What is Mastodon for?  connectedplaces.online

The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.

A few years ago, I started recommending [pt_BR] joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.

I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer (timeline):

People experience it [Mastodon] through their home timeline, which composites content from across the entire federation. They experience it through replies arriving from users on other instances, through boosts that carry posts across instance boundaries, through trending topics and hashtags that aggregate across the network. The lived experience of Mastodon is the federated social graph: thousands of overlapping follow relationships and federation decisions producing a shared space no instance controls.

Given this reality, the entire robust apparatus that developers created to offer control and self-determination to instances is useless.

This distinction ends up having systemic ramifications. Laurens uses the example of someone questioning the rejection of AI tools in the Fediverse. The responses (many, as expected) fell into two categories:

• Those who argue that instance administrators can block other AI-friendly instances.
• Those who completely reject the presence of instances, accounts, or even pro-AI discourse in the Fediverse.

A difference that can be traced to the distinction between the “protocol” perspective and the “community” perspective.

This is not a cultural failing that can be fixed by asking people to be nicer, which was roughly Scott Jenson’s prescription. Nor is it resolved by pointing to the protocol’s openness, which was roughly the community’s response. Neither prescription reaches the actual problem, because Mastodon’s governance tools sit at the instance level and the community’s experience happens at the federation level. Mastodon was built as open infrastructure at the federation level and community at the instance level. The Jenson thread demonstrates that the community has long since reversed this: they experience the federation as their community, and the instance as an administrative detail. The software has not caught up, and until it does, the community will keep enforcing its boundaries the only way the federation layer allows: person by person, reply by reply.

His conclusion (above) gives us a lot to think about…