twitter-vs-mastodon.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

twitter-vs-mastodon.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Welcome to Radical Eye, a podcast about technology, power society and what it means to be human in the age of information. We are your hosts, Dylan and Jess. We're two PhD students with different backgrounds researching AI and technology ethics.

Speaker2:
In this episode, we interview Dr. Jonathan Flowers about the 101 of Twitter versus Mastodon, the power dynamics of the Fediverse and potential paths forward in our digital lives.

Speaker1:
Jonathan Flowers is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His research areas include African American intellectual history, Japanese aesthetics, American pragmatism, philosophy of disability and philosophy of technology. Jonathan also works in the area of science and technology studies, where he applies insights from American pragmatism, philosophy of race and disability studies to current issues of human computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Speaker2:
And in the spirit of our episode today on Twitter versus Mastodon, we have some exciting news to share with you all. Drum roll, please, Dillon.

Speaker1:
Drum roll. I'm doing it. I'm doing in the background. It's not being picked up on the mic. Drum roll. Doing it.

Speaker2:
We have a mastodon now. We finally got a mastodon account. We joined, we joined the train and we still have our Twitter account.

Speaker1:
Only eight months late. Six months late. Eight months late.

Speaker2:
However many months late. Yeah. So we missed the first wave. But we we've heard a lot of you ask us to make an account because you're only on Mastodon now and we want to make sure we stay connected to our community. So we are going to be keeping our Twitter. We still also have our LinkedIn account and now we have a mastodon account. So we're just slowly infiltrating every social media account that we possibly can. And if you would like to follow us, you can find us at radical IPOB at psychosocial. And please also tell us how to use Mastodon when you follow us, because there's a steep learning curve and we discuss that a little bit in this episode. So we're very grateful for Jonathan for informing us about some of the nuances of the metaverse as we navigate this complex space and also some of the pros and cons of these different platforms that that we're already experiencing. But also we'd love to hear from you and what your experiences have been. So we hope to see you over on Mastodon. And with that, we are very excited to share with you this interview with Dr. Jonathan Flowers.

Speaker1:
We're on the line today with Jonathan Flowers. Jonathan, how are you doing today?

Speaker3:
I'm fine. It's a sunny California morning, so I'm pretty good.

Speaker1:
Awesome. Well, today we're talking about Twitter, Mastodon and things that are connected to that. And we'll see where the conversation takes us. I think just to orient listeners, if you can bring us back several months or however long ago it was when Mastodon became this hub for folks, but also in general as a response to what was happening on Twitter at the time. Can you just contextualize that moment?

Speaker3:
Uh, sure. Yeah. So this took place when Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter and made particular kinds of promises to either reinstate the accounts of known bad actors or to, as he put it, civilize the digital public square. And a lot of folks in marginalized communities and in other spaces took offense to that. Well, I can't actually say they took offense to that. They were rightfully worried about the ensuring the ensuing conflict between. Like what? What Elon Musk said he wanted to do with the platform and with the ways that they've been using the platform previously. And so what ended up happening was a number of individuals went looking for Twitter alternatives. And I'm using the language of alternative and not replacement specifically because, well, we'll get into that in a second. But they went looking for Twitter alternatives to avoid the kinds of issues not only brought on by Musk's kind of takeover of Twitter, but by brought on by the kind of or the the kind of environment of Twitter that kind of reemerged in the wake of Musk's takeover. And so folks kind of situated on Mastodon as one such alternative and began to move en masse to Mastodon. Now, to be clear, this isn't the first time that this has happened, right? There have been other kinds of waves of migrations from from Twitter or other social media sites to Mastodon, each with their own unique kind of issues. But the issues that they encounter, Right. Or the issues that they encountered in the migration are all typically parallel and all tend to cluster around certain, I guess I would say environmental features of Mastodon itself as a social media platform.

Speaker2:
Could you briefly describe what Mastodon is for our listeners who have maybe heard of it, but have never actually quite understood what it is or don't have one of their own accounts? And also why Mastodon is the go to alternative for these platform migrations.

Speaker3:
Um, I wouldn't say Macedon is the go to alternative. It is a go to alternative. And that's mostly given the the size and reach of the platform, right? So Mastodon is a decentralized social media, uh, decentralized social media platform, right? It's run on the activitypub. Uh, protocol, I believe. Yes. It runs on the activity pub protocol that allows for, uh, interconnected communication among different websites that use the Activitypub protocol, which includes all of the mastodon servers, but also includes things like Pixel Feed and Peertube and some other websites that run on the Activitypub protocol. So any software that you or any software that like implements what Mastodon calls federation via the Activitypub protocol can connect and communicate with with Mastodon or other such sites in a broad kind of decentralized network called the Fediverse. Right. Um, now this is, this is where this is one of the things that actually got me into some hot water among like long term Macedonians and whatnot. Mastodon isn't the actual thing. The Activitypub protocol is the thing. Mastodon is just one site built on top of the activity pub protocol. But since the activitypub protocol is like an email protocol, right? Um, so like with email you've got Gmail, you've got Hotmail. If you are like ancient, you've got, uh, your institutional or business supplied email. All of these are email. All of these are running on the same protocol, but they're using different websites, different servers to host the protocol so they can all talk to one another. Mastodon or Activitypub works like that. Mastodon just happens to be the largest one. So when people say, Follow me on Mastodon, this is kind of like shorthand for like, follow me on the Fediverse right? So I'm not on Mastodon, I'm on like Zirkus, but I will still use Mastodon as the shorthand to refer to it.

Speaker3:
And some of the more, I guess, touchy, uh, denizens of the fediverse uh, take offense at say referring to all uh, websites that use the Activitypub protocol as Mastodon, but like, I mean. There's realistically no way around it. So so that's the long and short of what Mastodon is. And that's kind of what makes it different from something like Twitter. You can set up your own mastodon server and invite all of your friends or like minded individuals and then decide what other servers you want to connect with through the process of federation. If you have like a server, say you are a Chicago Bears fan and there is a Green Bay Packer server called like Packer ville, you can federate from Packer ville and folks from Packer ville won't be able to like see. The posts on town and vice versa. Right. It allows for control over it allows for some kinds of control over the content that ends up on your server because folks have to share links into different servers. It also means that if you need to find somebody right, you have to know their handle, navigate to their specific profile and add them as a friend, especially if they're not on your server. Right? Then you can see their, their uh, well, they call them toots, but that's like a word for a fart. But you can see their posts on your, on your feed. Vis a vis following them.

Speaker3:
But the discovery is less organic than on other social media sites, and it requires more user input to find one one another's friends. And so this gets us to why, folks, you know, why Mastodon was a popular alternative to Twitter? Because you could control your your server control, who's on your server. You could essentially curate the kinds of individuals you wanted to engage with within your community. Additionally, because you could control who is on your server, you can also shape the the kinds of stuff that appeared on your your server's global feed, which allowed for an unprecedented level of control. Uh. Not all that dissimilar from like moderating a subreddit, except if that subreddit was basically like was Twitter esque. The other reason why folks gravitated to Mastodon is because there are a lot of LGBTQ designers involved in the initial setup of the Activitypub protocol. In fact, the the history that Macedonians will tell, um, is about or is essentially that there were a bunch of LGBTQ folks in the tech space who particularly trans folks who were tired of the, the harassment they got on Twitter and they were tired of the ways that the affordances of Twitter, things like, quote, tweets and other such things would be weaponized to, uh, to basically deal out violence towards them. And so they built the activitypub protocol and the Fediverse to like, avoid that kind of thing by writing out some of those. Some of those affordances things like, quote, retweet tweets are not possible on Mastodon, though you could probably code it in fairly easily and run and launch it on your server, things like that.

Speaker1:
One idea or set of ideas that you brought up at the beginning of this conversation was around whether Mastodon is an alternative versus a replacement and some of the, I guess, rhetoric around that. And remember at the beginning, I like I made a mastodon real quick and then I got really, really overwhelmed and was like, this is really complex. And it's not like the language that I speak or, or whatever. And so I was like, I was there. But then I was also I noticed myself moving back to Twitter, partially because for me, some of the familiarity. But I'm wondering maybe at the beginning or maybe now that tension between replacement versus alternative and how you've seen that tension play out.

Speaker3:
Well. So I think it was a mistake to even think about the concept of a Twitter replacement. Right? Because one Twitter, while it is a social media platform, it's an assemblage of code and run or it's an assemblage of code that runs on a bunch of servers that allows us to talk to one another. So while it is a social media platform, it's also a cultural institution. And insofar as it's a cultural institution, it has taken up a kind of outsized role within our contemporary cultural space. And as a result, replacing Twitter, I think is a kind of fool's errand. You just assume, say replace something like email, right? Or yeah, you just as soon replace something like like email. Given its ubiquitousness and the ways that it has come to occupy a fairly large portion of our, you know, cultural consciousness is real estate, right? So in Captain America, the Winter Soldier right at the end of the movie when when Black Widow dumps all of Shield's files out onto the Internet, one of the things she says about it is, oh, it's trending right. And so even in a fictional universe like Marvel or like the MCU, the Twitter or Twitter occupies this kind of outsized space in the cultural consciousness, and they've got like gods flying around and whatnot. So in, in, in real life, right? Replacing Twitter, I think is a fool's errand because Twitter for for better or worse, has been treated as if it is a digital commons, a public square where folks have been folks can be heard, uh, things like that.

Speaker3:
And in some respects it has operated that way, but only because we have treated it that way. And insofar as we have treated it that way, we have the expectations that the that the both legal and moral rights that apply in other common spaces should also apply to Twitter when that is absolutely not the case, because Twitter is a privately owned platform and as such, we are subject to the the rules of the people who run it. So to be clear, I don't think you can replace Twitter because I, I don't think there is any other application that has a similar, uh, space within our cultural context, within our cultural milieu, Instagram, Snapchat, Chat, TikTok, all of those occupy different spaces and do different things because they are different platforms with different kinds of affordances, different kinds of technical features that allow people to do things. So the replacement talk, I think, was was misguided from from the beginning. The alternative talk is a little bit better because it's like, you know, you can talk about Android as an alternative to iPhones, right? You can talk about, you know, electric vehicles as an alternative to a internal combustion engine. This acknowledges that there is not yet the capacity to replace this thing that has occupied our cultural milieu. But it also makes clear that you can use these things in the same space. And this actually gets you gets me to to something you said something you said Dylan, Right.

Speaker3:
When you created your account, you were overwhelmed by everything. Same thing for with me. When I created my account on Mastodon, the server, I was overwhelmed with everything because I literally could not control my newsfeed. There was so much information, so many posts, and I had to like go in and start mucking with the settings to make it slow down so that it could be usable. And even then I was like, I can't find my I could barely find my friends. Not all of this is relevant. There's no organic search feature. Mastodon is the way that I describe it, is that Mastodon is to Twitter what Linux is to Windows, right? Windows will show up and hide all of the things that make the operating system go If and if you want to see what was going on with your operating system, you have to go through the the command prompt or you have to go through the task manager window. You have to go through all of the utilities that newer versions of Windows increasingly try to to keep hidden, hidden much to my annoyance. Um, versus something like Linux where you have near infinite control over the way that your UI and your. Your interface and your operating system actually works, right? But if you are a new person to something like Linux or Mastodon, without looking up a guide or anything, it becomes immediately overwhelming. And actually one of the problems that this gets to, one of the primary differences between Twitter and Mastodon, your experience on Mastodon or the Activitypub protocol will change based on the server that you join.

Speaker3:
If you join something like Mastodon, which is the largest server, you will be inundated with, with with posts about things that you don't generally care about. You'll have to spend a lot of time curating your home feed and curating the hashtags that you follow in order to understand or in order to get it to some place that is comfortable in a social media sense. And that requires a fair bit of tinkering under the hood. So I spent a couple of days on on like Mastodon itself, the server and then moved to Zerk, which is a smaller server. It's and the difference was like night and day. I still had to set my feed to like slow mode because that was more comfortable for me. But like the kinds of, of posts, the kinds of individuals I was interacting with, so on and so forth, all were, were a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more familiar to the social media experience that I had been used to, not just on Twitter, but on on things like Reddit and, you know, even old BBS type situations, right? So that was one of the primary differences between Mastodon and Twitter mass. And this leads to a particular kind of attitude among, I guess, Macedonians who've been there for a long time regarding the regarding the use of the of the platform and its technical affordances, um, which is something we can get into in a little bit.

Speaker2:
Yeah, I would love to go back to this comparison that you just made briefly about this Linux versus like other operating systems that are maybe a little bit easier to understand. And I imagine like, you know, there are diehard Linux users where they they refuse to like buy a mac, for example, even though Mac runs on Unix. But they're like diehard Linux users and they like refuse to, to use this like more centralized operating system. And then there are people who are diehard Mac users and they have easier to understand and use features, but they are now like beholden to whatever Apple does with that operating system. Whereas like the Linux users, it's like a harder learning curve. But now they are the ones who are in control. And I, I agree. I think we're seeing this play out on like Mastodon and the Fediverse where you have like really difficult to understand and to use features, but you are now the one in control versus the Twitter users who are people like don't know, like myself and Dylan who are like, Oh my gosh, this is just way too much to learn. Like, let's just stick with what we know. Even though now we are beholden to like Elon Musk, I guess, and like the other like the Twitter world. And so I can see and I have experienced some of the tensions between this decentralized versus centralized affordances. And I'm curious, in your experience, what what has your experience been? Do you prefer this decentralized platform versus centralized? Like, what are some of the pros and cons of each based off of like how it's impacted your own social media experience?

Speaker3:
Um, so there's a couple of things I can say about this, right? So the decentralized nature of Mastodon means that any migration from someplace like Twitter, unless there is a concerted effort to move an entire, say, network of folks onto the same server results in the fracturing of communities and social networks that were established due to the centralized nature of of Twitter. Right. So I so I picked us on the basis of some of my colleagues recommendations. And because it's kind of an academic ish, um, server, once I was there, I was able to find a whole bunch of other folks and connect with them. And in doing that, I was able to like reconstitute a lot of my my social media networks or social networks that were hosted on these platforms while simultaneously like, you know, connecting with new people who I also connected with over over back on Twitter. So one of the primary effects that the decentralized, the federal or decentralized nature of the fediverse has is in is shattering social networks in a migration unless there is a intentional move to a specific server which will preserve those those networks. But given that the the given that the majority of individuals aren't aren't so coordinated, right? Like so for example, something like disability Twitter, right. Is centralized on Twitter, but broadly spread out across different interests, different occupations, different ways of being disabled in the world.

Speaker3:
And these lead to in a migration, these lead to, say, you know, joining different kinds of servers and insofar as that that's the case, right, what happens is it shatters the social network that formed due to the centrality of of Twitter. So folks will have to find one another again in a kind of pretty long and sometimes arduous process. And this process gets even more complicated. If somebody or somebody just picks a server at random, joins it, discovers that server is not to their liking move servers and like doesn't quite fully understand how shifting servers works on Mastodon because that too is a technical process that not that not everybody has the the time or patience to do. And so what happens is you end up with these fracturing of social networks. But also what happens on is that on Twitter, when if you have an individual who serves as a kind of node in the network, right, and that person migrates, say, fully to someplace like Mastodon and everyone else doesn't or cannot for a variety of reasons, accessibility included. Then you lose that node in the social network on Twitter. And so the the information that they would have circulated or recirculated is lost within that network. And so whole areas of that network start going dark. I think of it like in, in like disaster movies when they show a kind of eye in the sky view of a city and like a power plant goes out, right? You can see the different neighborhoods start winking out as in a kind of like slow collapse of the network.

Speaker3:
Right? That's the kind of thing that that that happens when you have someone on on Twitter in a community of identity that just vanishes and goes to someplace like Mastodon. The information no longer circulates. The people they were connected with are disconnected from the broader network. And this disconnection leads to the lack of circulation of information within these social networks. But for my part, right, so as I said, I initially joined the Mastodon server, found it too large, too overwhelming, moved to Zerk, found it less overwhelming and easier to navigate, and then spent the next, uh, I guess week or so finding everybody. Right? And I want to say I spent the next week finding everybody because that's literally how long it took to find the majority of my mutuals in other places on Mastodon, because the process of finding your, your, your folks is not as organic or seamless as it is on on Twitter. And so there was there was an entire week of me simply reconstituting the not not people who I who I want necessarily wanted to follow me but the people who I. Wanted to follow so that I could see their content and they're spread out across a whole bunch of different servers.

Speaker3:
Um, and so, yeah, that was a week. And then I started posting about Mastodon and that was a fun time. Right. That was a, a very fun time. So I give this example a couple of times. So it took, um, so my Twitter account is, is I guess old ish, but it took me a couple of years for me to, to say something on Twitter that got, um, you know, academics of a variety of stripes and other folks to actually show up in my mentions and start heaping abuse on me. Right. It took me two days on Mastodon to do the same thing. Um, simply by posting about some concerns I had about the platform. Right. And so the moderators of Zerk actually caught a bunch of like, you know, trolls and other noted bad actors well before I noticed them in my feed. So kudos to them. But that points to another issue with at least with the experience of Mastodon, like how the kinds of abuse you might be subject to and the ways that they're understand, understood as abuse are at the discretion of your server. Moderator Now, to be clear now to be clear, right? This is similar to Twitter where like understanding what gets flagged as abusive contents and what you know, what users get banned is at the whim of Elon Musk and the now non-existent like Twitter safety folks but.

Speaker3:
Um, on Mastodon, it's a little bit different. Like you could be on a server with a moderator who simply does not understand what ableist abuse is. Right? And they wouldn't understand why you are reporting these accounts for saying things that seem innocuous to them. Um, and insofar as that's the case, right, it becomes a case by case basis. Now we can say, I will say that Twitter's moderation policies are generally garbage, but their policies, they're applied to everybody or ideally apply to everybody. I can't even say that for certain, right? They're ideally supposed to be applied to everybody. They're ideally rules that everyone has to follow. On Mastodon. The only rules you have to follow are the rules that are relative to your server, right? So if another server is is, you know, a gigantic troll farm and enjoys abusing people, right. There's nothing you can really do about them except either de federate for them from them or get your moderators to, to ban them as opposed to on Twitter. Like there are folks who are like just clearly, you know, bad actors and they typically they in an ideal world, they get banned. And Elon Musk's world, who knows what happens, right. Um, but at the very least you can block them and you have there exists some kind of, um, some kind of punitive structure to prevent them from doing bad things on Mastodon.

Speaker3:
You have to hope that your server has strong moderation policies, um, and that your moderators are active and real good about that because they're not getting paid and they're not receiving the kinds of support that like a Twitter moderation team does, that sort of thing. And so it's up to them to play like whack a mole with with trolls, with limited resources. So there's, there's that kind of an issue, right? Um, so to get back to what I was, to your question, right, so I, I made a couple of posts on, on Mastodon about the general feel and climate of the space. Right. It is a very, uh, uh, tech person oriented, a very tech organized space, and it has all of the cultural modes of conduct that come with it. The expectation that you follow certain kinds of behavioral or social rules that you use the platforms affordances in ways that they intend and not that align or that may not align with how you want to use those affordances. And insofar as that produces a clash between the ways that a person may culturally want to use the platform and the ways that the the community expects you to use the platform, you end up with a lot of a lot of friction between communities and individuals on the basis of what is ostensibly a culture clash. Because to be clear, right, the tech space, the maker tech space, particularly, because that's the kind of space that, you know, Mastodon is aligned with, is a very white, very male space.

Speaker3:
Right? Despite the history of Mastodon being established by queer coders, the the the run of the mill denizen is a very kind of, you know, white male, I'm going to say it, white male tech bro type. Right. And this results in Mastodon as a as a cultural space, as what Sarah Meade calls an institution, reflecting the kinds of norms and habits of the individuals that primarily comprise it. Right. So Sarah Mead has this theory about institutions that they aren't just pre-given, they are formed by or they are formed through the ways in which individuals come into like association, Right? And insofar as, as, like or insofar as individuals that are alike come together, the habits of these like individuals will give shape to the institution and that institution will be able to extend the kinds of things that they do. Other individuals who are not like those, the people who are already in place at the within the institution will find it more difficult to fit in, in a literal sense into the institution. And this is what happens with Mastodon and the the expectations for how we should or how the the affordances of the platform should and should not be used. In fact, there are a number of like op eds that came out about this, particularly one that said that was talking about mastodons, Eternal Summer being over because a whole bunch of folks have.

Speaker3:
A whole bunch of folks from from from Twitter have come in. Right. The actually it was it's Hugh grundle.net/home invasion. Right. And he says here or he says here that for those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while, this week has been overwhelming. I've been thinking of metaphors to try and understand why I found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? And he's referring to the migration of new users. Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage, softly chatting with a couple of friends, and then an entire platform of football fans gets on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone at the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration. Right? So this is so if you think about this, I mean, since I'm a philosopher of technology as well as a philosopher of race, gender, sexuality and disability, if you think about this from a philosophical perspective, what he's basically describing is a complaint about immigrants bringing their own culture into a space that has been culturally homogeneous and disrupting and either not following or disrupting the established norms of the space.

Speaker3:
So insofar as that's the case, right, you have you have this tension between folks on Twitter or folks who came from Twitter with their own codes of conduct, their own ways of being in digital space, many of which are culturally coded. And Andre Blocks, Andre Brock's book on this is amazing. Um, but so, so this, this culture clash, right, uh, threatens the bodies that are already in place and they view these incoming folks as a threat. And the and Hugh Grundle's piece is shot through with all of this, Right? Um, you know, it's. So, for example, he's like, my my post was now getting hundreds of interactions, thousands. I've had over 250 follow requests since then, so many that I can't bear to look at them. And I have no criteria by which to judge, who to accept or reject. Early this week, I realized that some people had cross-posted my mastodon post into Twitter. Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on Twitter. Nobody thought to ask if I wanted that right. And he calls the entire experience here traumatic, so on and so forth. But and not to discount his feelings, I'm sure there is some form of trauma experienced with that. But what he's what what this is, if you think about this, as I do from the perspective of philosophy of race and from the perspective of the racial organization, the racialized gendered and sexualized organization of of the tech community, particularly maker spaces, right.

Speaker3:
This is a very white reaction to a whole bunch of folks of color showing up being and I'm putting this in scare quotes for for those of you listening loud and noisy in their in their nice, quiet, safe white neighborhood, it's it's amusing that among some of my colleagues of color we call or we called Mastodon the HOA of social media right. Because they they really came down hard in on demanding adherence to the social and cultural norms of the space, such that you had to use the affordances of the platform in the ways that they demanded. Otherwise you weren't doing it right. You weren't using it appropriately, so on and so forth. It I joke to one colleague, right, that some of these complaints sound like, you know, older siblings complaining about their their younger siblings turtling in the corner and street fighter and just throwing out low kicks. You're not playing it right. You won't let me play with you in the way that I want to. And I'm like and, and that that metaphor is apt. Nobody like I don't there's no requirement that says I have to use the affordances in particular ways. And so this is so this is kind of the the ground of the issue here, right? So when Hugh Grundle says suddenly having hundreds of people asking or not to join these those conversations without having acclimatized themselves to the social norms felt like a violation and assault.

Speaker3:
And I know I'm not the only one who felt like this so that that that thinking right that folks bringing in their own ways of using digital platforms own ways of being in digital spaces are like assaults. Right. Or a violation of what is to be expected is is pretty strong language but it also reflects a kind of entitlement to particular kinds of comfort and entitlement to particular or to people showing up in these spaces in particular ways. And this is actually not new. Right. And as I mentioned, there were previous migrations and they also had this problem. So me being a philosopher who a particularly an American pragmatist who thinks about these things in terms of histories that accumulate and give shape to things, Right. So if Mastodon has a history of these kinds of like tensions or teething problems with each successive wave of people who come into the platform, then one of the things that I'm thinking about is not what. What is it or what kind of a platform has these problems, but what kind of a platform makes problems or makes possible these problems? And realistically, it's a platform. Who's that demands certain kinds of community norms, norms that are connected directly to to whiteness as given Mastodon's kind of broad affiliation with, with tech makerspaces, which means that large largely these comments are aimed at at non-white users.

Speaker3:
Right. And so there's a history of Mastodon and Macedonians abusing, attacking and otherwise marginalizing their their non-white non-white users. And so this is this was my general experience, right? I, I literally wrote several actually a lot of threads pointing all of this out. And mastodon users were not happy. And what was interesting was it wasn't your run. It's not like it was on or it's not like it's on Twitter where if I were to make a thread, say, criticizing somebody for their transphobia and, you know, include some some relevant information, it's not like on or it's not like on Twitter where that person's like rabid followers would descend upon my mentions and flood them with. Well, you clearly don't you clearly don't know basic biology. There are two sexes, that kind of thing. Not actual discourse. No, this is a little bit different. Right. What happened was you got people who would be or you had people who would be making articulate and pointed arguments for why folks should just assimilate, which in any other context would be massively racist, sexist, homophobic, what have you. But in the context of Mastodon, it's just the expectation that you follow the unwritten rules. And the unwritten part is important here because nobody's telling you what to do, right? You only understand them when you run afoul of them.

Speaker3:
And so, like given and part of this was is due to the tech adjacent organization of Mastodon, these folks are used to articulating their points with logic. And I'm putting that in scare quotes because it is not the formal logic that I would teach my freshmen. They're used to providing use cases and all this other things. It was a very it was a very engineering way of trying to solve a social problem. Right? Because people would be asking me for give me a discrete example that fulfills all of these criteria so that I can understand best what you're talking about. And no other example will do or explain this to me in a way that somebody who isn't a humanities major will will get. I actually got that as a response. You know, use something other than like technical jargon. I'm like, listen, like I these there are and this is going to be an aside there are entire disciplines who that are aimed at at analyzing and understanding the human experience broadly construed. We call them the humanities and the social sciences. The social sciences historically were supposed to act as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences, But at some point the sciences decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So so sociological and philosophical analysis of the the racialized and other dynamics of Mastodon are the tools necessary to solve what is a social problem.

Speaker3:
Folks were asking me for highly technical responses and I would give them highly technical answers, but not in the not the technical sense that they wanted. They wanted like clear cases of, you know, of bugs they could fix. Right? So it's like one of my mentors said, if a a an engineer sees a problem of getting access to a public forum as an engineering problem, they're just going to say build more doors on the forum. But when there's a whole set of policies that are intended to keep you from getting into the forum, building more doors won't matter. This is so this is pretty much the problem that that I ran into. And so all of this to to wrap up this very long answer to a really simple question, all of this comes back to the ways in which Mastodon as a as a cultural and social space, is tech adjacent and takes up the habits and modes of conduct privileged by the dominant bodies within that space, which happen to be like white tech bros. Despite the despite Mastodon's history as being, uh, or despite Mastodon and Activitypub history as being established by by queer folks. And the history thing is something that we probably should talk about. But I will let you get. I assume you have lots more questions here.

Speaker1:
Now, I think I think. Get into that. That sounds great. I was going to go to another another question. But yeah, getting I think getting a just a bit into that history because that seems like a core tension here of and also just to name that this podcast episode is coming out several months after Mastodon came on the scene and after that. And so we're looking back a little bit at the history so far. But I'm wondering if you can put the original, I guess, original also in scare quotes, but the history happening in the creation of that platform with guess what, what we've seen. And then maybe just as we move towards closing, think about or I guess maybe we can reflect on like what happens next, maybe practically. And then also in an ideal world.

Speaker3:
So, so the history. So here I'm going to use some fancy jargon. Thomas Alexander and his book, The Human Eros, which is a Dewey and take on on culture, narrative, aesthetic experience. Right coins this this term mythology. Right. And a mythology is an organizing narrative for a community, a group of people. It's everything from America's myth of We the People to the narrative of the civil rights movement that organizes, say, the African American community, to the narratives that sports fans tell about themselves, about the, you know, the return to greatness of their their chosen sport community. Mythoi are not false narratives, right? So this is not talking about a grand myth about whatever. These are not false narratives. These are organizing narratives that tell a person who they are, where they are, where they've come from and where they're going. And so I provide that background to say that the the history of LGBTQ participation in the development of the activity protocol is a myth, right? It tells people where Mastodon came from, where it's going, what it intended to do, and it allows folks to situate Mastodon among these different platforms. So the the mythology or the the mythology of Mastodon goes like this. And this is a true story, right? So a large number of LGBTQ tech folks early on in the history of Twitter were quite upset about the way in which Twitter was was basically being used to heap abuse upon them.

Speaker3:
Right. And in response, they, they put their, their skills to use and built the activitypub as a kind of like haven away from Twitter. Other folks discovered it due to its modular nature, due to the federated nature of the different instances, and it grew from there. But at its core, it was developed by, you know, LGBTQ tech persons as a kind of refuge away from the the the broad kind of violence they were experiencing on Twitter. Now, this mythology is important because it purportedly tells you where Mastodon came from and where it's going. And so Macedonians in response to say, criticisms about the say, the overwhelming whiteness of the space, the ways that the cultural norms of Mastodon are, the ways that the cultural norms of Mastodon tend to privilege some ways of showing up in digital space and not others. The ways that the say, the insistence of of say, discussions of race and racism under the content warning structure, which would hide them from view from anybody on the timeline unless they clicked on them, that as a broad community norm shared across multiple instances of all of these these kinds of things which I associated with the the kind of whiteness of Mastodon were defended through presenting the mythoi of Mastodon as being established by LGBTQ folks to avoid violence. Right. So how can you say that mastodons, cultural and social norms are racist or that they privilege whiteness when the history of Mastodon is such that queer folks put it together and you know, I don't know what to tell them, but as a, you know, as a bisexual black man, I have learned that queer folks can be racist, too.

Speaker3:
So that's not a effective defense. But it was presented as a an argument against taking seriously the concerns of marginalized people and. In fact, it's one of the that kind of defense was used in for justification for, you know, in response to complaints about a particular targeted attacks on, you know, a black run mastodon instance. Some, what is it, 20 several years ago. Right. Um, this this instance collapsed under, I guess, racist vitriol, uh, because folks were generally upset about, I guess, its existence or the ways in which it insisted upon being present in its full blackness with all of its with everything that came with it, including bad experiences on Mastodon. Right. So when I say that, and that is part of Mastodon's history, the history of the marginalization and Mass federation of of, you know. Of instances of color, which is a funny thing to say of other kinds of instances, is part of the history of Mastodon. And it is part of the affordances of Mastodon insofar as the platform enables this kind of thing to happen.

Speaker3:
And the social the modes of social conduct actually make it possible for it to happen. So this is so when I talk about the history of Mastodon, this is one of the things that I you know, I try to emphasize, right. Mastodon's history isn't just this history of LGBTQ coders creating this wonderful thing and other folks coming and using it for their own purposes. It is also a history of, say, federation from instances of color. It's a history of using the established social and cultural norms of of the predominantly white tech maker space to abuse and police the conduct of of users of color on the platform. It's it's the history of of misogyny on social media as reproduced through the unique affordances of Mastodon. It is a it is a history that includes all these things and to to ignore these things in favor of a organizing narrative that says we were developed by LGBTQ refugees from Twitter serves to just miss the entire entire point. So that's what I mean by by the history. Right. And you said some closing thoughts and future directions. To be clear, this is a social problem, right? You cannot affordance your way out of this, right? Mastodon tried by not implementing, quote, retreats. And yet you still have people showing up and using the affordances of Mastodon to engage in other kinds of abusive, abusive tactics.

Speaker3:
Right. You can still dogpile somebody, although not as effectively, but you can still do it using mastodons affordances and the federated nature of the of the fediverse means that if you can convince your server mod that this instance of color or this LGBTQ instance is problematic, for whatever reason, they can just mass de federate from it and you can circulate that rumor across different instances to the point where every or the majority of instances de federate from that one instance. Now granted, most moderators will will kind of check out the claim beforehand, but we've seen this happen. I think there was a an issue where a a journalist, an instance set up specifically for journalists, was was rumored to be engaging in some kinds of problematic behavior. That rumor circulated through different instances on the fediverse. And there was a lot of mass de federation going on. Turns out it was a rumor. That is one of the risks of the fediverse. So it's not like you can affordance your way out of it, right? In a in the kind of dystopian kind of way, racist, sexist, heteropatriarchal hellscape we're living in. Right. Your. Bad actors will find ways to use the affordances of your platform to abuse others. It's not simply the case that you can build a better platform. This is not an engineering problem. This is a social problem. And as a social problem, we need a social solution.

Speaker3:
Right? So it's the Martin Luther King solution, right? A law or a moderation policy might not change someone's heart, but it can keep them from killing me. It can keep them from dogpiling me. It can keep them from hurling racist abuse at me from across the platform. But that is a social problem and it requires social solutions. You can't automate your way out of it, you can't affordance your way out of it. And so that's that's that's the the my take on the history and and the future. But if you if you're asking like, where do we go from here? Mastodon and Twitter. Um, that's a little bit different, right? So since the dust has settled on Twitter with Elon Musk doing whatever he seemingly whatever he can to break the platform, one of the things that we're learning in real time is the resilience of communities of identity on Twitter, right? So black Twitter, uh, did some kinds of migrations to Mastodon. And there's still there is a black Twitter mastodon instance, but like largely black Twitter was like, okay, so, you know, old platform, new racists, what's going on here? Right. And so they you know, they stuck it out. Disability Twitter was was and still is incredibly worried about it because a lot of the the technical changes that Musk has wrought has done some kinds of damage to that community, which is important because disability Twitter has used the affordances of Twitter not only to engage in political activism, but to engage in mutual aid and provide support for individuals who otherwise would not have it.

Speaker3:
And Musk's nonsense has has damaged and in some senses the ability to do that by changing the way that things become visible, changing the way that things circulate. But disability Twitter has rallied and adjusted accordingly. So what we're learning is that or what we're learning in real time is that even when you have like, you know, and forgive me for saying this a kind of actually, no, this is an easy way to say, even when apartheid Clyde takes over your digital public square with the intention of civilizing it. You know communities of resistance will still will will remain and will stand firm in the face of whatever happens there. It just becomes more difficult for for folks to or to realize the veracity or authenticity of accounts that are circulating information. So I think where we go from here, I think there's sort of a detente that has settled like my I haven't posted on Zerk in like a couple months. Um, I go there to, to look at cats of Mastodon and see what the, the rather thriving Star Trek community is up there. But my mentions are still full of people arguing about reposting, fighting over things that I have posted months ago.

Speaker3:
Right. Because they're still salient. They they just keep happening. Right. Look, before we started recording, I took a look at my at my mentions and there was a a young woman of color who said or who said something to the effect that one of my threads about the whiteness of Mastodon perfectly captured her experience and why she doesn't spend so much time on the platform. And this was something that I had written out, I guess, around maybe January or February. And it's still it's still like salient, right? These just because the dust has settled and we're all kind of adapting to the chaos on Twitter doesn't mean the issues that folks encountered on Mastodon have gone away. In fact, I think I think the the the concern is that they're just going to, you know, subside until the next wave of folks and because of folks migrate to the platform because people really the it doesn't seem to me that Macedonians are really interested in altering or changing their their practices to make the space more welcome. And that's a travesty because Mastodon could be something really cool. But it is not a Twitter replacement. It is a Twitter alternative and it has some very specific and very cool uses. Um, so long as you don't run afoul of somebody for not using content warnings or the content hiding feature inappropriately.

Speaker2:
Wow. Well, Jonathan. Unfortunately, we are out of time. Despite knowing that Jill and I have so many more questions we could ask you. But thank you so much for sharing your your personal experience and also for all the advocacy you've done on multiple platforms regarding these topics. And and also just for sharing, you know, all the history and the risks, the pros, the cons, the affordances and and a potential path forward in this interesting alternative metaverse that we have encountered in this community. So thank you so much for for being here and sharing all that with us.

Speaker3:
Yeah. No, it's my pleasure. If you. If you want me to come back and talk about it again, I'd be only too happy to.

Speaker1:
We want to thank Jonathan Flowers again for joining us today and for this conversation. As usual, we do a quick outro with Jess and his thoughts on the conversation and other things that are coming up in our mind spaces around the topic of the episode. So, Jess, let's start with you. What are you thinking today?

Speaker2:
So I feel like this topic is still surprisingly timely, even though the like scandal of Twitter and mastodon migration, everything happened. When was it like the end of 2022? Like November? December? Does that sound right around that time?

Speaker1:
At the beginning of the episode, I said the time either eight months or six months. It could have been four months. I know. And I say that because it was like it was. It was a it was a process, right? Like there was an instigating moment. But then it happened in different ways, which we sort of talked about during this interview.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So I guess it has been a while since the original debacle happened and like the mass migration occurred and I was a little bit worried that we were going to be doing this episode a little bit too late and that there wouldn't be a whole lot to comment on. That was still relevant today, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. And I think that was in part because especially with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, I feel like the changes that occurred, like the rapid fast, like move fast and break things mentality that began during that mass migration has just continued to today and unfortunately will continue continuing. And I think something that has been standing out to me in this conversation was the question that I asked Jonathan about, like, what's better to use a platform that has like really seamless UX, but we don't have any control over it, or to use a platform that's like really difficult to navigate, like the Fediverse and Mastodon. But like now we have agency and control as users and I feel like. There's part of me that, like, really does lean towards this, like, simplistic, easy. Like I'll just give away my my digital rights and my agency on the platform just so I can have like ease of use and I don't have to worry about like different like server instances and things like that.

Speaker2:
But then there's also been a lot of moments over the last few months where I've like logged on to Twitter, for example, and like the website is just broken, like it's just straight up broken. Like I'll go to the twitter.com and like the URL is broken and I'm like, Whoa, Twitter has never been broken before. Isn't this supposed to be a platform that I'm supposed to trust that it will always just be there and work like it's always been there for me and now it's not there for me anymore. And so I think that this, this this has been sort of like a catalyst for me to just grapple with like how much I trust these big tech corporations, these private tech corporations, and how at the end of the day, like they have no they do have like a responsibility and a duty to their users, but they don't really have like a legal or moral responsibility or duty to like keep the platform going forever and running in the same way that it always has. And that's like a trust that I, I didn't realize. I now like lost in a lot of the platforms that I use and I really took for granted before. So yeah, I think that's the first thing coming up in my mind. Space What about you?

Speaker1:
Yeah, I think the question of trust is huge here. So in some of the the work that I'm doing on like Death and Dying and archives and where do we put our stuff when we die? And then how do people who are bereaved, how do they manage that stuff? There's this assumption that people make that the stuff is always going to be there that like, compared to, you know, a notepad or a letter, Like if it's in person, if it's physical, then like that's going to deteriorate over time. But if we put these pictures on iPhoto, if we put these different, say, tweets out there like people want those two to stay out there as part of their legacy. And one thing that is gets to me it's disquieting, as I think the word I want is that like there's there's no guarantee that those things are going to survive. Like there's no guarantee that there's actually fidelity there. And then also it does depend on the platform how they are going to handle that according to their policy, according to their practices. And it turns out when you get a new CEO and other names that we could say Elon Musk at the Twitter Corporation that like.

Speaker1:
That you can't take for granted the changes that are going to be made or that there will be no changes made. But then at the same time, you see in Mastodon that people who are working on the Fediverse are constantly having to make choices about how to design this thing. And so your question of literacy as well, like how customizable should we make these social media platforms versus how streamlined should they be to appeal to a wide user base? One thing I heard in what Jonathan said is that there is also, you know, a barrier to use if you don't have a basic understanding of how to, you know, put different things together. Whereas in Twitter it is very intuitive. And that's part of why it's been able to take such a power stance in the market in general. And I don't know how you balance that appropriately. But yeah, I think I think the biggest thing is just like, well, what do we what do we trust? What do we take for granted on these social media platforms, including their neutrality of how they handle our data and our archives of the data that we create?

Speaker2:
Totally. Yeah. The example that was coming to my mind as you were speaking too was like photos and memories and sort of these like more higher stakes forms of data that I trust online. And you're totally right. Like I do not trust the two terabyte hard drive that is sitting in my desk right now. As much as I trust two terabytes of my photos on like Google Cloud. But why is that? Like what if Google all of a sudden one day ceased to exist or decided to like up how much it costs for me to store my photos and I couldn't afford it anymore, or just something happened and all these servers were wiped out. Like, I don't actually have as much agency over their servers and their hard drives as I do over this small handheld hard drive on my desk. But that scares me to know that like, that is in my power, that is in my control, as opposed to like, it's living in this like, ethereal cloud that is that belongs to like, some higher power. I don't know. There's like, there's a lot there.

Speaker1:
The religious undertones.

Speaker2:
I know I kind of accidentally slipped out is this like the Big brother state. But speaking speaking of like power, that was something that I was hoping to debrief with you a little bit, too, because that that theme came up a lot in the interview today as well, was like the this notion of like, who holds the power on these platforms and who is like represented through this power on these platforms, especially in terms of like identity and something that really stood out to me. And what Jonathan said was how on Mastodon there are these like calls to assimilate to this like white tech bro culture and how assimilation is just this like inherently racist thing when we're talking about identity and race specifically, specifically and ethnicity. And um, I think that's going to be an interesting experience to navigate as we explore Mastodon for the very first time because we haven't been on Mastodon, right? So we, we don't know what it's like in comparison to Twitter. And um, yeah, I'm curious what your thoughts are about about that topic specifically.

Speaker1:
I am. Curious to hear more from colleagues that we have, especially folks who are researching and employing Decolonial studies and decolonial perspectives on the adoption of new social media technologies. Because one thing that I'm hearing from Jonathan is that there is this echo chamber that emerges for various reasons of who's going to this new platform, when and why. It sounds like there's some level of virtue signaling that's happening there, but then it also sounds like there is a recreation of colonialism in various ways and in various levels. And so if you're listening out there and you do do work on decolonial studies in the HCI context or beyond, we would love for you to connect with us on Mastodon and tell us how this how that might be applied to expand on some of the things that Jonathan brought up today. But I think I have to do some more thinking about that and also some more exploration of Mastodon. There's a lot of like I said, I'm scared. I'm scared of Mastodon, I'm scared of change. And so I think that I have to face my fear and see what this new platform has to offer personally and then also for the podcast. So I'm interested in seeing where it goes from here. So with that, please do follow us, connect with us. Other verbs with us on Mastodon and Jess.

Speaker2:
And you can do that if you follow slash connect slash verb with us on Mastodon at Radical AI Pod at HCI for Social. And for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical AI Borg.

Speaker1:
If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite Podcatcher. You can catch our regularly scheduled episodes the last Wednesday of every month, sometimes with some bonus episodes in between.

Speaker2:
You can join our conversation on Mastodon One Last pitch at Radical iPod HCI Social. You can also join our conversation on Twitter at Radical iPod. You can join our conversation on LinkedIn at the Radical AI podcast. And that's all the social media so far. We're putting an end to this. We're capping it at three.

Speaker1:
You can also follow us on on LiveJournal and MySpace and that other one that began with an X that I use that one time back in 2006. There's there's many places you can.

Speaker2:
Follow us on Skype.

Speaker1:
Can you do that? I don't know. You can chat with us live on our Skype account. Hypothetically.

Speaker2:
At and as always, stay radical.

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