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Last Week in the Fediverse, ep 5: 🧙

Welcome to Last Week in the Fediverse, episode 5. It’s been a busy week, filled with drama, news about dropping activity on the network and controversial software releases. In this edition:

🧙Drama over the new Harry Potter game leads to the shutdown of the mastodon.lol server.
🤖The continued bot transition towards Mastodon.
📉A public conversation on how to interpret Mastodon’s user numbers.
🐃Wildebeast, controversial new server software from Cloudflare is released.

As well as quite a list of other interesting news items!

Server admin issues

Joining a network on the internet inherently comes with strings attached: you are dependent on the admin of the server you’ve joined. This theme has been present throughout the entire history of the internet. Early internet forum drama with regards to admins is well-known. When the internet became bigger, and the networks became massive corporations, drama with the admins never went away (‘vaguely gesturing towards Twitter’). The fediverse’s approach of going for decentralized and smaller servers meant only a shift in the content of drama, and how its manifests.

This became visible yesterday with the instance mastodon.lol, a server that is home to 18k people, and describes itself as “friendly towards members of the LGBTQ+ community”. The issue is about the new Harry Potter videogame Hogwarts Legacy. The game is controversial due to J.K. Rowling’s outspoken transphobic statements. For further context, Mastodon holds a large presence of trans people, and queer issues are deep into the DNA of the fediverse (4 of the 5 authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer).

The drama started when @Nathan, the admin of the server, refused to ban people for buying or playing Hogwarts Legacy, and telling them not to post spoilers just to spite people:

This lead to serious pushback from people (both mastodon.lol people and people from other instancers), and the discussion turned very heated from there on. There has been a significant number of name-calling in the direction of Nathan, which escalated to a point that he decided to give on being an admin for the server, posting:

This escaled even further, triggering in meltdown by Nathan, in which he told multiple people to kill themselves (link, CW: suicide). In later messages, he reiterated that he will not transfer the server admin rights to other people, noting the sensitive nature of the database of users.

This drama is a clear indication of how difficult content moderation is. Before the drama started, it was clear that everyone’s ideology is aligned: everyone on the mastodon.lol server condemns transphobia and TERFS.

Let’s assume you someone who is mindful of trans rights, and are looking for a server to join. You read the rules of the server and think, great, this server is a good fit for me.

Then Hogwarts Legacy gets released, and people are posting comments about buying and playing the game. For a trans person, this can be quite painful; the author denies your very existence. Gameshub (by Percy Ranson) wrote a good article about the game explaining this in more detail. So maybe you agree and think thus posts about Hogwarts Legacy do not have a place on your server. You check the rules of the server and read: “No oppressive language or actions”. Supporting someone who profits from the denial of your existence seems pretty oppresive. So you apply the posts about Hogwarts Legacy to be removed.

Now the admin sees your report, and also checks the rules. They also read: “No oppressive language or actions”. But restricting someone’s speech for simply buying a product that does not directly make transphobic statement sure does seem oppressive! So the post stays up.

Which rule interpretation is correct? I don’t know! It is a hard question, open to ambiguity and nuance. But assuming that people interpret ambiguous rules the same as you is easy. And thus, conflict arises; people expected the rest to agree with them, and well, clearly they did not.

A final note: the meltdown posts by @Nathan are unacceptable. There is no situation where it is okay to tell someone to kill themselves. I also condemn the dog piling that occurred in the direction of @Nathan. This form of online harrasment can be devastating to receive as well, and easily lead to escalation. My interest is on the underlying forces that caused this drama.

Bot transition

Last week, Twitter announced the shutdown of the free tier of the API (since extended for a few days because, well, lol). We’re starting to see the fallout of that decision:

I spoke with @stefanbohacek, the creator of the website botwiki.org about all of this.

Botwiki is a website that is dedicated to bots on all social networks, and help with documentation and inspiration. The large majority of bots on the wiki are about Twitter, due to the scope and size of the network. With the limitations of the free tier of the API, the focus however has changed in the last weeks.

“On a technical level, I'm still learning about what you can do with Mastodon,” @stefan says. “The API is really easy to work with, and I was able to migrate my most popular bots without any issues. I'm not really missing much from Twitter yet, but I will say that so far it's been a breath of fresh air. There is no monetization goal with Mastodon/fediverse, so things are definitely more open and invite you to experiment.”

@stefan is clearly not only focused on the technical aspects of bots on social networks though: “I am really excited about being part of something new and positive that we can all help grow together. Between the scams of the profit-oriented “web3” and the continued automation of jobs that the working class will hardly benefit from, there really hasn't been much to get excited about in the tech world. So this is a very welcome change, and I am happy to be part of it.”

One of the more important questions with regards to bots is how to deal with data ownership, especially when bots are scraping. Here @stefan recognizes the issue: “even if you do post something publicly, you should still have control over how it gets used, or how it gets presented.” He notes the issue goes for bots on the wiki too, when authors want to have their bot removed, which he does. He summarizes: “In general, I do prefer to ask for permission, but if you asked me specifically about companies hoarding public data and making money off of it, like Twitter does, I'd say that's a fair game, at least in regards to the company.”

If you want to contribute to the botwiki project, you can find more information at this link. For now, the focus is on organizing and adding the quickly growing list of bots on the fediverse. And if you want to start building your own bots, take a look at the website cheapbottootsweet.

Mastodon user count

Wired published an article with the headline ‘The Mastodon bump is now a slump”. This refers to the drop in daily active users (DAU), which looks something look this for Mastodon:

(source)

@mmasnick wrote a good response to this in TechDirt, explaining how this is lazy reporting. He explains how this is a wrong interpretation of the numbers, but a logical conclusion of a spike in new users. New users will never all stay to a new product that they signed up for. Mastodon’s retention rate of new users is actually remarkable high. The drop is caused simply by the matter of the peak in November 2022 being extremely high.

It also ignores engagement, which seem to be remarkably high on the Fediverse. Earlier this week I noted how a post about trains by the European Commision had 3 times as much engagement on the fediverse than on Twitter, even though they have 4% of the followers. The German magazine Heise Online noticed a similar experience. @fingolas went into detail comparing the engagement numbers between Twitter and Mastodon. They wrote how similar the engagement levels are between the platform, even though Mastodon is significantly smaller.

There is a second problem with the argument, namely that it assumes a Silicon Valley Tech Growth mindset for Mastodon, where growth is inherently good. The only thing a platform should be focused on is growth. Ed Zitron wrote a great article yesterday about the problems with this mindset in general. He explains the problems that arise very well, when the focus is only on numbers-go-up.

Instead, it is great to see how many people in the fediverse are working towards building a community that is helpful and inclusive, and not towards the biggest network that kills Twitter.

Wildebeast released

Cloudflare has released Wildebeast, a Mastodon-compatible client for the fediverse. They have build the architecture from the ground up, and it is technologically quite impressive. However, there are a few notable features that are worth knowing:

@jonah and @atomicpoet both explain their hesitancies with Wildebeast very well. I echo their opinions: a corporate, for-profit instance that seeks to raise barriers, and create their own walled garden, does not fit well with the idea’s about the fediverse. Because you cannot transfer your account away from Wildebeast if you would want to, you end up being locked in Cloudflare’s walled ecosytem. This is in direct contradiction with the openness of the fediverse. Until/if these issues are addressed, I would advise to avoid Wildebeast.

In other news

A lot of other things have happened as well this week. Lets summarize them quickly:

(source)

It’s been a busy week, lots of things happening. The Fediverse Report will be back this Sunday, with the bi-weekly Sunday Readings report. Thank you so much for reading. You can follow here at fediversereport.com or follow my Mastodon account.