It occurs to me, as we see more and more people drifting toward Bsky, that the conventional wisdom is that Mastodon “died” or is in the doldrums or somesuch — because it didn’t immediately explode into a magical Xwitter-killer I guess? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s rolling along merrily in a low-key way. Bsky is fine, but it has a very familiar undercurrent: it feels like some overhyped trendy restaurant full of being “mwa! mwa!” faaaaabulous. Mastodon’s vibe is more like your favorite quiet neighborhood café, especially now that the finger-wagging phase is mostly over.
I know people have encountered harassment problems on Mastodon, which will never be OK, but that mostly has to do with choosing some big, default instance that operates “at scale,” i.e., where the admins do the minimum viable job. There are lots of smaller ones that are very well-run, where issues like that get nipped in the bud. The one I’m involved in, tldr.nettime.org, has a really excellent admin / moderation team, and (naturally) the people there are even better. For people interested in a mix of critical / art / theory / tech / politics / curation / etc, it’s becoming the go-to instance. And it’s doing that slowly and organically, which — starry-eyed rhetoric about how Bsky — is always better than an overnight sensation.
More and more people are beginning to see clearly just how dangerous social media megaplatforms are, largely because they’re vulnerable to oligarchy, which in the US effectively now means THE STATE. It’s great that Bsky is a public-benefit corp and is taking steps to insulate itself from oligarchic control, but if you think it isn’t vulnerable to Trump, Musk, and Zuck, you’re kidding yourself. Let me be more specific: the moment that Bksy starts to pose a threat to their new order, MAGA will mount coordinated attacks from a dozen directions (federal regulation, state legislation, personal legal actions, forum shopping, etc). Indeed, you can be sure that what we should start calling Uncivil Society — that toxic sludge made of oligarchs, fake-news barons, corporate counsels, rightist think tanks, ALEC-style activists, creepy lobbyists, fashy provocateurs, and so on — are already mapping out the legal and political strategies needed to bring unruly social media to heel. (If that still sounds “conspiratorial” to you, that no longer means I’m imagining things, it means you haven’t quite caught up with where we’re at.)
Bsky is fine, but it isn’t safe. “Benefit corp” or not, it’s a US-based for-profit corporation run by Silly Valley scenester types and it remains entirely dependent on investors. If you go down the list of what steps its leadership has taken to protect it or what benefits its model offers, every one of them is just a diluted versions of some of what Mastodon has to offer: beneficial mission, open protocol, distributed structure, self-hosting, data portability, etc.
So: If you think Facebook will remain a safe, viable environment under Trump…good luck with that. If you don’t think so, you will NEED to start untangling yourself from it: downloading your data, sharing alternative contact info with FBriends, and building presences and habits elsewhere on the net. You’ll hear lots of reasons you shouldn’t, including people like Rebecca Solnit who will tell you that leaving FB is tantamount to “ALL GO[ing] SILENT AND BE[ing] UNABLE TO COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER [and] BE[ing] SILENT, UNCONNECTED, AND DISENGAGED.” (Seriously?! GTFO.) Another friend put it better: “Spare me the ‘we should stay, fight and keep balance‘ rhetoric, you cannot win against the house.”
You might expect me to end this with a paean to Mastodon, but I won’t. It’s not for everyone. But, then again, nor is being forced to migrate as one platform after another fails along plain-as-day fault lines like centralization, corporation, and (I guess) scalification.