Thoughts on Mastodon and community owned social media

edit: Since writing this I realised I didn’t go hard enough on the micronationalist bent on Mastodon. The thing is for large numbers of white people, being able to stake a claim on a space they own may mean safety for them as Trans, Queer, Furry, etc, but it also by default becomes a space they defend as a space for their Whiteness. The “micronationalist” culture of these little internet kingdoms becomes a white nationalist culture, and that’s something we need to fight back hard against.

I’ve been on Mastodon since 2018 on and off. I’ve had real world friends there for a very long time. As of the big Twitter migration, I am now on two instances.

The first of the Mastodon instances I’m on is collectively funded on a sliding scale and run by democratic cooperative. I’ve been there for 4 years. Everyone in is invested in building communitarian infrastructure so it’s nice there. The other one I use is owned by Trans Safety Network and used exclusively for TSN work and it’s run by us. It’s nice there but because there are few of us it’s more involved in the moderation.

For both it’s very much worth the small costs of participation like everyone else because it’s part of a community owned infrastructure. That means the segment we participate runs how we want. This is an extremely different experience to having to wonder if anyone is going to see our posts once Twitter gets replaced with a two tier class system by a billionaire mad about his wife and his trans daughter ditching him.

The biggest best connected mastodon instances (at least the ones that aren’t run by far right venture capital) are free for all and covered by patreon subscriptions by supporters. The subs paying coops are very cheap or free if you’re poor in many cases.

On Twitter, as a trans person I just have to carry on having people sending me DMs of rope nooses or telling me I’m a danger to kids. On Mastodon, as a trans person if I think the moderation is not working I could get together with others who feel the same and have a meeting with the coop about how to deal with it.

Sure that’s hassle. Power comes with responsibility. But we do have power in our own spaces.

Similarly, if I’m banned because the place I’m at is prejudiced against people like me, I can go somewhere else in the fediverse where the place I join isn’t actively hostile. Again being discriminated against sucks. But I have remedies in the fediverse that trans people suspended for criticising Nazis harassing them on Twitter haven’t had.

There are lots of people for whom this experience of owning and taking responsibility for your own community and not shitting where you eat is really unfamiliar. That's a learning curve, and a very different experience.

But I prefer this one.

A word of caution

People use the "town Square" metaphor for Twitter a lot. Mastodon is arguably more like running a café/community centre on a high street.

Some places will be more or less welcoming than others and if you start causing fights in one or another you might get barred.

I think that metaphor works for another reason which is, being more critical of Mastodon, the communities there can have a bit of a micronationalist vibe where you’re constantly berated about the culture and community norms there etc, which can be unwelcoming.

Community ownership means people are very protective of their little patch of federation and that’s not always positive. I think it’s incumbent on those of us who are more antiauthoritarian to consistently push back against overly restrictive cultural aspects of the fediverse. Preferring community ownership and responsibility to a service provider model with no accountability doesn’t mean it isn’t trading some concerns for others.