It began as shelter.
A little over two years ago, I deleted my account on Douban, which was the only Chinese social media site I really ever used. My decision was a response to the increased censorship, which was not in its beginning at the time, and certainly not in its end.
It was also (shortly) before Women Overseas was formed, so I was on the verge of being cut off from the Chinese community entirely. I asked around on Douban and was invited to a secret Mastodon instance (=server).
And by “secret” I don’t just mean that Mastodon was rather niche back then, but also that the particular instance I was on was set up to be super secretive. It was designed for people who wanted a place to post thoughts that only very few hand-picked followers could see. Most of them had locked accounts with no publicly visible timeline.
I spent my first few weeks on Mastodon staring at a blank timeline. It was also around this time that Chrisy and I started to talk more. She had been using Mastodon for some time on an instance that had a more standard set up. With her suggestion and the network of Women Overseas (which included several Mastodon instance owners), my timeline came alive.
Nevertheless, because of the circumstances surrounding my own use of Mastodon and that of my immediate circles, there was a pervasive culture of gentleness, privacy, and solitude. Almost everyone I ever interacted on there was a woman or non-binary person who was exhausted by unsolicited engagement on traditional SNSs. Even though my timeline spans across several instances, it was generally understood that: 1) any unsolicited advice results in immediate block, 2) most users specify follow rules in a pinned post; not reading them results in follow request being denied, 3) the most appropriate way to approach an argument is to mute and block.
It was certainly something I had not experienced before. While I don’t usually start fights under other people’s threads, it has always been difficult for me (and it still is) to balance myself when online strangers pick fights with me. I’m too quick to be self-critical. And while it (fortunately) doesn’t last long, the emotional roller-coaster exhausts me.
My timeline was also refreshingly casual. Most of my timeline consists of glimpses of other people’s lives. “Had the best apple pie from a local coffee store today. Chatted with the store owner. She is 46 years old and has 6 children. She told me she looked forward to seeing them all this Christmas.” Stuff like this would be posted by locked accounts so no one could boost them. Sometimes I star them. Often I just smile to myself.
Every so often there would be social commentary. And once in a blue moon there would be arguments. But they usually ended quickly, because everybody was exhausted all the time. Many posts would explicitly say “do not reply” or “those looking to argue will be blocked”. For some reason, these disclaimers took the pressure off of me to publicly endorse or censure them, which made it easier to appreciate their points of view and reflect on the subtleties in our disagreements. I had never weighed in myself. But nobody had needed me to weigh in.
This was what I had associated with Mastodon for two years.
It was just an idea.
I have been using Facebook and Twitter on and off. There are many features about them that deeply annoy me, but almost all of my professional connection is on there, so I begrudgingly use them. I was at my “off” period for Twitter when the Musk purchase happened, so I missed the drama (not sorry).
Because I manage the PSA DEI Caucus account, I still needed to check Twitter every so often. A couple of weeks ago when I checked Twitter, I came a cross a link that was circulating. It was a link to a GitHub page on how to find academics on Mastodon. It turned out that academics (as well as non-academics) were exploring Mastodon as Twitter-replacement in large numbers.
I browsed the list and saw several academics I’d like to follow. First, I wanted to follow them on my Chinese Mastodon account. But I soon realized that, unless my plan was to never ever interact with them, it was irresponsible for me to break identity in an instance that was set up to protect the privacy of its users.
Next, I wanted to make a professional account. My target was scholar.social, which had been around for quite a long time. However, the registration was closed. This was quite common for older instances — both of the instances Chrisy and I had used had indefinitely closed registration long ago. (For those who don’t know why, later I will explain how this works.) I looked around a bit more at other instances but was not a big enough fan of their domain names. Besides, most of those were closed too. I had considered fediscience.org, but felt like I wasn’t enough of a scientist to join, even though I was published.
(I do know that many philosophers or other non-scientists are on fediscience, and the admins might as well don’t care. But I have always had a strong sense of “I am using someone else’s space” when it comes to Mastodon, and therefore do not want to intrude on a space that explicitly asks for a “published scientist”.)
I was still debating the idea of joining a big, non-specialist instance such as mastodon.social. There was a remark made by an instance owner that stuck with me. She was complaining how there wasn’t a way for mods to reply to join requests, so she couldn’t explain to people what was wrong with their requests. Then she off-handedly remarked: “someone recently cited reason to join as ‘finding a place to save my thoughts’. Why someone would think saving anything on a stranger’s private server is a good idea is beyond me.”
It is difficult to wrap one’s head around this, but Mastodon instances are privately operated entities. The only thing they have in common is the ability to talk to each other, because they choose to run the same set of code. While my professional online presence isn’t exactly “precious”, it also isn’t so valueless that I’d be content tossing it into just any random stranger’s backyard; I should at least know whose backyard it is. And since I don’t know anyone who has a free backyard at the moment, I thought about making my own.
It was just an idea, but there were two of us.
I thought about it. I thought about it out loud with Chrisy, as one does. Chrisy is a physicist/ soon-to-be mechanical engineer who specializes in computer stuff self-assembling systems. We’ve collaborated on several “women in academia” type outreach projects before. It turned out that Chrisy had been toying with the idea of starting an instance, too. And while what stopped me was the coding part, what stopped her was anything but. Just like that, we decided to give it a try.
As you might expect from an open source, decentralized project, there are tons of guides out there that were comprehensive but not very well updated. Luckily, we knew several instance owners well enough to be able to ask for help. For example, many instances are hosted on DigitalOcean, which supports one-click installation of Mastodon, but it has been having a lot of performance issues lately which has resulted in one of our friends migrating her instance away.
The reason that DigitalOcean is having this problem is likely because it is one of the recommended hosting service on the Mastodon official set up guide and so is receiving too much hosting demands due to recent surge of Mastodon usage. The same is likely going to be true for the other hosting services mentioned on the guide. So I had to start with reading random hosting service reviews.
I had build this current blog with wordpress.org, which required me to buy a domain name and rent a server, so I was somewhat familiar with this process. It still amuses me that the major domain sellers all have super sketchy sounding names like namecheap or godaddy because they were started in the late-90s/early-00s.
I had to purchase an email distribution service, which is different from an email domain or address and is something I didn’t know about before. When new users join, they receive a confirmation email, which is sent by an email provider. I also learned that some email servers (usually institutional ones) would hold on to an incoming email for security screening before releasing to the receiver. When this happens, the email will display as “delivered” to the sender without being received by the recipient.
The day after the first launch, Google started flagging our site as dangerous for potential phishing. Chrisy and I spent the entire day trying to figure out what might have gone wrong. My current best guess is that it was because I didn’t register the site with Google Search Console. I did not know that was a thing. Chrisy ended up running her computer through an anti-virus software and performed a clean reinstallation of the instance. We are pretty confident now that we were never actually hacked. I have since received three more Google danger alerts which I had requested review for, and the alerts had gone away. I’m slowly learning to be more calm about these things.
Having Chrisy around is helpful not just because, well, she runs the instance, but also because she provides an important sanity anchor for me. She is a lot more used to troubleshooting tech issues than I am. If nothing else, it’s always good to have someone there to remind you that not everything is your fault.
People are people.
Just today I filled out a survey someone’s doing on academic fediverse admins as part of a digital humanities project. One of the questions was “What are your biggest challenges in running your server?” Without hesitation, I wrote “keeping my cool”.
About one in ten sign-up requests I receive writes something like “I come from Twitter” or “I saw this on Daily Nous” in the mandatory “reason to join” box, despite the fact that, between the box that says “confirm password” and the box where people must provide their reasons to join, there is a short paragraph that starts with “Please link to the institutional page of yourself.”
Both the “About” page on the instance and the github guide contain a section titled “Finding people to follow” that covers ways of finding other academics to connect with. A lot of these rest on hard work by other folks too (such as Cédric Eyssette, who maintains a list of philosophers on Mastodon). Still, I (occasionally) see people complain about Mastodon being difficult to find connection.
I received several direct messages asking me why our server doesn’t run on this or that Mastodon app. “That sounds like the app’s problem,” Chrisy would say. But they keep coming. (For what it’s worth, the reason is likely that we are on version 3 and a lot of apps only support version 4. I have also received a number of requests asking us to upgrade to version 4. I am holding on to my stubbornness so far.)
I will probably never fully understand it, and it is probably for the better.
The level-headed approach to this is probably to remind myself that I shouldn’t think of hosting as a favour for others and others are not doing me a favour by joining. It’s not like I expect gratitude — I don’t. And a lot of it comes from a genuine misunderstanding of how the fediverse works. But still.
I tell myself that people are entitled to have opinions, even if their opinion is that the fediverse doesn’t work as well as Twitter or Facebook. The fact that it has sheltered us all this time, until we are finally emboldened enough to carve our own corner, is irrelevant.
I tell myself that people are entitled to expect different things out of an experience and be frustrated when these expectations are not met. The fact that we spent time and effort and thought to plan it for people like us, should not matter.
I tell myself that we all came here because we didn’t want to be elsewhere. And a community is what its members want it to be.
If nothing else, this has been a good learning experience for me. It provides me with the rare opportunity to *know* that, as a matter of fact, I know more than this person who is doubting me. (This knowledge comes to me in the form of Chrisy telling me that I am right and me having independent reasons to believe her, which is good because this way I know it’s not blind confidence.) As you might imagine, I am sometimes wrong, and often doubted. Trying to figure out when I’m doubted because I’m wrong and when I’m doubted just because is always valuable.
The beauty is in stopping.
When I first started the instance and tried to recruit friends to join, they asked me what was so different about Mastodon other than the lack of a billionaire CEO. In my mind Mastodon was so radically different from Twitter and Facebook, but I soon discovered that I couldn’t exactly articulate the difference. This conversation was the motivation behind this post.
I now think that the most valuable aspect of Mastodon isn’t in its ability to “social network”, but in its ability to let you stop. I owe this point to Mike, who prefers a more passive, controlled networking experience. I went on social networks because I wanted an audience. I don’t have a lot to say but I want people to listen when I do. It was very difficult to wrap my head around the kind of gentle and reserved content sharing I experienced when I first joined the secret instance. I was almost forced to learn because I would have been ostracized if I didn’t.
But I did eventually learn, and I learned to appreciate it. I still wouldn’t adopt this approach for myself, but I’d like to encourage it. Here are some tips on controlling your social engagement:
- Under “preferences -> profile -> appearance”, where you can edit your bio and such, there is a check box for “require follow requests”. This means that, when people click “follow” on your page, they send you a follow request. A lot of people I know have a pinned post that explains their acceptance criterion. But you can also do it arbitrarily or… not at all — people will not be notified of your follow request decisions.
- You can make it more difficult for others to find you. Under “preferences -> profile -> appearance”, you can uncheck the “suggest account to others” under profile and check “hide your social graph”. Under “preferences -> preferences -> other”, you can “opt-out of search engine indexing”. You can even set up automated post deletion that automatically clears your timeline.
- You can remove current followers by going to the “follows and followers” tab on the right hand side and select either “followers” or “mutuals” under “relationship” at the top. You will see a list of people who currently follow you, and you can remove them by making them no longer follow you.
- When you post something, you can set it to “follower only” by clicking on the globe icon under the text box. This means only followers (whom you’ve hand picked using above methods) can see this post, and they cannot boost it.
- If you feel like you have to follow a bunch of people, but really only want to see the timeline of a few, you can create a list. Here’s a guide on how to do that. I have a list of people whose status I don’t want to miss at all.
- Remember that your timeline isn’t curated. If you don’t like someone’s content, unfollow or muting will instantly remove them from your feed. You can also turn of boosts or relies from showing on your feed with the little bar button on the top right of your timeline.
It is a bit of a learning curve, but I hope people who will enjoy this community will be able to stay.
Link to instance: https://fediphilosophy.org/about
Link to guide: https://github.com/xiyudu/fediphilosophy
My handle: @kinozhao@fediphilosophy.org
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This was really interesting, thanks for all the context. I actually saw the link on Mastodon, which is my first active presence on a large social media platform since the early days of Facebook (which I barely use anymore). I did follow a whole bunch of people on Twitter just for fun because some of the threads were so great, but mostly from a locked account without posting myself. I’ve been trying to force myself to engage a little on Mastodon but am feeling shy there for several reasons, so this time I thought I’d reply here instead. (But I’m happy to boost if you want more people to see your mention of the blog).
I loved the way you opened this: such a different experience than how most people are coming to Mastodon. The gentler, less toxic vibe is very apparent though I also see tradeoffs; I miss the loose, freewheeling sprawl of Twitter as someone who never had any skin in the game and found it easy enough to sidestep the hate and dogma by being very selective in whom I followed or how far I read. But it was lonely not to be part of any conversations. And even if Twitter remains intact, having only 1 follower from years with an inactive locked account means I look like a bot and will be roundly ignored. So, Mastodon seemed like a great way to make a fresh start.
However, something problematic has come to my attention, which perhaps you could shed light on as an administrator. One of the more high-profile people on Mastodon with tons and tons of followers was complaining about people demanding individual replies to their comments when he’s been receiving up to 1000 messages/day. Another commentator pointed out that many people may not realize he gets so much activity, because Mastodon has been hiding most other replies in people’s feeds such that when they look at someone’s thread, they only see a tiny fraction (if any) of the volume of replies that were actually made to an OP. Apparently this is due to either some bug or a core feature, but if true, it would mean that there’s no way to see who is actually in the conversation and what most other people said. Indeed, I have been struck by how few comments appear under posts by semi-popular people where I would expect to be seeing more replies.
To me this seems like an enormous problem, and honestly kind of a deal-breaker. I mean, what’s the point of participating in threads when you might be missing 90% of what’s going on and 90% might not bee seeing yours, and even worse, you have no idea to what extent this is really happening?! I am astonished that more people haven’t been discussing this, and can only assume it’s because no one knows if it’s really happening. But if this is really how Mastodon works going forward, it’s going to be an enormous barrier.
Sorry about the long-winded comment, and congratulations to you and Chrisy on starting your own server – an epic achievement!
Hi Chris-
Thanks for the comment 🙂 On the can’t see other users’ comments point: it’s not a bug. I don’t know if the counts as a feature. But the way Mastodon works is that your server caches information from other servers based on which servers the users from your server interact with (where interact is things like follow and search). So, you can only see the replies by users whom your server knows about, because your server doesn’t cache every server in existence (because it’s a federated network).
I must say I don’t really see this as a problem. I think of Mastodon more like real life interaction. Say, in a conference, I’m chatting with a smallish group of people in a big convention hall. It might be the case that everyone is talking about the same subject, but I don’t actually want to hear everyone’s opinion. I only want to hear from people I care about, who are all right in front of me. It’s also possible that one of them would say “just like what X said” and I would be like “who’s X?” But then I have a target and I can find them to see what they say and maybe join their circle too. But it’s not like Twitter where everything is shouting at me all the time.
I guess that did sound a little alarmist in retrospect, lol. It just caught me by surprise since I had assumed the whole decentralized servers thing only impacted what initially appears in your feed and who you can interact with without specifically following them, not the individual followed threads themselves. If it’s just another reflection of the network and not a bug, I feel a little better. Especially if we still have the option of seeing any invisible posts by manually looking up the post in question on that other server, then it’s not an issue at all. Your image of just focusing on whomever happens to be there in your proximity is a neat way to look at it.
But in your real-life example, there is still a certain amount of control in terms of knowing who is and isn’t present in that small circle and who else is around on the periphery. I wasn’t hung up on hearing or engaging with every single opinion, so much as having access to a cohesive exchange rather than just a random thin slice out of context. It would be more like if you showed up at the conference hall but neither you or anyone else could see or hear very well, so you would chat with whomever emerged out of the fog but couldn’t see the lay of the land. Or if you were at someone’s talk, and could only hear (and be heard by) the two people immediately to your right and left who aren’t necessarily your friends. That was the impression I got from the other guy’s description, but sounds like it’s less random than that. Anyway, I’ll deal! 🙂