you still can, uh, revert to pre-algorithmic days, right? At the top, some people don't know this, but it says, if it says click, uh, we'll show you top tweets first, uh, then you're, then you're in algorithmic mode, but it says We'll show you latest first. That's a pretty, it's not a complete reversion to pre-algorithmic days, right? But you will then see every tweet by everybody you're following.

Yes. You can, you can flip back to that if you want to.

Um, so, but, but, but it, that's kind of mandatory with, um, Mastodon, which is interesting. Can you do, there's a subtle, uh, there's a thing I find useful. In Twitter, which makes the pre-algorithmic mode more manageable, which is that if you have followed somebody and then you find that they just tweet really prolifically about stuff you don't care about, but you feel awkward, you don't want to block them, you don't dislike them. And on Twitter you can mute them and then they don't, at least they don't automatically have a way of, I don't know if they even have a way of finding out you've muted them. They certainly don't find it out almost naturally the way they would if you blocked them. That's very useful. Do you know if there's anything like that on Mastodon?

Yeah, on Twitter, yeah, the whole idea of muting is it's sort of a polite block, and I don't think Mastodon has it, although I'm not positive. And another thing worth mentioning is that Mastodon goes through software upgrades on the server side regularly, and they just released one called Mastodon 4.0. Which added a number of features such as the ability to edit your, your toots. And so stuff that Mastodon does not currently have, it may get. Although another thing, another fundamental difference, which is kind of intriguing, is that there's no way to do a full text search on Mastodon. You can search for people so you can find who to follow and you can search for hashtags. But they decided that in a lot of cases on Twitter, when people do a full-text search, it is for nefarious purposes because they're looking for stuff to dive in on and be unpleasant or trollish. And so there's no way to do a search unless there's a hashtag, which is kind of an indication that the person who used the hashtag wanted to be part of a larger conversation and for that stuff to be findable.

Huh. So if they don't have a mute feature, and, and you're in the only mode is kind of pre-algorithmic where you see all the tweets by everyone you follow or toots. Then you actually have to be pretty careful about your follows, right? Or else your, your timeline will become unmanageable. I mean, I remember in olden times before, either before there was mute or before I discovered it, I used to kind of really agonize, you know, over whether to follow somebody. It's like a, it's like getting married, you know? It's not a decision you make lightly. So that's kind of the way I guess Mastodon is, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to get into Mastodon just because you're starting over again. And if you're somebody who's been on Twitter for a long time, and I think I've been on for 15 years, I've ended up following 5,000 people, including people who I don't even necessarily remember why I followed them in the first place.

Am I one of those, Harry? You have no idea why you follow me?

You're one of the ones who I chose to and I still remember why, but that's not true of everybody. And on Mastodon, I started from scratch and so I'm following like, I think 136 people and they're all people who I still remember why I decided to. So while it's a less rich experience than Twitter, I think at least arguably it's a higher quality one because it's based on decisions I made just recently and there's less randomness in it. Also because Mastodon was designed not to be viral, there's just not the same sense you often get on Twitter that all these random celebrities are intruding on your timeline. I think there are celebrities who are joining Mastodon, but in a lot of cases they're just doing it to snag an account. And there's no equivalent of the fact that right now on Twitter, Elon Musk is sort of front and center of almost everybody's timeline because everybody else is talking about him and commenting and retweeting So at least for me at this moment in time, Mastodon kind of feels like a very small party involving people I chose to be there, and my Twitter doesn't feel like that and hasn't for a long time.

Are you finding that you like the idea of opening up Mastodon? I mean, if you sit down at the computer, which has the stronger pull? And are the two poles qualitatively different? Like your heart and head wants to go to Mastodon and your gut, your id is pulling you toward Twitter and your superego. How would you describe this?

I like them both, but mostly for different reasons. I'm super comfortable on Twitter. Politics is such a significant part of Twitter, and if you want to gorge on commentary about something like an election, most of the people whose opinions you'd want to see are there and you know how to find them and you can dive in. On Mastodon, there is some political talk, but I think there are quite a few people on Mastodon who went there partially because they were sick of politics. A lot of the pundits who you might want to read who are on Twitter aren't on Mastodon, and so it's just kind of a little bit more quiet. On Twitter, I am still maybe a tiny bit addicted to some of the viral aspects. If I say something that gets retweeted by a lot of people or liked a lot, it's embarrassing to admit, but I find that rewarding on some level, and that kind of stuff just does not happen on Mastodon. In the same way. So at least for me so far on Mastodon, it's smaller and more constricted, but also a little bit warmer. The primary thing I've been talking about on Mastodon so far is how to use Mastodon, and I've gotten lots of great help on that from people who I'm following who have been there longer than I am and have shown me the ropes. And I have not seen any trollishness or hate speech or people just being unpleasant. And that doesn't mean that it's not there, but at the moment at least, if you want to show up in a social network to cause trouble, it's a lot harder to do on Mastodon and the potential rewards to you as a troll are not as great.

And it seems to me some of what you just described is due to intrinsic differences between Mastodon and Twitter, And some due to the fact that most people are still on Twitter, right? Like if there were more, uh, pundits you follow or whatever on Mastodon, it would be different. You know, and as for virality, things did go viral before in pre-algorithmic days. It could happen naturally. It just wasn't, uh, amplified. Uh, the threshold maybe was a little higher or something, but You know, it was a perfectly— it was a world where I look, Glenn Greenwald was doing fine in pre-algorithmic Twitter. Okay. And the people who, who make things go viral to a large extent were doing it back then. But, but I guess now that you have these two universes and virality can be bigger and faster in Twitter, you may never see certain kinds of celebrities move to Mastodon, right? Because that's what they're there for. Does that make sense?

Yeah. On Twitter, even before the algorithm, I mean, you had people who had hundreds of thousands to millions of followers because they were famous. And if you have a huge number of followers, it's a lot more likely your stuff will go viral. I don't know who the biggest users on Mastodon are, but there are fewer celebrities and fewer people with vast numbers of followers, which also tends to depress virality. So yeah, it's possible for it to go viral without an algorithm, but it's, I'd say, on the whole, less likely. And particularly now on Mastodon, it's not something that happens as often.

When you see a toot, does it tell you how many retweets and likes it has? The way it does on Twitter?

Ah, that's another thing I should know off the top of my head, and I'm not sure, although in general, there are less of those cues to get excited about virality on Mastodon.

Well, it sounds like it probably doesn't show it to you by default. If the answer doesn't spring to mind, you probably haven't seen it on your timeline, right?

No, I mean, it feels much more like you're part of a small conversation, and it's not about racking up numbers. It's about, asking a question and seeing who responds or sharing something and seeing how they reply. In an odd way, it also reminds me a little bit of Facebook groups, which are probably the best, at least the good groups are probably the best part of Facebook. And those are also managed by individuals who have a fair amount of power to set the ground rules. And at least the good Facebook groups are pretty constructive in the way that Mastodon is, although of course they're also terrible. Facebook groups.

Huh. Well, I guess if you don't see number of boosts or retweets, that kind of makes a difference because that was used as a signal even in pre-algorithmic days, like, oh, I should take a look at this. A lot of people are paying attention to it.

Right.

The— okay. So there is— I mean, in terms of whether Mastodon can ever you know, get big, big enough for Elon Musk to worry about. I see no signs that he's worried about it. I mean, he did make a juvenile joke about it, a pun on some— I, I, he deleted it. So he's, he's, I guess, not beyond salvation. He, he's capable of, of, uh, being convinced that maybe, uh, making a masturbation joke about mastodon isn't, isn't gonna elevate his stature in many people's eyes. But, um, As for whether it will ever pose a threat to him, there's first of all, the kinds of questions we've been addressing, like what's the experience like? And if you imagine a universe with tons of Mastodon users, including all the big shots, what's that like? And then there's a question of could you get to that anyway? And this I think of as the migration problem, the, or the network effects problem. You know, the social media, you know, companies famously, a strength they have once they're big is that what's appealing about being on them is that everyone else is on them. That's positive network externalities. And these people who have been predicting the doom of Twitter over the last few days, which seemed to me greatly overstated, but in any event, they're doing it on Twitter. There's nowhere else to do it. So I just don't know how easy it's going to be for Twitter to die. And And one dimension of this question is, is the question of how, how a migration to mastodon would happen. And it seems challenging. I— have you seen this Debirdify tool?

Yes.

Okay. So that's one dimension of this. Before we get into that and other things, what's your take on that prospects? For migration ever actually happening on a large scale?

Well, it would be bucking the trend of the internet over the last 15 to 20 years, which for the most part has been about centralization and companies such as Meta and Twitter and Google and Snapchat piling up hundreds of millions to billions of users and running their services exactly the way they want to. And benefiting from that network effect. And in most cases, the network effect being so powerful that it's very hard for anybody to compete with that. You might remember that in the first couple of years after Twitter became popular, there were all these startups that tried to build a better alternative to Twitter, and none of them went anywhere. And Google launched something called Google Buzz, which was trying to turn Gmail into a Twitter alternative and that died very quickly. And even Facebook briefly looked a lot more like Twitter. It had a real-time timeline and that went nowhere. There are all these years showing that essentially the internet kind of wants to be about centralization, which is a depressing thought, but true. And if Mastodon really took off and went from having millions of users to hundreds of millions, it would be pretty dramatic just because it's been a long time since something that decentralized grew that quickly. I do feel like there's an opportunity for somebody to build a Mastodon client that makes that easier. You mentioned Debirdify, which is this tool that lets you find the people you're following on Twitter and see what they are. On Mastodon, but even if you do that, you have to do a fair amount of work to actually follow them. And it seems like somebody could build a Mastodon client that makes that a lot smoother. And in terms of usability, is designed to be friendly to people who are not all that familiar with Mastodon. And if that were to be the case, that, that would increase the likelihood that more people would come over. But it might be that only Somebody would build that client only if they had some kind of financial incentive to, um, and it's a little hard to figure out what would be the financial incentive given that Mastodon is not an ad-based platform.

If I heard there was this great interface that preferable to any other way of moving to Mastodon and, and, and would allow you to take as many, uh, of the people you follow kind of with you and make it as easy as possible for your followers, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You know, I'd pay, you know, 10, 20, 30 bucks just to use it for a few days and make the migration. I don't know. And then you might have these, you know, there are a lot of people who don't like Elon Musk, so they might do it out of whether you want to call it the goodness of their heart or the badness of their heart is one question, but they would be motivated. We'll see. So Debirdify, I gather, it scans Twitter. And if you have put your Mastodon address in your Twitter ID, then it will bring you to the attention of the person who has moved to Mastodon and had followed you on Twitter. Is that right? So, right.

And a lot of people are putting their Mastodon IDs in their Twitter name or bio, which makes it a lot easier than if you start— have to start over again. And like with you, I searched for you on Mastodon, and I found two of you. It looked like maybe you might have signed up briefly for an account years ago as well and then started fresh. Wow.

Is that possible?

But neither version of you had actually posted anything, so I wasn't positive you were you. And also, there's no verification on Mastodon, so anybody can create a fake anybody. And I was also trying to figure out if any brands were on there, and I searched for Microsoft, And I found several Microsofts and could not tell if any of them were actually Microsoft Microsoft or not.

So you mean you searched for Robert Reiter?

Yes, I searched for Robert Wright and there were two of you.

Oh, okay. As the username. Okay. Uh, um, okay. So yeah, the first one was not me. I've only signed up very recently. Um, and I don't know, I've got to figure out if server choice matters enough. I guess I need to— and I decide this isn't a great server, I'll move to another one. I do want to check it out a little more. I was waiting for this conversation to guide me, and you've already done a lot of good. The— so, yeah, the migration problem, though, there's only so much of it you can solve, it seems to me. I mean, here, here's what would be an interesting tool. Does this exist? If you had a— well, of course, right away you run into the character limit. But suppose I was going to say, yeah, suppose I was going to say everything. You might not want to say this, but anyway, suppose I wanted to say that everything I tweet is also going to show up on my Mastodon account. And I just keep telling people on Twitter, you can follow me either place. It's the same thing. Um, that's maybe a way to smooth the ground or maybe, maybe it'd be a simple thing you check when you tweet, uh, on some Twitter client. Uh, but here we get into the question of how much Twitter's API permits. And I barely even know what an API is or if Twitter has one. Uh, but, um, maybe you can imagine I'm going to tweet and I can check a box that will mean this, this shows up on Mastodon too, or maybe vice versa. Mastodon toot, I click something and if it's short enough, it'll go on Twitter.

There are ways to do that today. Of course, that kind of only makes sense if you're using these services in kind of a one-way direction. If you're just pushing stuff out, you can push it out to both and it makes sense. But if you're actually having conversations, it would not work as well. Years ago, I had Twitter set up so that all of my tweets also went onto my Facebook. I can't remember whether it was Facebook blocking Twitter or Twitter blocking Facebook, but that became less easy, so I stopped doing that. But yeah, in the early days of social networking, people did that quite often and it became less easy because the social networks were not thrilled with you sharing stuff from one of your networks to all the other ones.

Uh-huh. So anything else you want to say about the migration problem, the question of whether, you know, I mean, there's one more thing. Well, go ahead and say what you were going to say. Well, I was just going to say— Okay, you go. I'm stopping.

Go ahead and talk. Yeah, I mean, there is this huge influx of Twitter users into Mastodon, and theoretically, if every single Twitter user joined Mastodon, Mastodon would look maybe almost exactly like Twitter. But right now it's the newbies and the longtime Mastodon fans, and there's a certain amount of culture clash between them. And if you've been enjoying Mastodon for the last few years, you don't necessarily see it as a great thing that all these Twitter users are landing. But it also seems quite likely that some of these Twitter people will, unless Twitter really does fall apart, some of the Twitter people will flirt with Mastodon but then go back to Twitter. And therefore it might be that the the Twitter users who stick around on Mastodon actually are using it in a constructive way and find value to it. But it's gonna take a while for that to shake out.

So I guess it's only when these longtime Mastodon users are in the community timeline that they care about this, right? Because otherwise, if they choose not to follow you, they won't even know what you're doing, right?

Right, unless somehow you become so popular on Mastodon that other people are boosting your toots.

Yeah, you got the jargon down. That's very good. Boosting your toots. I'll try to get used to that. So what I was going to say is there are two things that seem to me have led to established social media platforms losing their power to some extent. One is if, you know, when the younger generation thinks it's uncool because their parents are on it, that's a Facebook thing where they started going to Instagram and Snap. And so Facebook says, well, we'll buy Instagram. So they're still doing okay. But you know, people get younger and younger. You wouldn't think that that's going to kick in big time on Twitter. If anything, I would think it's older people who are probably having more trouble to adjusting to the Elon era. So maybe you'll have the first generational shift that works in that direction. But the other thing that's been threatening to social media platforms is kind of bad news for Mastodon in that it's kind of hyper-algorithmic, right? Like, whatchamacallit, you know, the thing everyone's trying to be now, the name escapes me.

TikTok?

Yeah, TikTok. So that's You know, what they're doing is— that's almost like they're broadcasting. They're just— you tell me if I've got this right— they are using everyone's reaction to, to their videos and, and things, um, to figure out exactly what kind of people would like a given video. I mean, they're not paying much attention at all to my social network the way the other algorithms algorithms, I think, still do to some extent. They're just saying, let's scan the whole planet and see what people who are kind of like Bob in their tastes are clicking on, and let's show that to Bob. Is that— does that capture the spirit of TikTok?

I actually have an article coming up in the next issue of Fast Company on exactly this topic. And, uh, yeah, that's pretty much correct. Um, the main feed you see in TikTok of videos is not based on what your friends or relations or people you have followed are sharing. It's based on an algorithm that's purely devoted to showing stuff that you're likely to find compelling based on what you've liked before and what other people like you have liked. And so TikTok is really not a social network in the sense that Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Mastodon are, and it's very potent in terms of keeping people glued to the screen and really sort of the opposite of Mastodon, which because it's not a business at all, has explicitly chosen not to try to do that to you.

Yeah. I mean, there's something so noble about Mastodon that I want to be part of it and help make it work, but you can see what some of the frustrations would be and So, so who decides what the new versions of Mastodon will be? You said they, they do these upgrades, they add features. Um, I guess it was, there is a person who started a nonprofit that is, to the extent that there is leadership, is the leadership.

Yeah. I mean, there's this guy, um, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, but it's Eugen Rochko. Uh, he's essentially the equivalent of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. He created Mastodon. It's still essentially sort of a one-person organization run by him, but it's open source so other people can contribute to the code. But he's first among equals. He gets to decide what Mastodon is ultimately, and it seems like it still very much reflects his vision of what a social network should be.

Yeah. So has— is there an overall kind of ideological tenor? I'm sure that individual instances have ideological tenors. That's just naturally going to happen. Um, but it sounds like— I mean, you said earlier that a lot of like instance run— what do we call the people who are in charge of an instance or a server who started the thing and control and decide who gets What other servers get blocked? Is there a name for them?

I'm not sure if they might just be the people who run the instances.

The people, well, yeah, we'll refer to that as that for short. We'll call them the people who run the instances. Um, and they, uh, you said that a lot of instances blocked the right-wing alternatives to Twitter, which suggests to me that there is an overall kind of aggregate balance of ideological power. And I guess the question is, well, A, if that's true, in other words, if you did a poll, a survey of all the people who run instances, would they depart from, you know, middle of the road? Probably so, along various dimensions. But then the other question is, if that's the case, to what extent Does this tend to manifest itself in consensus or something approaching consensus about which servers are blocked? Right, right.

Yeah, I mean, my sense overall is that Mastodon is on some level kind of uncomfortable with ideology in general. It's definitely opposed to harassment and hate speech and misinformation, but it's, you know, it's not trying to be conservative. It's not trying to be woke. Like I said, in a lot of instances, they seem to be somewhat uncomfortable with discussing politics in general, and they tell you if you're going to do that, put it behind this sensitive content warning so people don't have to look at it unless they specifically choose to look at it. I'd say in general, it's just kind of a place that does not want to be so much about angry people with different ideologies shouting at each other.

And that's a server-level rule, an instance-level rule if they—

Well, that's also an overarching thing. And then in fact, the people who, if you decide to run an instance, you have to agree to follow this covenant. And part of that is I will stamp out hate speech and misinformation and trolls and so forth.

But I mean, the question of whether you're encouraged to put political discussion behind this, whatever this wall is, is that a server-level decision or is that just almost universal on Mastodon?

I mean, I think it's pretty common, but it's part of the culture of individual servers. And to some degree, individual servers do have quite different cultures and they are shaped by the people who choose to run the server.

Well, now I see why the— well, that's very different from Twitter. And I would imagine what's going to happen is you're going to see instances where everybody wants to talk about politics and that's going to be the way it is, you know, with this migration from Twitter, which is already non-trivial, although it's a long way from keeping Elon Musk up at night. I assume you're going to see that. I mean, look, I've seen some writer at The New Yorker started an instance and he's a political writer and come on, they're going to talk about politics on that instance.

Right. But at least the people who decided to choose that instance knew what they were getting into as opposed to Twitter where it would be probably a pretty large challenge to be on Twitter at all and prevent yourself from seeing a fair amount of politics.

Yeah. And nobody outside of that instance needs to be bothered by this if they don't follow any of those people, and assuming the people they follow don't retweet them a lot.

Right. Yeah. Unless the stuff they were discussing got boosted a lot by other people in other instances, it would be somewhat isolated. Twitter, by the way, has this feature called Groups, which as far as I know has not been a tremendous success, but they tried to retrofit small communities onto Twitter in a way that at least theoretically is vaguely similar to what Mastodon does, but it is much harder to do given that Twitter started out as a big swimming pool and it's harder to break it up.

Okay. And so as for the process, Set aside the problem of kind of mass migration, just individual migration, a person going from, from Twitter to Mastodon. Now you're a tech guy, so you, but I think you understand you're in that sense not representative. And I'm wondering, well, first of all, how challenging you have found it and how challenging you think the average kind of person who's a little less tech literate than you would find it. You know, there was this tweet. I don't know if you saw this. It got a lot of, got a lot of play, but it was— I'm reading it— suggesting Mastodon to most people as a Twitter replacement is like if you ordered a steak at a restaurant and the waiter handed you the map to a cow pasture and gave you a bolt gun. Now, probably was— probably wasn't that hard, right? But on a scale where that is at one end, And like, so easy I did it in my sleep is at the other end. How have you found it?

Yeah, there are a lot of those similes out there, and there are certainly some challenges. I'd say figuring out the fact that you have to be on a specific server or instance is probably the biggest one. I think, though, we also have to remember that Twitter has long had a reputation for not being all that easy to figure out. When you're a newbie. In fact, that might help explain why Twitter never got as big as Facebook or Instagram. They've done a few things over the years to make it easier, but certainly for a long time there were all these people who signed up for Twitter accounts and couldn't figure out how to follow people or join in conversations. Mastodon has all of those challenges and a few new ones, I'd say that probably there's a pretty wide difference between the worst possible initial Mastodon experience, which, which might involve things like being confused by which server to join and then choosing one that was not the best one for you and maybe suffering from reliability problems. And on the other end of the spectrum, you might make a great choice of a server. And once you get rolling, It's not that different from Twitter. And for the most part, the differences that affect your experience are more about the community and the people involved and the fact that what is considered to be good behavior is not exactly the same as on Twitter. So I'd say it's probably somewhere in the middle. Go ahead. It's not having to shoot a cow, but it's also not Not going to McDonald's, not going to Big Mac. Not the driver for Burger King.

Yeah.

Right.

And did you find like a particularly good guide, a particularly too written how-to guide?

I've been reading a whole bunch of them. I'm not sure if there's a single one that's definitive, but not surprisingly, there are a lot of people trying to put together those guides for newbies. We've done some on Fast Company ourselves. Clive Thompson, who's a great tech writer, had a great post up on Medium just in the last few days on the fundamental differences between Twitter and Mastodon in terms of Mastodon not wanting for stuff to go viral and just sort of the different behavior of these two communities. And if you search for Clive Thompson Medium, you will find that, and I think it will help you understand some of the subtle differences between the two platforms.

Okay. And is there anything I've kind of failed to ask that you think should have been asked or people really need to understand?

I think we've covered a lot of the important points. I'd say there are a ton of Mastodon clients out there. There are official ones for phones and tablets and so forth, and you can just use it on the web. And there are third-party clients, which seem to vary in quality. There's this one called Hyperspace that I like, which you can use just on the web if you want to. And it's kind of approachable and has a few features that help you find interesting stuff. So if you are struggling with Mastodon, it might be worth trying a different client for whatever platform you're using.

So there are, like, these are what TweetDeck is to Twitter?

Anybody can create a Mastodon client. Unlike Twitter, which doesn't make it all that easy for someone to run a third-party Twitter client, on Mastodon it's just fine. Anybody can build a client, and there are a whole bunch of them. I'd say the best ones are probably better than the official client in some ways.

Yeah. In fact, Twitter now owns TweetDeck, doesn't it? It did it originally, but—

They do.

And they bought it.

Yes, they acquired that way, way, way back when the best iPhone Twitter client was called Tweety, and Twitter acquired that and turned it into the official client for the iPhone.

Then they made it harder to make these things, right? They bought a couple and at the same time made it harder?

Yes, after a while Twitter not unreasonably came to the conclusion that if you were on a third-party Twitter client, they had less control over your experience and couldn't show you ads. They made it a lot harder for anybody to have a Twitter client, a third-party Twitter client to have lots and lots of users. Then after a little while, I think they made it slightly easier, but there's still less incentive for people to create third-party Twitter clients than there was originally when Twitter briefly thought that was wonderful. Actually, one thing we didn't cover is the fact that There's this idea floating out there in Twitter land that maybe the solution to some of Twitter's problems is that instead of everybody being on Twitter's algorithm, anybody should be able to create a Twitter algorithm skewed to whatever purposes they want, which is sort of a return to the idea of third-party Twitter experiences. And Twitter actually launched this thing called Blue Sky, which is a program to make it easier for Twitter-like experiences to be based on different algorithms. And I think even Elon Musk has occasionally said that there should be different Twitter algorithms aimed at different kinds of people. So if you love Donald Trump and want all the MAGA you can possibly get, you could use a Trump algorithm. And if you want nothing of that, you could be on a different algorithm that completely sealed you off from it.

But have they done anything that actually makes that easier? I mean, has Blue Sky been implemented in a way that makes it easy for, like, say you're an entrepreneur and you think, well, I'm gonna give people a Twitter interface that lets them just, like, there's a dial and they can say more anger, less anger, you know, whatever, whatever you wanted to do. Is Twitter made it, does Blue Sky make it easier to do that? Or is it even, or is Blue Sky even really happening?

I believe the initial Blue Sky spec was just announced, so it's a little past just being an intriguing idea, but not quite to the point where anything is happening with that. And of course, Elon Musk, before he actually owned Twitter, he was full of ideas for adjusting the algorithm, and he said that the algorithm was part of the problem because it was hurting free speech. And as far as I know, he has not really actually made any meaningful changes to the algorithm. And he may be a little bit less smitten with that idea once he learned that advertisers don't want to be on a platform that feels dangerous and out of control. And so he may kick that can way down the road before he actually does try to adjust the algorithm to make those people who feel like they've been shadow banned happier.

Yeah, I think actually owning Twitter has perhaps changed his incentive structure in ways that he's beginning to grapple with. That leads to one more question, if you have a few minutes.

Sure.

Do you have a theory of Elon? I mean, you know, there's a question of what his original actual aspiration was. Has that changed? I think a lot of people are puzzled by his behavior on Twitter since he bought it because it seems to involve doing so many things that you just wouldn't expect somebody to do if their goal was to accomplish either what he said he wanted to accomplish, the high-minded stuff, or just make money, right? I mean, it almost seems as if he's trying to drive liberals off the platform. Now, maybe he realizes network effects are so strong he doesn't have to worry about that. He may be right, but, uh, there's just a lot of you know, and the whole, the whole, uh, kind of build the airplane while you're flying it quality of, hey, let's try this. Oh, you're right. It sucks. We're not doing it. I mean, normal, you know, it's different in so many ways from what you expect when somebody takes over a company and wants to either do something good with it or something profitable with it that people are puzzled. Do you have a, a, and of course he's a very eccentric guy, always has been. I mean, you wouldn't think that he could have been as successful with Tesla in a way, given how you wouldn't think his being so uninhibited on Twitter in the past was necessarily an optimal strategy, but it seems to be working. So do you have a theory of Elon?

I'm not sure if anybody who doesn't actually personally know Elon can completely understand him, but I mean, first of all, he is a person of accomplishment. Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink are all actual significant contributions to the world that he made possible. He's obviously an extremely serious Twitter user. He loves it. He has more than 100 million followers, and it does feel like a lot of his perceptions about what Twitter needs are based on his experience, which is quite different than yours or mine because Everything he tweets gets a lot of attention, and there are all these Twitter bots which follow him. I think I tweeted that over the years I've had very little issue with bots and spammers on Twitter. I just kind of don't see them, and he sees a ton of them. There are scammers who try to hitch themselves to his feed, and so he worries about that stuff, and it impacts what he thinks Twitter needs. He's clearly somebody who is a micromanager. He has not gone out to hire an accomplished, successful social media executive to run this thing. He named himself as CEO. He believes in moving fast and breaking things, which when you're at the scale that Twitter is at, the moment you break something, it's painfully obvious it's broken. He does not seem to be that great at listening to other people. As far as I can see, Casey Newton, who has a newsletter called Platformer that is kind of doing the definitive coverage of Twitter under Elon, reported yesterday that people at Twitter gave Elon a 9-page memo on the idea of what would happen if anybody could be verified by paying $8. And they said that it was likely that that pranksters would see $8 as a really cheap way to cause trouble and do things like pose as Eli Lilly. So if Elon had taken that memo seriously, we wouldn't have seen all these issues that came up with this new approach to Twitter Blue. And it just seems like he is so confident in his own abilities that he may not think too much about what other people who might know more about a given topic than he does say. He certainly is kind of managing Twitter on Twitter in terms of firing people on the platform. It seems to be pretty obvious to me that it would not be a bad idea for him to tamp down on his own use of Twitter or at least use it in a different way, but he's not doing that. And if the Twitter If the Elon Twitter we see is him being careful about what he says, I would love to see what uncensored Elon would do on the platform because he really does not seem to do anything to prevent himself from tweeting whatever pops into his head. And that's why it's so contradictory and in some way anybody who's positive what the road ahead is like for Twitter under him is probably wrong because there are so many basic contradictions in the things he said. And he said everything from Twitter should be a place where anything that's legal should be said to saying, well, of course we're not going to let bad stuff on Twitter, that would be irresponsible. So you can pick what he said. And I'd say ultimately we should just look at what he actually does and that will tell us what it's going to be like. And it's too early to know for sure what the long haul is going to be like.

Yeah, my own view is network effects are so strong that he, he actually can afford to move fast and break things for a while, at least. And what I worry about is that it seems clear, clearer now than before that money is really at the forefront of his consciousness, right? Like, he really wants to make it profitable fast. And what I worry about is that's going to turn it into either TikTok or Amazon.com or, you know, or something that I don't really want it to be. Now, maybe, maybe it can be two things at once. I don't know. And you can— there will be selections you can make that allow you to make it what you want and you don't have to make it TikTok or something. But that's my concern.

Yeah, I mean, he said he wants it to be a video site like TikTok. He said he wants it to be a bank. He said he wants it to be an everything app, kind of like WeChat in China where you tweet on it, but you also order meals and it's like everything under the sun. So at the moment, he is not really ground down his goals into something that's reasonable to achieve, like anything that might make Twitter larger and more profitable is on his to-do list. And of course, he's not going to be able to do all of that stuff. And at some point, he will have to pick and choose and focus in on the stuff that seems more logical. And even if he does manage to get a lot of people to pay, there is probably no scenario under which advertising is not a large part, if not the largest part of what makes Twitter successful. Therefore, his ability to piss off advertisers is pretty limited. And I'm guessing even Elon understands that, and over the long haul, it will tend to influence his decisions.

Well, apparently they did land one big ad account with a big company. The company's called SpaceX. I mean, this is really true, and it's totally above board because SpaceX is a private company. So he's just moving money from one pocket to the other, fine. Now, if he did it with Tesla, which is publicly owned, I think there would be issues. But yeah. So thank you so much, Harry. Now normally at the end of these, I ask people if they want to tell us where we can find their work and what their Twitter handle is. This time I'm gonna ask you those two questions plus telling, to tell us what your Mastodon handle is.

Well, on Mastodon, I am @HarryMcCracken@ S-F-B-A dot social. On Twitter, I'm just Harry McCracken, and most of what I write you can find at fastcompany.com. And as I mentioned, just to give our magazine a plug, the next issue does have a story which is not about Mastodon, but it is about the ways that Meta is trying to compete with TikTok. So, it does cover the future of social networking and some of the stuff you brought up. In terms of these hardcore algorithms that are not about the social aspect of the internet at all. So it is sort of one step removed from some of the stuff we were talking about today.

Okay. So you decided to put the at the very beginning of your address on Mastodon, is that right? It is @Harry McCracken.

No, no, no, that's not me. That's what you said, but that's not what you meant. Well, that is what I meant. If you were telling somebody who you are on Mastodon, you put an before your name and before your instance. It's the same as on Twitter where you don't actually have to type the before Harry McCracken to find me.

But that technically is part of your address?

It's always an The convention is if you're telling somebody your Mastodon name, you say Harry McCracken at SFBA.social.

Okay.

Which is another thing which is confusing people, uh, because it's sort of like an email address but not quite because you don't put an before your name on an email account. If you look around, you'll see this is not something I invented. This is what the savvy Mastodon users do.

Okay. And I am Robert Reiter at some Mastodon address I don't remember because I haven't used it. That was another question, like, should you choose a memorable This is like 4 letters that don't make sense to me, even in the way SFBA does to you, because that's San Francisco Bay Area. Should you choose like a memorable address? Like mastodon.social would be great if it weren't already subscribed fully. Um, does that make sense? Like, so people can remember it? I guess maybe so.

I think, I think probably so, on at least some of the people who create their own instance are doing it purely so they themselves get to choose what that second part of their mastodon name is. And I'm giving vague thought to doing that myself.

Wow. But that, you really do have to be a little tech savvy to do that, right?

You do. In fact, I started to do it last night and I realized I was in a little bit over my head and I'm confident I will figure it out, but it turned out to be more than a 45-minute project.

So you have to rent server space from AWS or something, or?

I'm doing it without somebody. Hosting service called DigitalOcean, uh, which has like a one-click way to install Mastodon, but then you, you need to hook your Mastodon up with another service, um, that will send out emails because like when people sign up for Mastodon, you need to send them an email. And so I, I started fumbling at the part where I was hooking up this email service I had set up to my Mastodon instance and maybe over the weekend I will come back to that.

Okay. Final question. Maybe I already asked you this, but so there could be another Harry McCracken with another server address on Mastodon with the same exact username, but another, just because there is, there could be a, a bob@gmail and a bob@outlook.com.

It could be my old account, which I've forgotten about. It could be somebody else with my name. It could be a troll. And right now it's pretty hard to figure it out. And, and I, if I were you, I would check out the two Robert Reiters and verify that the one who is not you is not somebody who means to start harassing you or leading people to think that he is you.

I'd like to think— I'd love to think that I'm worthy of that kind of thing, but I don't think I'm a big enough target.

Although I still feel there is some chance that you briefly signed up years ago and have forgotten about it.

I don't think there's any— you never know. I've forgotten— I forgot TikTok within the last hour, so you never know. I could well have Okay, well, thank you, Harry. This has been great. Keep up the good work at Fast Company and on the Weekend Tech podcast, where you're an occasional guest. I always make sure and listen when you're on there because you're so, so pithy and clear and insightful.

Indeed. Thank you for your support.

Okay, take care.

All right, thanks, Bob.