I’ve been using mastodon for a month or two now. I never used twitter but thought I’d try it out for fun since I love this new fediverse experiment.
Then my mastodon instance started experiencing some downtime and I wondered what happens in this scenario. It seems if the goal is to have lots of smaller instances and decentralize social media, then instances, particularly those not run a big companies (who can reliably fund things for years on end and sell ad space on their platforms), will come and go and users will lose their identity or home base each time this happens along with all their followers and their connection to the wider social graph. This seems not great.
It seems that nostr might actually be a fix for this. In nostr:
- You publish to multiple relays (essentially instances) and anybody from any relay can follow you.
- Your messages are signed by your key so you can prove they are authentic.
- If your relay goes down, people can still follow you via other relays
- You can change between relays without losing your identity. Your post history and followers follow you, not yourusername@relay.com.
Doing some reading, it seems people’s main criticisms of nostr are:
- Interface isn’t as pretty. Looks like this has come leaps and bounds in the past six months but of course could always use more work
- Populated by crypto bros. This seems like not an issue long-term, there’s plenty of crypto bros on mastodon, you can just not follow them if you don’t want to see them. The idea that you can “tip” with a tweet or whatever nostr’s term for that is seems pretty interesting.
Basically, at a protocol level, nostr seems better in some important ways and the cons don’t seem protocol related but userbase and UI related.
What am I missing on the pros/cons list? Anybody got experiences to share?
You do lose your identity though. If your instance suddenly disappears you have to start from step zero. You have no followers, you follow nobody, and nobody knows you exist. By social graph I mean your connections to others which mastodon facilitates (a list of people you follow and the connection so that others follow you) plus the entirety of the content you have posted since you started your account, your DMs, etc. Losing your social graph isn’t an inconvenience, it’s losing the totality of the features mastodon gives you as a user all at once. Social media connections are important for people socially, in the job market, etc. Those connections are meaningful. On a network-wide level, it’s frustrating for users to be following people and then just have those people vanish off the face of the earth because their instance died. It’s terrible UX.
You can no longer tweet as the “old you” and as far as anybody else knows, “new you” is a different person pretending to be “old you” unless they authenticate you in some other way and that’s a major pain.
I don’t think the ultimate solution is just “pick a stable instance”. All instances will eventually experience instability or close, what happens to those users when they do? An account should be 100% portable between instances. And ideally, a somewhat automatic mechanism should be in place so that recovering from an instance loss isn’t hard.
I know this fediverse stuff is in its infancy, I know we’ll get all these problems figured out in time.
You can import/export most things to CSV (follows, lists, blocks etc)
This way it’s easy to set up a new account on new server (as I said, I’ve been instance hopping for a long time).
You can also download your media archive in its entirety. And you should.
You should also turn on scheduled deletion of your old posts. You don’t really want to leave >6 month old messages behind you. You don’t have to lose your stuff, just stick the archive somewhere safe (local disk, or dropbox, whatever). These are all standard Mastodon features.
You should always authenticate yourself on Mastodon if you’re “serious” about your identity. It’s very easy to do and re-pointing it to your new “official” identity is just one line of HTML.
Mastodon has also feature for moving instances and forwarding your old identity to your new one.
If your instance admin suddenly disappears and shuts down the service, it’s a pain, but obviously you run the same risk with any commercial company shutting down your account without notice or recourse to re-open it. So keeping regular backups of your data is a good idea, the import/export tools are there.
The only thing that isn’t automatic is followers. And if your followers are a huge concern (for example, part of your livelihood/patronage) you should probably adopt a multi-platform social media strategy anyway. This way you can always reach your followers, no matter what happens to Twitter or Mastodon (or whatever network). You should be on ALL the networks.
But for most people who are not “content creators” the amount of followers isn’t really very relevant. It doesn’t mean anything. The quality of the discussions is important. And you can participate in discussions without any followers. It’s not like other commercial networks where the algorithm squelches you if you don’t have enough “clout”. You don’t need followers to discuss with people on Mastodon.
Plus: if you are that dependent on you followers maybe it’s a good idea to be self hosted or at least choose a reliable instance.