About once a year, I try to push my friends to dip their toes in an alternative social network. One recently joked, “like allo or peach? How’d those work out?” But I will continue to push when we have a window of opportunity to gain traction on an alternative social network, because Twitter’s conduct is unacceptable. With no oversight but its shareholders and no competition whatsoever, the company has run a course right over its user’s rights and well-being. Literal neo-nazis have free rein on the service, and white supremacists only face repercussions when their targets are A-list celebrities. If you criticize a verified account using coarse language, you are immediately suspended. If you highlight injustice, you are suspended for “inciting harassment.” The company accepted advertising from a literal neo-nazi group (and then claimed, wrongly, that the user who reported it fabricated it). Twitter was ground zero for the Gamergate campaign of harassment, abuse, and violence and did nothing to address it for more than a year (meanwhile, its victims were the subject of campus shooting threats, stalking, and more). The company has mismanaged its response to every incident I can recall.
What’s to be done?
Traction
The biggest issue with any new platform is traction. If there’s nobody to talk to, why would you stick around? But new social networks can and do gain traction; Snapchat went from zero users in 2013 to hundreds of millions today. Examples of networks that didn’t gain traction (RIP app.net, allo, peach) are not proof that no new network can thrive. Maybe I’ve exhausted my goodwill by encouraging friends to use networks that haven’t taken off, but I’m not willing to accept Twitter’s hegemonic mismanagement and deafness and I will continue to promote good alternatives when they arise.
Criteria for an alternative social network
I only pass along about 1 in 10 social networks I try out. I always test them to ensure that they’re structurally sound (more on that in a minute) and will offer a good first day of use, to promote user retention. By structure, I mean structure of governance, operator accountability, user choice, technological basis, and revenue stream. These are all indicators of the health of a possible platform. User experience includes technical stability, friendly design, and a mobile app. Today, I can recommend a social network that hits nearly all of the targets.
Mastodon
An analogy is helpful for explaining what, exactly, Mastodon is. If Twitter is AOL (you can directly message xXAngelGirlXx, or any user who is on the platform), then Mastodon is e-mail (you can freely message [email protected], or anyone on any platform who is also using e-mail). The benefit is that no single entity controls the platform-- so long as your message complies with the e-mail protocol (it has headers, a recipient, etc.), it can be sent. Mastodon is the same-- any service provider who complies with the technical requirements can play ball.
This also adds some confusion, however-- how do you “sign up for Mastodon”? But the answer is the same as “how do you sign up for e-mail”? You find a provider, and create an account. This presents a logistical barrier for new users, as they have to find a provider that meets their needs. If you feel like diving deep and assessing providers’ uptime, security protocols, number of users, and other metrics, you are free to do that before registering an account. But for most users, I recommend...
Registering on Mastodon.social
Mastodon.social is provided by the creator of the Mastodon protocol, and is a fully-featured Twitter replacement. Registering and navigating is a breeze, so click through, make an account, and poke around. It checks almost all my boxes for a replacement service:
Structure
Governance: Mastodon.social is operated by Eugen Roschko, the original designer of the Mastodon protocol. Eugen is fiercely dedicated to open source software and civil conversation. He is responsible for establishing the rules of conduct on the site, and they are very hostile to far-right wing politics.
Accountability & User choice: If you are unhappy with Eugen’s behavior, Mastodon.social’s performance, or any other aspect of the service, you are free to register on another instance, and can still interact with all the users you did before. This gives users leverage to demand responsible behavior from the operator.
Technology: Mastodon is a “federated” protocol, which is what allows you to communicate with users on other services. The protocol is based on OStatus and GNUSocial, which have deep, open source roots.
Revenue stream: Eugen self-funds Mastodon.social, but you can contribute to his work on Mastodon via Patreon. I’d prefer that users could directly contribute to Mastodon.social’s upkeep, but history shows us that being a paid service isn’t enough, by itself, to sustain a platform.
User Experience
Stability: the service’s uptime is excellent, and the only hiccups I’ve experienced were after the site received a large amount of publicity and a deluge of registrations. Eugen is quick to respond to reports, but it’s not clear how well this would scale.
Design: Mastodon.social’s registration flow is very smooth, and the web UI apes Tweetdeck (in a good way). The three-column view makes navigation simple, and is accommodating of both power and casual users. Posts can be up to 500 characters, and easily allow native gif support, image uploads, and also can include content warnings (which obscure content until a user clicks through).
Mobile app: There is no first-party Mastodon.social mobile app, but its open nature means that there are dozens of apps on both iOS and Android. Recommendations below.
Recommended Mobile Apps
No matter which Mastodon provider you use, there are loads of apps available to you. However, I recommend the following selections based on my research. Please note that these recommendations are made as of 6/14/2017, and new apps are becoming available frequently.
iOS: Mustor. Clean design, easy navigation, and full support for Mastodon.social’s features make this the best option currently available for iOS devices.
Android: Tusky is a great, full-featured, dedicated Mastodon app. Twidere is a Twitter app that’s been around for a very long time, but it just added support for Mastodon accounts, as well. Check it out if you’d like to easily switch between your accounts without having a dedicated app.
Who to follow
Follow me, of course!! You can add [email protected] from any Mastodon provider. And be sure to login to this tool to find your Twitter friends on Mastodon. See you online!
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My response to Twitter's suspension of journalist Guy Adams' account and recent calls for a more open alternative to Twitter:
I’m interested in plans to build federated versions of the internet, including “darknets” like Freenet, Cryptosphere or wireless internet alternatives like Project Meshnet and the many many other project like it. But for those of us living in relatively free countries, just having an internet where everyone owns their own portable identity is good enough. Owning a domain name is a bit on the geeky side, but it’s not like asking people to learn to program or configure their own Linux servers. We can still rely on hosted services – as long as we can pack up and move out of them when the time comes.
What we need to build an open alternative to Twitter isn’t more standards. We already have Dave Winer’s microblog namespace for RSS, PubSubHubbub and Activity Streams. What we need is a self-hostable, single user Twitter clone that can publish these formats (and optionally push to Twitter and other social networks). That was the idea that Winer was seemingly getting at last week with his own post on a Twitter alternative, but he focused more on all the tools that are out there for building something like this, and didn’t come out and say what it is we actually need. And that’s something that power users can get up and running relatively quickly without having to write it themselves and with the least amount of server fiddling possible. A WordPress of microblogs.
Sure we have StatusNet and other clones already. But these are designed for groups who want a private Twitter. I’m talking about is giving every user control of their feed by attaching it to their own domain name. One such thing exists already: PageCookery, but the site is in Chinese. Another option is to just run StatusNet and be the sole user on your server. There are also some WordPress microblog themes, but that seems like a clunky solution. It might be nice to see something that isn’t in PHP, but hey – PHP gets the job done and it’s easy for non-developers to get PHP apps running on commodity web hosting.
TechCrunch: The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds
