Brave New "Hello World"
Decentralisation out of a dumpster fire
This time last week, I had no idea I would be where I am today. I don’t mean physically - if anything I’ve spent more time at my desk than I have for a long time. There was some big news last week, when a blue bird was finally sold. This had been looming for some time, but the implications of the sale for both staff and users of the platform were yet to be clearly seen… Hate speech immediately rocketed, racial abuse increased fivefold in 12 hours. If this is what “free speech absolutism” is, I don’t want any part of it.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and initially I felt the same: powerless that this place where I’d met so many data folks was coming crashing down. Over the last 10 months or so, I’ve spent a lot of time here sharing ideas and interacting with new people. I feel lucky to have met many of them at Coalesce 2022 in New Orleans. Have I lost what I’ve invested into this place? Will I not be able to interact with these great people in the same way I have previously?
I’m not one to bemoan my fate; I like to be proactive. I searched for “Twitter alternative” and “Open source Twitter”: both searches led to Mastodon. Briefly skimming through the top posts, I realised this was a decentralised system, with many servers being part of one network - back to good old Web1 with some modern software engineering mixed in.
Rather than going into much depth on what Mastodon is, I’ll share Jeremy Littau’s post above
You have to host your own server somewhere to use it, or otherwise join someone else’s. It was at this moment I realised that we, the evacuees of “Data Twitter” (EoDT), needed our own home and our own server to preserve what we have. I briefly toyed with the idea of self-hosting Mastodon somewhere, but thought better of it - I’m time poor and weak at infra stuff.
Could I find a host who I could pay to make a server for us and keep it up? The top of my first search found masto.host, which I now know actually hosts two of the larger Mastodon servers: mastodon.art and fostodon.org. Getting a server was as simple as choosing a name and server size: I chose data-folks.masto.host. As I explain below, I chose this name as the server was initially intended for EoDT, but also for anyone and everyone who’s interested in data, who is willing to come and be kind, not abusive and be respectful of others on the server. The term “folks” now has inclusivity baked into it for me, from its suggested use in our existing data communities. I thought of buying a custom domain, but wasn’t sure if it would be worth the hassle… I had no idea if many people would use the server.
When I set it up I thought… hopefully at least 20 or so will come, because even then it could just be like a fun chat group about data amongst friends. That was last Thursday night - what happened afterwards was not what I anticipated 😅!
There were hours over the last few days where over 5 people per minute, on average, were joining the server… I’ve had to upgrade it twice!
I’ve spent so many hours just drinking in the timelines (the feeds of posts on Mastodon), enjoying a new social network experience for the first time since 2006. It’s felt most like when I was a teenager and MSN Messenger became popular, and we found and invited all our friends! Whatever happens with the server in the future - and I’ll keep it up while it’s used - nothing can take away this experience from us. Folks who felt put off by the algorithmic acceleration of hate in the previous space feel comfortable to be on our server! This wasn’t something I had thought of when I set it up - there are many folks who never used Twitter who are on the server.
I’ve had one of the best weeks of my life (not even a full week yet), I’ve made about 1000 posts (I’ve only made 1500 on Twitter in 10 months). It’s a much freer space, where people don’t feel worried about posting with no reactions - Mastodon doesn’t play on the social reward centre of your brain so much with viral feedback, or lack thereof. There is a much greater equality of voice and many people who are less well-known have great things to say. It’s actually made some folks who seemed like they live on a cloud, with tens of thousands of followers on other platforms, more approachable and just like the rest of us.
Timing is everything with social migrations like this - many of you will remember Whatsapp-gate, which is a fair amount of time ago now. At that time, there was an opportunity for people to move, in big numbers, to a platform such as Signal, where they are not beholden to the whims and appetites of another unsuitable leader. In a time where everyone is relatively happy with the existing platform, it’s hard for a few people to overcome the inertia. In a time like this, when most people are unhappy… it feels like you just need to light a match.
Today, I use Signal for over 95% of my personal messaging, but I used WhatsApp’s own broadcast feature during the time of lower inertia, to encourage my contacts to move over. Many of them did. It’s important to use the features of the previous platform to help folks move across - we don’t want to leave anyone behind if we can avoid it.
Some of us have already decided that this is the future public square we’ll speak (toot) from, and the bird is in the past. Going forward, I will only post on Twitter to show people the way out.
