Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has bluntly renamed it “Masterbatedone,” its popularity has rocketed to one million monthly users in the past week, and its followers believe it can be an antidote to misinformation and online hate. What is Mastodon, this little-known network until recently presented as the potential replacement for Twitter? Five questions to understand.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
Where does Mastodon come from?
This social network was created in 2016 in Germany by a developer, Eugen Rochko, in response to rumors at the time of the acquisition of Twitter by the controversial Peter Thiel. The interface looks like two drops of water to Twitter, with “toots” (“pouets” in French) containing video, images and up to 500 characters, instead of tweets limited to 280. The basic principle is the same: we see appearing in our news feed the “squeaks” of those to whom we are subscribed. There the similarities end.
How it works ?
Even its proponents admit, Mastodon’s operation is complex, even off-putting. “It’s complicated, it’s not user-friendly, it’s decentralization that causes this, summarizes Nellie Brière, speaker and consultant in digital communications and social networks. It feels like Twitter in its early days, there’s no algorithm, I really feel like I’m reliving 2009.”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY NELLIE BRIÈRE
Nellie Brière, speaker and consultant in digital communications and social networks
First of all, Mastodon is made up of some 4100 servers, called “instances”, set up by as many communities with their interests and location. There is at least one instance in Quebec, called jasette.facil.services. Each is responsible for moderation, in compliance with the main principles dictated by Mastodon, and manages traffic according to the power of its server. She has access to her users’ information, which she can ban. We open an account on one of these servers, which confirms the registration within a very variable time, between 3 seconds and 1 h 12 min in our three tests. You can subscribe to an unlimited number of instances and switch from one to another by exporting your messages and subscribers.
Communications and the search for subscribers are easy between members of the same instance. Things get complicated when you want to subscribe or find “squeaks” on another server, but interactions are still possible. Basically, there are three news feeds: the “local public feed”, with the most recent messages posted on the chosen server, the “global public feed” from the other servers and the “home”, where the messages of the users to whom we are subscribed scroll. Everything scrolls in chronological order, no algorithm comes to lather the most popular content and no advertising appears.
What are the benefits of Mastodon?
For Nellie Brière, “the big difference is that it’s open-source, free, decentralized”. “I invite people to go there, it costs nothing, and it’s an apprenticeship that is essential to envision the future of digital. It’s not going well with GAFAM, and we don’t have to suffer the tyranny of Elon Musk. »
For Laurence Grondin-Robillard, doctoral student in communication at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and lecturer at the School of Media, the grouping of users according to their interests, by “instance”, is one of the strong points of Mastodon. “Being in a community of interests in an application that shares knowledge, without filters, without ads, that’s great. »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY LAURENCE GRONDIN-ROBILLARD
Laurence Grondin-Robillard, doctoral student in communication at the University of Quebec in Montreal and lecturer at the School of Media
The 500-character limit instead of 280, the ability to edit messages, different emoticons depending on the server, “sensitive content warnings” and the ability to effectively filter its subscribers are some of the charms lashed out by Mastodon.
But surely there are downsides…
Yes, and there are many. First, some very popular servers, like mastodon.social, are horribly slow, especially with the explosion in popularity over the past week. The absence of an algorithm means that the messages scroll without any hierarchy: the “squeak” of an obscure merchant in a Texas town will have the same importance in your feed as the headline of the daily newspaper. The world. Mastering the interactions between different servers is so complex that an article here would not be enough to expose the subtleties.
And the proliferation of decentralized servers and unknown moderators brings a very real risk of slippage. “I haven’t seen any so far, but each instance with its basic rules could decide to troll as it wants, notes Laurence Grondin-Robillard. Moreover, at the beginning of Mastodon, it was free-for-all, everyone had their rules and that gave rise to a lot of problems. »
Nellie Brière, she does not see why a decentralized moderation would be more problematic than one that would only be the responsibility of a single private company like Twitter.
“It is not by leaving this in the hands of big magnates that we are going to solve the problem. If there are malicious servers on Mastodon, the other servers will not allow them to stay. »
So, could Mastodon replace Twitter?
Even a supporter like Nellie Brière is reserved on this subject. “Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to work, people don’t have enough digital literacy. I would like to believe it, I invite people to go there. »
Laurence Grondin-Robillard, she has a main piece of advice to give to those who want to understand Mastodon: “Try it, get started! As with Twitter in its early days, it takes some time to understand this social network, its codes and its interface, and find the most interesting accounts, she notes. “It’s really not perfect. It is an application that remains nested, which takes a little more technical knowledge. I don’t think it will replace Twitter. »