Cal Newport has written yet another great piece at the New Yorker about Twitter, questioning the need for a global central communication network. First, he wonders if Threads can or will replace Twitter; it's unlikely. Then he reasons why we don't need a Twitter replacement at all.
Newport argues well. I agree with his conclusion that smaller social networks are better for people to actually enjoy good online communication, while giant social media sites are fine for venture capitalists to make money yet bad for humanity and civility.
I couldn't help but wonder, though, how Cal's astute points apply to Mastodon. So I asked him on his blog and hope he responds. I said in part:
"Mastodon is algorithm free and, so far, eschews the 'Quote Post' feature. And with instances (federated), each one seems to be, or can feel like, a smaller niche-focused forum or network.
So Mastodon may avoid the rancor of Twitter's mass-comms (like Threads' goal), yet it may also avoid the anodyne banality Threads seems destined for."
I think Mastodon has some fundamental things right about connecting people through federated instances on the open web.
On one hand, an instance can be small or niche, fostering a tight-knit group of folks who share a common interest and actually enjoy talking about it. For example, Gamepad.Club is a relatively small Mastodon instance focused on gaming that seems to work quite well, engendering casual chat about the subject.
On the other hand, small instances like Gamepad.Club are integrated (federated) with other instances (both smaller and larger ones). This lets gamers there follow other topics (hashtags) or people on any other instance (or server), thereby creating a larger social network.
Of course, instances are not necessarily focused on single topics. I'm on a large general one, mastodon.world, featuring a wide variety of people and topics. I like to closely follow certain favorite topics of mine, though, so I follow many gaming conversations on Gamepad.Club and computing/tech topics on fosstodon.org, for example.
Mastodon seems to have struck the balance between small/niche and large-scale mass communication. There is good conversation to be had there, and there seems to be little negativity of the sort Twitter is infamous for.
I may be wrong, but I hope my assessment is accurate and that Cal Newport weighs in with supporting points. Knowing where he stands against big social media, though, my hopes aren't high.
Nevertheless, he's right about people favoring small groups for more personal and casual conversation online, especially around common interests. Given that, Mastodon is on a path that may prove more successful, long-term, than Threads, even if the number of its user-base is smaller. In this case, while being globally federated, smaller is a bigger deal.
But what if Threads eventually federates its large user-base with Mastodon's small one? Those dynamics remain to be seen, but we can see a hint.
Micro.blog, a microblogging social media platform, already federates with Mastodon. Due to the small size of both, combining them doesn't net a new overpowering mass-communication platform, breaking at the seams. But this is also due to their natural separation on the web.
This effect is explained, in part, by the Loosely-Coupled System. The internet itself (via protocols like ActivityPub) is the social network, tying social sites together. But these sites are hosted on different servers at different domains, much like Mastodon is itself comprised of many small stand-alone instances. It's like Micro.blog is simply another "instance" of Mastodon.
Likewise, though Threads has a large user-base and may federate with Mastodon, the fact that they are naturally separated services may provide a safe buffer against amassing into an overgrown social-media monolith. Thus a large global social conglomerate, distributed across the internet, may prove more beneficial overall than a single Twitter-like platform.
We don't need to replace Twitter with a better Twitter. We need to recognize its replacement has been here all along; it's the internet itself. And Mastodon is the newest refined example of loosely-coupled groups of people interconnecting online.