Café Lob-On – Bloonface's blog

Some interesting links – September 2023

Most of these relate back to previous posts I’ve made, but I’ve found them to be interesting/complementary to them – or I want to talk about them in a way that’s too long to go in a thread somewhere but too short to be in an actual post.

“Mastodon is easy and fun, except when it isn’t”

Erin Kissane did some informal research on why users bounced off Mastodon, using a sample of BlueSky users who were willing to answer the question as to why they left.

Most of these reasons are quite congruent with what I suggested in my post on the failed “Mastodon Migration”; and the segments about poor discoverability and a culture that focuses on hostility to outsiders and lecturing ring true to me. She also posits some answers as to how these things can be fixed – how likely these are to ever be implemented is however something I would be dubious of, since (as noted in my piece) the users and main developers of Mastodon presently are those who like it already and don’t want it to change.

I did quite enjoy this quote from a bounced-off Mastodon user, which rather sums up how I feel about how poorly decentralisation actually works for users and how badly Mastodon’s functionality is oversold:

I was told picking a server didn’t matter. Then it turned out it actually mattered a great deal for discoverability. Then I’m told ‘migrating is easy’, which is just a straight up lie.

I do have to wonder how people keep talking about migration being easy and painless when you lose all your past posts and media in the process. The usual reply to this seems to be “why would you want to look at all your old posts?”; a typically condescending tone-deaf “works for me” response. What if I do want to, dickhead?

“The ecosystem is moving”

That leads me neatly into this great post by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, which goes over the considerations of why a federated protocol is potentially of less utility than a centralised platform – using the example of XMPP. His suggestion is that a protocol becomes stuck in a moment in time because of the need to maintain consensus between its users, and this cripples its ability to respond to new user demands and needs.

I discussed this phenomenon briefly in reference to XMPP in my piece on Meta using ActivityPub, and agree. As I say there, XMPP did not fail to gain any consumer foothold because of nefarious ne’erdowelling on the part of Google, but because there was no real reason to use it – and even less after competing products outclassed it in terms of features. XMPP is a great instant messaging platform, if you like talking to absolutely nobody using a feature set that is somewhere behind AIM circa 2008.

The same also applies, although Marlinspike doesn’t directly say it, to ActivityPub, the protocol principally used by Mastodon. ActivityPub now underpins a whole variety of different services, only a few of which it is actively suited to, and so its feature set is broadly limited to a subset of what Twitter offered circa 2012. Things like quote posts are not part of the spec, so implementation of them is restricted to clients, where they are essentially unofficial extensions of the protocol.

Meanwhile, Meta’s Threads (which has faltered a bit after an initial strong start – albeit landing a hell of a lot ahead of the Fediverse in terms of active users) has iterated on itself quite quickly, albeit maybe not quickly enough to recover its initial momentum.

The other side of this is that while Marlinspike talks about how a lot of protocols ossified in the late 90s, a lot of fediverse users and developers seem to actively want to go back to what they see as a halcyon era of the Internet when it was all protocols – probably, quite literally, the late 90s. And again, they’re the ones in charge. That feels dangerous when the supposed driving idea is to try and revolutionise the social media of 2023.

The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s sucked, incidentally. Yes, Meta might put tracking cookies on your computer, but I’ve also not needed to run Spybot Search and Destroy for the best part of two decades, and in general today’s Internet is far more useful and simply has far more fun in it for the average person. Nostalgia for those times is very misplaced indeed.

“Meta just proved people hate chronological feeds”

An interesting article from Wired on Meta publishing some research showing that people tend to get bored of social media without algorithms very quickly. As a short summary, users start to scroll more at first to try and find what they might find interesting, then discover that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and then they go somewhere else to get the fun they were looking for.

This is something that could have gone into my Mastodon piece, had it, you know, existed when I wrote it. Mastodon offers nothing but chronological feeds; but given its famously terrible content discovery and its lower levels of activity overall, this just annoys users more, since they have a fairly large pool of activity to sift through but no means of easily surfacing things that they might be interested in.

And, of course, its users resist even the availability of content-surfacing algorithms to other people, even if they aren’t made to use them themselves – sometimes on such tenuous grounds as “I want control over how my content appears” (something which is laughably naïve in the context of how little meaningful control ActivityPub actually gives you over your content).

For all people complain about Internet users just wanting “dopamine hits”, at the end of the day, people get dopamine hits when they enjoy things. It’s a very strange attitude, peculiar to Mastodon, that you shouldn’t easily enjoy the process of using social media – that you should have to work for a long time to try and find things you might be interested in, and if you don’t then you’re somehow doing it wrong. The problem is that Mastodon does not exist in a vacuum, and this “eat your greens” approach to the Internet only really appeals to, well, Mastodon diehards. If people don’t like it, or want algorithms, then there are other places they can go that have them. Meta’s research proved that that’s exactly what they do.

And realistically, people use social media for leisure. For fun, over limited periods of their days. “Making fun hard work to obtain” feels like a pretty shitty goal to have, in general. Not to mention counterproductive if you want people to actually use whatever it is you’re offering. When I go to Tesco to grab a meal deal, they don’t tell me to fuck off and make my own sandwiches in case I get addicted to the dopamine hit of getting food easily; and if they did, I’d probably go somewhere else for lunch.

Bloonface

September 5, 2023

Internet

fediverse, Internet
The enshittification of “enshittification”
Cory Doctorow’s idea of “enshittification”, as elucidated in his post here is quite simple:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cory Doctorow

This concept, or process, has been applied to all sorts of things – Amazon, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter/X, basically any platform. How are these platforms “good to their users”? Doctorow explains a little bit better further down, vis a vis Amazon; emphasis mine:

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.

Tangibles

The above quote is a few paragraphs after Doctorow explains how Amazon started attracting users by selling and delivering products at a loss. One does not need to be an accountant to understand that isn’t sustainable. However Doctorow asserts that this “customer surplus” – created by artificially undercutting other retailers – is actually good, and its removal constitutes “enshittification”.

As such, here, what “good to their users” means is actively making a loss to subsidise their customers’ purchases. That’s absurd.

We then move to the “abusing their suppliers” bit. Here, Doctorow asserts that Amazon attracted sellers to its Marketplace platform through low commissions, and then ramped these commissions up, but also neglects to notice that Amazon has been a loss-making business for much of its life. It turns out that making a loss to subsidise your suppliers is also not a particularly good business plan.

The core idea here is that the “surplus value” from this transaction must accrue to either the customer paying for a product or a supplier using Amazon as an intermediary, but absolutely not Amazon. Amazon must make as little money as possible – or even a loss – even while its customers and/or suppliers gain value they likely would not have been able to realise without Amazon facilitating their transactions.

The next bit is that apparently, these “enshittified” platforms die. But, and there really is no blunter way to put this, Amazon has not died and does not appear to be dying. Frankly, if Amazon were giving that bad a deal to customers even without this supposed “surplus”, nobody would use it. But they do. It’s the world’s largest retailer. Clearly quite a few people feel they are getting some benefit from it.¹

This makes it a bit clearer that what this “enshittification” thing is actually doing is describing a free-rider problem from the perspective of a free-rider, who naturally is unhappy that they can no longer get a free ride. It is blatantly unreasonable and completely unsustainable to expect companies – even larger ones – to make losses purely to subsidise others, but such is the expectation here.

If you want to argue about how actually the expectation that a business that sells things to consumers should reasonably expect to make a profit from the transaction is a manifestation of the evils of capitalism, cool beans, but that value judgment does absolutely nothing to change the reality of the situation in the real world as we live in right now² which is that businesses and organisations that do not even try to cover their costs die a damn sight quicker than those that are able to.³

Intangibles

The problem really comes when you apply this concept to things like social networks. I, a user on BlueSky or Threads or Facebook or Mastodon or whatever, have paid exactly zero of any currency to access it. Here, the user is almost definitionally a free-rider. Someone buying a heavily-subsidised product from Amazon is still paying something – a user of a social media platform, by and large, pays nothing.

The problem here, really, is that running an free and open service that anyone can use to publish whatever they like is a fundamentally unprofitable endeavour. This is why Elon Musk had to be legally compelled to spend $42billion on a perpetually loss-making enterprise, and Twitter’s prior shareholders were so eager to compel him to do so. It is why Facebook/Meta constantly grapples around for any kind of revenue stream and clearly sees their basic functionality of facilitating “shares from your aunt” as a form of loss-leader. YouTube, which ingests and republishes hundreds of terabytes of video every day, video that’s possibly of no interest to anyone, is focusing heavily on further advertising and paid memberships in order to somehow turn the most egregiously unprofitable platform of the bunch into something even vaguely sustainable.

The consequent problem is that, as noted, “enshittification” here comes specifically from the perspective of a free-rider. Their “customer surplus” is the existence of a a free, stable, well-moderated service that allows them to put out whatever they damn well please, to as large an audience as they can. If that right is restricted or they are expected to trade something for that right – even something ultimately immaterial and intangible, like seeing ads – they cry “enshittification” and push blame for this state of affairs onto the platform, then try and leave it for another platform that is willing to indulge free-riders… until their costs, too, become unsustainable.

Different platforms have as such tried to square the circle of a user base that won’t pay but that also demands full and unfettered access to their services on only their terms, but without which these platforms would not exist. All their means of doing so have, with varying levels of justification, been described as “enshittification”, but regardless of how unpleasant they are for end users they all ultimately are just answers to the same question of “how do we make this intrinsically loss-making thing not make losses even as our users resent us making any money at all?”.

The solution

There is no actual solution that does not involve users either a) accepting that free services have someone else paying for them and that some sort of trade-off must be made to keep them sustainable, or b) actually paying for the platforms they use. Period.

Mastodon (and the wider fediverse) suggest they have a solution, that being a bunch of small privately-run servers federating together into one network, but while it is an answer, it’s not a solution. Yes, you can’t easily be advertised to on Mastodon, and right now nobody is analysing your posts to try and sell you car insurance.⁴ But leaving aside the poor UX that results from decentralisation, the fediverse design is computationally, and thus financially, expensive, and its scaling is legendarily poor. It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that people using a service incurs costs, it simply atomises those costs onto a variety of different randos, while socially proscribing most methods of recouping them that aren’t entirely voluntary.

Those randos can as such either try and recoup those costs through voluntary donations, or simply absorb them and run the server for fun. The latter can only stretch so far, and the demands – both financial and in terms of sheer effort and emotional labour – of running even a moderately-sized server can and does easily burn people out, rapidly becoming akin to a second job. That they have absorbed those costs themselves does not mean they do not exist or that they do not matter, or that this approach is sustainable in the long-term. Like I say, it’s an answer, in that Mastodon is relatively resistant to what is described as “enshittification” in the short term and while it remains a tiny platform, but it’s not a solution, because if the platform were (somehow) to grow to the size of a pre-Musk Twitter, or even a Threads, it would quickly prove unsustainable without some sort of consistent ability to recoup running costs.⁵

At the moment, users of BlueSky and Threads seem to like these services.⁶ But right now, neither service has advertising, memberships, or any means of obtaining anything from their users in exchange for use of the service. That goodwill will start to evaporate as soon as BlueSky and Meta start to try to recoup their start-up and ongoing costs, and in turn there will be an exodus of users who start crying “enshittification”, looking for another service that will provide the same things to them without advertising or any other form of trade-off, and then the cycle will repeat. The only way to break the cycle is to abandon this notion that there is, actually, such thing as a free lunch.

Ultimately, I think the “enshittification” concept has done a lot to harm discussions of how online platforms should be managed going forward as Twitter/X continues its slow disintegration. It has centred the idea that free-riding is inherently justified and a moral good, while ignoring that some of the more egregious behaviours of platform providers like Meta and Twitter are motivated exactly by the fact that most of their users are free-riding even as they start to take roles central to social lives and political discourse. A more mature discussion would result if it considered who is paying for the platforms, how these platforms can be run in a sustainable way, what trade-offs are actually acceptable if not direct monetary ones, and indeed whether it’s even intrinsically possible for a “platform” in the 2008-present sense to be run sustainably. That discussion cannot happen while the core expectation is that a user should give up nothing at all in exchange for the use of someone else’s resources.
1. This reminds me a bit of all the people who were telling me how Facebook and Instagram were “dying” in response to my Twitter migration post, which actually appeared to be more along the lines of “well none of my Linux-using nerd friends use Instagram and they all use Mastodon so clearly nobody must use it and Mastodon must be the world’s biggest social network.”
2. Yes, I’m sure this problem will magically be solved under some sort of voluntarist anarchism, however we can talk about this as and when such a society actually stands half a chance of existing in the real world and you can work out such things as, I don’t know, pharmaceutical supply chains.
3. This applies to all organisations, bar none. Co-operatives want to make money, even if that money is reinvested or distributed to their employees or customers rather than shareholders; the beneficiaries change but the fundamentals do not. Even charities, ultimately, are hoping to secure enough revenue to cover their costs and fund whatever activities they are pursuing. Yes, you may consider this to be intrinsically bad and immoral and you’d love to sweep it all away, but I refer you to footnote 2.
4. Although nothing fundamentally stops them from doing so, or for that matter stops your chosen server’s owner from serving you ads on their web interface. Probably the only reason nobody has done so yet is either ideology or the fact that any server that proposed to do so, even to just its own users, would be immediately defederated by a large portion of the network.
5. Good luck replacing YouTube with a bunch of PeerTube instances all ingesting and redistributing multiple terabytes of video a second, is all I’m saying. They’d shut down citing lack of resources before you can say “please stop, Bloonface, the world doesn’t need more Rave.dj mashups“.
6. Short review: I use both and like them. I wish Threads had a web interface, mind you.
Bloonface

August 8, 2023

Internet

Facebook, fediverse, Instagram, Internet, Mastodon, Meta, platforms, Threads
Dumb video #23324

Stupid video idea I had that I decided needed to become a reality, and nobody stopped me.

Bloonface

July 16, 2023

Humour, Television

Better Call Saul, Bravo Vince!, Breaking Bad, Stupidity, Threads
Psuedonymity

I’ve used the name “Bloonface” on the Internet now for about eight years. Choosing it was essentially a very impulsive decision that in all honesty I’m rather sick of the results of but am more or less stuck with. “Bloonface” is a stupid username – quite aside from the fact that it actually appears to mean something in some cultures, it’s just a dumb thing to call yourself. It says nothing about me as a person, what I like, even what I am, it’s just a dumb word that I came up with on the spur of the moment because I had a couple of minutes to come up with a new Twitter username.

Part of that though is that in large part, I do not want to be “me” on the Internet. I don’t want to use my real name for any reason, I don’t want the complete shite I spew on Mastodon or Reddit or YouTube to be connected in any sense to me, the flesh and blood person. I don’t want my personal or professional lives to be linked to my Internet one, where I write puerile synthpop with a friend and run a swearing bot that wasn’t even my idea to begin with. I’m happy for that to be linked to an entirely separate persona from the things that make me money and allow me to live.

I have thought about doing the opposite, on occasion. Frankly, my Internet presence is more weird, profane and embarrassing than it is harmful. I don’t have a history of espousing racial hatred or of extreme political stances. I swear a lot online but I swear a lot in real life too, something that feels less and less like a transgression as mores (correctly) shift away from prohibition of words that are arbitrarily evil bad words and towards prohibition of words based on their intention and/or their demeaning of the vulnerable. There are people on Twitter arguing for violent communist revolution under their real names and faces; I doubt me and my offensive bots and pissweak socdem views would raise many eyebrows in the scheme of things. And to be perfectly frank, there are people who are far more likely to be the target of harassment than boring cis straight white males like me, yet are far more happy to be who they really are online.

This also, for the first time, became a bit of an issue when the post about the Mastodon migration got big, and Ars Technica got in touch about having it published there. While I’ve had things I’ve written bigged up by people in “proper” publications before, it turns out that a serious site like Ars doesn’t really want to just throw stuff up by people with childish non-names. As such, it’s now up under the name “Mark Bayliss”, which for the record is not my real name or even close to my real name. (But I’m more than content for anyone who’s angry with me to assume that it is.)

So in a very real sense, my pseudonymity is becoming a limiter. And yet.

Fundamentally I don’t want someone to look at my LinkedIn, stick my name into a search engine and be presented with my Mastodon instance full of shit bots and my YouTube channel full of shit videos and my blog full of both shit posts and shitposts, or my Reddit account where I toss off dumb opinions. In what sense is that beneficial to me? It feels like something far more beneficial to people who are not me – not least the various groups online whose specialism is finding anyone who happens to stand out and hammer them flat with relentless precision. I also, fundamentally, do not care about my writing picking up traction in any real sense as it’s a hobby, not something I do for money (for the record, Ars didn’t pay me and while I probably could have, I didn’t ask to be and it was open to me to refuse.)

The flipside is that I am far less concerned about “privacy” as an abstract. It’s fundamentally not something I am actually that bothered about if someone wishes to profile me to try and sell me things. My stated interests include old TV ephemera and I run a swearing clock bot – if Meta or Google or whoever manage to find a product they can sell to me based on those, well done.

Pretty much this.

This informs what I wrote about the fediverse’s dubious levels of privacy, because I am (and I would guess that most people are) far less concerned about some machine somewhere reading my posts and deciding that I might like to buy a clock or some life insurance so Mark Zuckerberg can earn four cents than I am about an actual spiteful person deciding that they’d like to try and ruin my life. Mastodon is very good at protecting against the former, albeit not through deliberate effort – it’s utterly dismal about protecting against the latter.

Ultimately there are concrete risks to me in not being pseudonymous and absolutely no risk to me in being pseudonymous. Anyone who needs to know who “Bloonface” or “Mark Bayliss” is in real life already knows, I’m not sure what it adds to anything if some randos do too.

Bloonface

July 15, 2023

Internet, Personal

Bloonface, Internet, Mastodon, pseudonym, pseudonymity, Twitter
A vision of the future

It is 1st January 2024, and Meta has shocked the world by introducing a new policy where they will literally murder all of their users using a big gun if they don’t delete their Facebook, Instagram and Threads accounts by the end of the year.

Luckily, the Fediverse has an answer!

It’s a new decentralised social network called 4skin, and its logo is a giant dick with a smiley face. Half of its homepage (which is on Github) is about its specific choice of open source licence (“it’s a hybrid between CC-BY-SA, the Microsoft Public Licence and MIT that we call CLIT”). The other half is about how Meta is bad but doesn’t mention the “will literally murder you” thing; instead it focuses on the idea that if you use Facebook you may, on occasion, see an advert that relates to something you posted about two weeks ago, and how this is a completely unconscionable intrusion of your privacy.

To enforce decentralisation, the primary feature on any Facebook users’ minds, 4skin instances (called “pubes” in 4skin parlance) have a strict one user per instance limit. The 4skin instance software only runs on Amigas that run GNU/Hurd, and the software is distributed solely via Docker. GNU/Hurd doesn’t run on Amigas and Docker doesn’t exist for GNU/Hurd yet, and if the 4skin server detects that you’ve used a binary package to install either of them it will self-destruct out of sheer ideological disgust, so you’ll need to port both GNU/Hurd to the Amiga and Docker to Hurd by hand if you want to use 4skin.

Anyone joining from Facebook is subject to a harsh hazing ritual in which they must choose and draw a fursona, publicly atone for ever having used a Meta product in the first place and also install Arch Linux. The 4skin web interface can be used to open a remote shell onto your system*, while the official mobile app has a “Post” button which does not post the text you input but instead sends nudes to your boss, posts your personal information on KiwiFarms and then makes your phone explode.

Even if you had a hope of finding your friends on their various different instances, which you don’t, you don’t need them. You have 4skin now and that makes you morally superior. Friends are for the weak. Only the worst social media platforms allow you to find and talk to people, and 4skin is the best.

But it doesn’t really matter that the app doesn’t work or that you can’t find your friends or that you had to locate and buy one of the remaining seven Amigas in the world that don’t have blown capacitors, because you’ll have been defederated (“circumcised” in 4skin parlance, and reported via the #cockblock tag) in the first five minutes of usage anyway for not putting a content warning on a picture of a tree you uploaded because someone’s dad might have died from being pushed out of a tree (by them) and they could have spontaneously combusted from the sheer anguish and that would be entirely your fault if it had happened but it didn’t but you’ve been defederated/”circumcised” anyway so tough shit you are about the same as a literal Nazi.

Also, 4skin has lots of Nazis.

[…]

It’s the 1st January 2025 and all of Facebook’s billions of users have been shot to death with Meta’s big Internet gun. Fediverse advocates are baffled as to why people stuck with being literally murdered instead of giving 4skin a shot, but they’re sure that the new decentralised Netflix that has nothing to watch except amateur foot fetish pornography will be the next big thing now that Netflix has threatened to slam an asteroid into the earth if they don’t reach exactly zero subscribers in the next four months.

* This literally happened.

Bloonface

July 9, 2023

Humour, Internet

#cockblocked, Amiga, circumcision, Cockblock, Docker, fediverse, foreskins, GNU/Hurd, Internet, Mastodon, Satire
The fediverse is a privacy nightmare
ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.

This is something I touched on in my Meta piece, but I think it bears reiterating in full as a blunt, stark message for anyone who needs to know this:

If you have any objection at all to your posts and profile information being potentially sucked up by Meta, Google, or literally any other bad actor you can think of, do not use the fediverse. Period. Even if your personal chosen bogey-man does not presently suck down every single thing you and your contacts post, absolutely nothing prevents them from doing so in the future, and they may well already be doing so, and there’s next to nothing you can do about it.

To illustrate why, we need to understand exactly how the fediverse works.

How fedi works

Mastodon and the fediverse are not on a single server. Instead, people create servers of their own, called “instances” (again, I will use “instance” and “server” interchangeably here – they are functionally the same thing). These all communicate with each other using a protocol called ActivityPub.

Rather than registering “a Mastodon account”, you register an account on a server, for example mastodon.social. This server then lets you access the posts of, and communicate with, users on any other server (in theory – in practice this is a bit more complicated). In total, there are more than 15,000 servers operating at any one time.

Anyone can start a server. There is no prequalification required and there are various different server packages that you can use. People can, and do, start servers on their own home computers, or pay $20 or so a month to Linode or whoever to run a server for them. All you need is the domain name, some Linux experience and maybe a few hours to get everything set up. There are also plenty of managed hosts for servers that make it, essentially, a few clicks. There are fediverse server packages that some guy can run on a Raspberry Pi. There are massive servers like mastodon.social which are run by large non-profits, and smaller ones like the one I used to run which are just run by individuals for them and a small group, and even smaller ones which are run by one person for one person. But functionally – anyone can start a server.

The “federated” bit of the fediverse is that posts are distributed to followers on different servers via ActivityPub. If I have an account, @bloonface@mastodon.social, and I am followed by @exampleuser@example.com, whatever I post from that point on will not only be stored on mastodon.social, but also on example.com. The server software on example.com will start making copies of any posts I make, essentially forming a duplicate of my account’s content from the point of following.

But in practice, most people with any significant number of followers will have followers on maybe fifty or so different servers. So every time you post, your posts are automatically distributed to those fifty servers, who each retain a full copy of your posts and (usually) any media you post along with them. If someone on one of those servers “boosts” one of your posts, it will get redistributed to their followers, and saved on their followers’ servers.

If you delete a post on Mastodon, your server will send an ActivityPub delete command to any servers that it knows have copies of the post, which instructs them to delete any copies of them. If your Mastodon server shuts down, its admin should run a mass delete command which tells all servers it has ever contacted to delete all your posts and everything about you. But there is nothing compelling them to do so.

The privacy problems

Anyone can run a server, and they don’t have to be identifiable

A server that retains your posts could be run by anyone. It could be like mastodon.social, in which case it is run by a registered German non-profit, with an identifiable leader. It could be like Meta’s putative Threads, in which case it is run by a US-domiciled public corporation. Or it could be like my old server, in which case it is run by some rando who does not use their real name ever. Or it could be a Pleroma instance run on a Raspberry Pi by someone who really, really likes Hitler. Or it could be whatever the fuck this is. You have no way of knowing.

As soon as a post reaches another server, they control it totally

As soon as you make a post on Mastodon, and someone else on a different server reads it, that server has downloaded a copy of whatever it is your posted, along with your profile information.

The Mastodon software will offer you the option to delete a post, however while this definitely deletes the post from your server, it does not necessarily delete it from other servers; it only sends a command requesting that those servers delete it. The servers do not have to honour this and there is no feedback mechanism to see whether it was successful, so you’ll never know if it was or not. A server can simply disregard the message, and retain – and possibly even redistribute – copies of your posts for as long as it likes. The upshot of this is that whatever you post on an ActivityPub service should, for all intents and purposes, be considered irrevocable. There is no means to categorically enforce the deletion of your content or your profile information from the entirety of the fediverse. Period.

If your server closes down, and does not run the “self-destruct” command that tells all servers it has ever federated with to delete all record of it, its users and its posts, then they will stay on those servers indefinitely with no simple means of deleting them, or even knowing that they are there. And that’s assuming that the other servers would have honoured that deletion request anyway. Again, a bad actor doesn’t have to. Mastodon includes this self-destruct command – many other fediverse software packages do not.

Worse still, different server packages do not have to even respect privacy settings on your post, or even whether you have blocked someone at an account level. It can and has happened that bad actors have run modified versions of server software (most famously Pleroma and its offshoots) that can evade and ignore account blocks. Sent a “DM” to someone, or tagged it “followers only”? Plugins exist to automatically convert these, on the receiving end, to public posts that are viewable by anyone. This isn’t something hidden, or theoretical – it is publicly advertised and freely admitted to.

There is simply no way you can really avoid this. A system that works based solely on voluntary and mutual agreement, without any real compulsion for anyone to abide by what is expected of them, can be easily defeated by someone simply ignoring the expected norms and doing whatever they please. There is no central enforcement authority that mandates that servers have to implement the whole ActivityPub spec, or respond to requests in the expected way, and a server that does not do so has no means of being completely booted off the network.

Server blocking cannot fully mitigate this

Plenty of fediverse servers can, do and indeed should block some of the most egregious bad actors out there, but it is a constant game of whac-a-mole on the part of server administrators to try and continually block servers run by bad actors – in which time, those servers can still participate fully in the network and read – and save – whatever posts they feel like. Even after they are blocked, however, there are means by which they can still see, download and keep the posts of users on servers that have blocked them.

Say you are on server A, and you have a contact, Mike, on server B. Server C is a shithole server full of harassers and Nazis. Server A blocks server C, but server B does not, for whatever reason. Someone on server C, Adolf, follows Mike. Server C cannot see your posts directly… but if Mike boosts one, Adolf can see it, so server C can download and keep it, and will display it to all of Adolf’s friends on server C via the Federated feed. And because server C then knows about both server A and your account specifically, in most cases it can start making API requests to your server, anonymously, to get your account information and any other public posts you have.

You might well not know about this. Why would you? You’re a user of server A. You don’t necessarily know who or what server B blocks or doesn’t block. You may not even know that server C exists or who Adolf is. But all it takes is someone to put a post in server C’s eyeline and they can take it and keep it, and then ignore any and all requests to delete it. Meanwhile, Adolf and his friends Rudolf and Hermann can have a lovely little laugh at your expense in your replies… on their server. Which your server blocks, so you will never see it or know about it. But Servers D, E and F that are also blocked by your server, but not by C, can also join in.

Again, this is not theoretical. This happens. A lot. It reduces the value of defederation as a means of ensuring user security from bad actors by making you only as cut-off from shithole servers as the least cut-off server that boosts your posts. Over how many degrees of separation are you personally willing to vet your server’s block list to ensure that a boost of a boost of a boost of a boost doesn’t get you a starring role on the bad side of fedi?

Your server can, at least, turn on “authorised fetch”, which mitigates this issue somewhat by ensuring that servers can’t read posts without identifying themselves, allowing server blocks to be properly enforced. But authorised fetch also breaks various other bits of Mastodon functionality, not least by completely locking down the server and all posts on it from everyone who isn’t an authorised server, not just bad actors. There’s some discussion on this here. Given that Mastodon already has UX issues with discoverability and reply chains appearing “broken”, and that this makes an already unwieldy and resource-heavy server even more resource-intensive, it’s not on by default, and it’s not surprising that a great many servers do not enable it.

Oh and there’s also no obvious way to see that a server does have it enabled, as far as I can tell. I can’t even find out if Mastodon.social does, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t. No worries though, they’re only literally the biggest Mastodon server on the planet.

Your posts are only as secure and private as the least secure and private server that can see them

These servers, and their treatment of your posts, are also subject to the security consciousness – or lack thereof – of their administrators. Kolektiva.social, an anarchist instance, gave everyone a stunning demonstration of this fact when one of their admins was raided by the FBI, while they were holding on their personal computer an unencrypted copy of the Kolektiva database.

This database does not just include posts made by Kolektiva’s users on the public network; it also includes posts viewed by any of Kolektiva’s users, posts from people followed by users on Kolektiva, posts boosted by Kolektiva’s users, and every direct message sent to and from users on Kolektiva’s servers. Given the ideological leanings of Kolektiva’s user base, it can be reasonably surmised that there are things in that database that are incriminating, or that might be of value or interest to law enforcement.

Quite rationally, a lot of Kolektiva’s users (who naturally are already not going to be especially trusting of the state) might feel exposed by this and want to delete their posts from Mastodon. Unfortunately for them, they are subject to the above proviso regarding deletion; all they can do is send out “please delete this” messages and hope that the other servers comply with them. If they don’t, they are functionally shit out of luck. I really don’t mean to scare them, but the FBI are possibly the least of their problems here.

This boneheaded approach to data security is only notable because it’s one of the few we know of, because Kolektiva (and they should get credit for this) readily owned up to it. How many other servers have been compromised or had the computers with their databases seized? And in what jurisdictions? How many servers hold your posts without you knowing about it? And what stupid clownish things are they doing with them? You simply have no way of knowing. But your posts are only as secure and private as the least secure and private server that has them.

You don’t even need to go outside the spec to suck down everyone’s posts

To add to the fun, Mastodon so not a private platform that it is absolutely trivial for someone to simply set up an account on a big well-federated instance, like mastodon.social, grab an API key, spend ten minutes writing a Python script that yanks every post it can from the Federated feed of that instance, suck down as much raw post data from the fediverse as they please and do whatever they like with it. Their rules don’t forbid this; neither does their privacy policy. And that “someone” is likely to be a pseudonymous private individual, completely unidentifiable to anyone.

While everyone has been running around in headless chicken mode about Mark Zuckerberg coming to hoover up your toots, they’ve failed to notice that there’s frankly far worse and more immediately harmful people that could be doing so, already are doing so, and doing so without anyone even noticing or knowing – and in a way that is, for all intents and purposes, completely authorised by the server operators.

The upshot

The end result is this:
- Posts on Mastodon are immediately distributed to potentially hundreds of different servers.
- As soon as a server holds your post content and profile information, it is subject to their information security practices, and they can redistribute it, potentially without you ever knowing.
- For a great many servers, you have no real way of knowing who owns them or how competent they are.
- You can only request that other servers delete your posts via the Mastodon software. You cannot enforce their deletion.
- Other servers do not have to respect the privacy settings of your posts. The only mechanism to stop them is for your server to block them, which only works for future posts and even then only imperfectly.
- If another server does not delete your posts when asked, you are stuck resorting to legal means to try and compel this… with hundreds of different servers all around the world run by people over whom you have no leverage, who may not even care to respect data privacy rules, and with which you have no relationship – and who you may not even know about.
- To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of.
GDPR

To preface, I am not a lawyer, or someone who particularly knows much about GDPR except on a surface level – but then I could guarantee that most server owners aren’t either, and they’re the ones to whom it is probably most pertinent. And it is worth discussing the legal framework that applies.

Servers can be based in any jurisdiction. Data privacy rights in the EU and the UK are governed by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The US and many other jurisdictions have other, weaker protections. But generally, the privacy protections of your server’s home jurisdiction apply to your posts on that server. If your server is based in the UK, UK GDPR applies. If it is anywhere else in the world, but you are in the UK or EU, then theoretically GDPR applies by virtue of the data being processed being that of someone subject to GDPR. If it is in the US, and you are in the US, well, good luck.

Under GDPR, any site you use should have a privacy policy that describes what it does with your data. Here’s Mastodon.social‘s, something which a great many other instances crib from. It makes a note that you can delete your account, and that you can delete your posts, but does not mention that this is conditional on other servers respecting that deletion. This feels like a significant omission.

At least Mastodon.social has a privacy policy. There are plenty of small, single person servers which do not. You can guarantee that the Hitler-loving Pleroma guy doesn’t. Indeed, under GDPR, if he’s just running that Pleroma for himself, he doesn’t have to.

GDPR does confer significant rights of deletion of information, and rights to direct how your data is processed, or whether it should be processed at all. But the problem with this is enforcement. How do you serve legal papers on a person who is potentially fictitious, in a jurisdiction halfway around the world? How would a server owner even know what servers their users’ posts are hosted on, anyway, in order to be able to commence the exhaustive process of trying to locate contact details from all of them?

How does this even work in a GDPR context, anyway? Does a Mastodon server act as a “controller” that directs the other servers that process its posts, or is it just a “processor”… or both at once? If I post on Mastodon.social and my post gets syndicated to a different server, who is responsible for that? Am I a “user” of the other server and thus gain GDPR rights over it no matter where it’s located jurisdiction-wise, or is that server a “processor” directed by my server, the “controller”? Can I raise a subject access request against them to get my data? If they tell me “no, I won’t erase it”… what then?

The fediverse is alien to, and predates, the concept of GDPR, which was created envisaging scenarios in which disparate consumers acting as natural people engaged with recognisable legal entities which engaged with other recognisable legal entities in ways governed by binding contracts and legally-enforceable terms and conditions. Mastodon doesn’t have that. Mastodon is a very loose informal association that just sort of… happens, with a melange of natural people interacting with corporations, unincorporated associations, non-profits and other natural people, all of whom could be considered data subjects, data processors or data controllers in their own right. GDPR wasn’t even a thing when Mastodon started, and what “terms of service” exist for users are more along the lines of “don’t be a racist, transphobic shithead” than anything firmly contractual. It’s all remarkably informal for something that hosts what is deemed to be the personal data of millions of people across numerous jurisdictions.

As far as I can tell there is no actual settled answer to all of this and nobody is particularly exercised about finding one. This is partially because the fediverse is so small fry in the scheme of things, and the infrastructure so atomised, that it’s deemed to “not really matter” in the same way that a local cupcake shop’s email marketing doesn’t really matter to national privacy regulators. It’s also partially because, I think, everyone is aware of what a massive can of worms would be opened if anyone decided to look into things too deeply.

The situation is at least a lot more clearcut for users who wind up subject to jurisdictions that don’t have GDPR or equivalent legislation: you are on your own. Have fun!

I’m not the only person to have noticed this but I don’t think it has really got as much attention as it should, because there’s some serious issues brewing here; all it will take is someone who discovers that their PII is being held by one Pleroma Nazi too many and decides that they want to start enforcing their data protection rights in good faith, and the house of cards will start to crumble. That your rights of deletion over your data on Mastodon are exceptionally contingent is not something that is spelt out by anyone, or that anyone particularly wants to confront; again, I think mainly because everyone is scared to open that particular can of worms because it would not end well. Everyone was up in arms that “the admins can read your DMs” was a stupid criticism of Mastodon, but failed to notice (or, as I would suspect, rather not talk about) the massive elephant in the room; that quite a few other people can read your DMs too, as can anyone who happens to gain access to the servers of anyone who you’ve DMed. Which, now in at least one instance ^{(pun not intended)}, includes the FBI.

My worry about Mastodon and data privacy is not, at the end of the day, the prospect of Meta having all my posts. Meta is identifiable. I can send them a subject access request to find out what data they hold on me, and I can complain about them to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and I can sue them to enforce my rights, under laws I can identify and know exactly how they apply to me and what both my and Meta’s role is in the equation. They have identifiable office holders, and registered offices, and a legal team, and a data protection officer, and a privacy policy, and the EU ready to smack them with a sledgehammer should they put a foot wrong (as they have done and assuredly will do in future). Even on a more base level than that, speaking to the more real and present threats that a lot of people on the Internet face: Meta isn’t going to swat me, or doxx me, or send me death threats, or try to ruin my life.

In that context, I am not at all worried about Meta on fedi, really. There are things I can do about Meta, and the worst they can reasonably do to me is try, fruitlessly, to advertise to me.

My worry is the guy with the Raspberry Pi.
Bloonface

July 4, 2023

Internet

fediverse, GDPR, Mastodon
Meta and the fediverse: sorting heat from light
As I alluded to in my previous post on the Fediverse and Mastodon (as before, used interchangeably here, deal with it), the prospect of Meta’s new “Project 92″/”Threads” being ActivityPub compatible has led a not-insubstantial quantity of existing Mastodon users to react with incredible fury and calls for the entire thing to be blocked by all other servers (“defederated”), in theory thus smothering it at birth while also protecting existing Mastodon users’ personal data, in this reading meaning their profile information and posts. Those who have tried to adopt a “wait and see” approach, or correspond with Meta to try and figure out what their intentions are, have been pilloried and in some cases received death threats.

It’s worth, here, analysing exactly why Meta might be interested in doing this, because quite a lot of heat has been generated talking about this subject over which there are very few actual concrete facts. To be clear, my purpose here is not to defend Meta specifically (a company which has, shall we say, a rather interesting moral compass and approach to data protection to say the least) but to point out that so much of this discussion is borderline conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theory that makes basically no sense whatsoever in the cold light of day, other than if you assume that Mark Zuckerberg is actually Satan and is the font of all sin. Which, again, may well be true, but still.

Let’s deal with the main claimed motivation that Meta might have for this:

“Meta are going to harvest all our posts!”

Meta, here, are presumed to be deeply, eagerly fascinated with the posts and profile information of Mastodon users, to the point that it is worthwhile to them to build a brand new social networking service, integrated with both Instagram and Mastodon, in order to harvest this “data” through some means. This, in my view, relies on some extremely questionable assumptions, to wit:
- the posts of Mastodon users can be used by Meta to derive some sort of value from them, likely by marketing to them;
- Meta can do so despite these users never actually using a website owned or controlled by Meta;
- the ~2million active Mastodon users that exist are such a disproportionately interesting and lucrative marketing cohort for Meta, compared to the several billion existing active users of its social networking sites that it already fully owns and controls, that it justifies going to all this time, effort and cost to advertise to them, somehow, through some means;
- the only way in which Meta can harvest all of these (apparently extremely lucrative) posts and bits of profile information is by running its own ActivityPub-based social networking website.
These are all exceptionally dubious, but without all of them being true, this doesn’t make sense.

First of all, a bunch of aggregated text data about posts is not particularly useful unless Meta is developing e.g. a large language model on the level of ChatGPT. It’s not clear why they’d want to do that or what they’d gain from it.

Secondly, Meta are not interested in “data” in a vacuum. Their whole game regarding keeping and analysing the data of its users is that they wish to use this information in order to target ads, so that it can say to potential advertisers “look! Your demographic of 18-35 year old men are on Facebook! Give us money!” They’re not interested in data in the abstract; unless they can actually use this data to sell ads to someone, there is no benefit to them in having it.

In Mastodon’s case, the theory is that I, Bloonface, on Mastodon.social, might have my posts analysed to decide that I fit in a demographic that someone might decide to advertise to. But unless I used Threads, Meta would have no means of displaying adverts to me, or selling ad space on my page, or putting (or reading) a tracking cookie on my computer. There’s no secret backdoor in the ActivityPub spec that can be used to deliver adverts to be displayed in users’ feeds on other servers; and if Meta tried to create one, it would be easily defeated by those servers simply ignoring it.

The reality, of course, is that they have no means of marketing to fedi users, or displaying ads to fedi users. And frankly, fedi users are not that interesting. They are simply not worth the effort of advertising to. Even assuming that the only way Meta could obtain all these posts and profile titbits about people was by running their own server infrastructure – again, very dubious assumptions – Meta could quite conceivably exceed the entire active user base of the entire fediverse within days should they decide to start up a Twitter-alike in anger, simply through cross-sale to its continent-sized existing user base. Whether it uses ActivityPub or not. And these would be users on its server, using its platform, who it can advertise to. In what sense should they give a shit about fedi? Frankly, you guys aren’t that interesting.

The final point is that Meta does not need to run its own ActivityPub server to achieve all this stuff. ActivityPub is not secure in the slightest and is actually kind of a privacy nightmare. Frankly, there are worse and more obviously harmful actors already using AP than Meta, and it’s quite difficult to argue that it’s somehow worse for users for Meta to have their posts than it is the bunch of Pleroma-running block-evading Nazis to whom they are almost certainly already being syndicated. (I have another post brewing about this also, you’ll be excited to hear – my mentions will be less so.)

“Meta are going to embrace, extend and extinguish ActivityPub!”

The other option is that Meta are supposedly going to “embrace, extend and extinguish” Mastodon through Threads, presumably by pretending to co-operate with ActivityPub and then screwing with the protocol in order to render Threads ultimately incompatible with it, thus gaining control of it and able to dominate it. This, too, relies on some fairly dubious assumptions:
- Mastodon is a meaningful competitor to Facebook and Instagram;
- Mastodon is such a meaningful competitor to Facebook and Instagram that it cannot simply ignore it;
- Mastodon simply cannot be competed with by Meta, but must be controlled if not irrevocably destroyed;
- Mastodon is so obviously better than anything that Meta can come up with, that Meta needs to resort to anti-competitive behaviour to beat it; and
- Whatever Meta might do to ActivityPub cannot be reverse-engineered by other server users.
The first two points can be easily refuted simply by looking at the user numbers. Facebook has almost three billion monthly active users. Instagram has about two billion. At its peak, Mastodon has had about 2.5 million (and it is now well below that peak) Mastodon’s entire active user base, at its highest water mark, was under 0.08% of Facebook’s. Pre-Musk, Twitter had 253million; still a drop in the bucket compared to Facebook, but a hundred times that of Mastodon’s peak.

Based on those facts alone, Mastodon is simply not a meaningful competitor to Meta. Full stop. Meta does not need to somehow destroy Mastodon to “win” because Meta is already winning. Again, Meta could sign up just 1% of its existing Facebook user base to use Threads – a pretty shitty conversion rate however you spin it – and wind up with a user base ten times Mastodon’s peak. Meta doesn’t even need to think about ActivityPub. Sorry guys, but once again, you are just not that interesting.

The other side of things is that, as discussed in the previous post, Mastodon is convoluted to use, offers little in the way of a USP that matters to most users, is appallingly difficult to scale, is hostile to users in terms of both UX and culture, and is especially hostile to the sort of actual regular social media users that Facebook and Instagram have. Meta doesn’t need to resort to anti-competitive means to beat Mastodon in the marketplace, it simply needs to provide a better product to end users that is not convoluted, isn’t overtly hostile to users, is reasonably well-moderated, has a decent UI and offers a decent USP over other competing services (in Meta’s case, a strong network effect gained from its abundant cross-selling opportunities between its other big social networks). If it does those things, it has a better product. It doesn’t need to beat Mastodon with unfair competition when fair competition will do the job just fine.

The most common thing cited as precedent for Meta doing this is XMPP/Jabber. A popular post that made the rounds talks about how Google “killed” Jabber through embracing, extending and extinguishing it via Google Talk. Unfortunately, the reality that the author Ploum glosses over in that post is that prior to Google picking it up, nobody gave a shit about Jabber, which was a complete also-ran in the market place compared to the then-established competitors (MSN Messenger, AIM and Yahoo!, with BlackBerry Messenger briefly becoming a big thing here in the UK). And then, after Google dropped Jabber, nobody gave a shit about it again.

But then, next to nobody gave a shit about Jabber even while Google were using it. Ploum himself admits that most Google Talk users were just using Google Talk to talk to other Google Talk users. I was online throughout the entire era and didn’t know a single person who used XMPP. Tim Chambers had similar experiences from actively trying to switch people to it, finding it a tough sell because it wasn’t actually any better for his friends than the services they already used, and in some cases was worse.

Jabber was not a successful competitor that Google needed to crush through anti-competitive means, it was a tiny little also-ran IM service used, almost to a man, only by FOSS users who believed in it ideologically and were willing to forgive its faults for the sake of that ideology, had a lacklustre feature set even in 2008 and by 2013 (when Google stopped federating with other XMPP servers) was even more hopelessly outclassed in terms of features. For example, I can’t say for certain, since like I say I’ve never used it and I don’t know anyone who does or did, but it appears that Jabber never supported inline picture messaging. This is something that Facebook Messenger and Windows Live Messenger could do in 2011. Something about that tells me that the reason XMPP didn’t dominate the world has more to do with it actually kind of sucking, and less with Google deciding not to throw continued effort and resources at something that ultimately wasn’t very relevant to their users and also sucked.

Perhaps the actual lesson to learn from Jabber is that a decentralised also-ran social service that is and was never actually a meaningful contender or competitor might have issues that can’t be blamed on a big bad corporation adopting it, and that instead it should focus on providing features and satisfying use cases that users value. One could also be somewhat unkind and suggest that Google simply provided a convenient conspiratorial explanation for the more obvious, Occam’s Razor truth that Jabber just plain sucked from an end user’s point of view whereas the actually popular networking protocols that their friends were on didn’t. One might also hasten to point out that Windows Live Messenger, Skype, AIM and indeed Google Talk itself were also similarly left by the wayside because of competitive pressure, and didn’t need to have some nefarious outside party intervening to do so.

To bring this back round to Meta and Mastodon, then, Meta does not need to “embrace, extend and extinguish” Mastodon to beat it in the marketplace, the same way that Facebook Messenger did not need to “embrace, extend and extinguish” Windows Live Messenger to be obviously better and more useful than it. Indeed, Meta does not need to beat Mastodon in the marketplace at all, because it already has; as far as social platforms go Mastodon is a tiny network that is not particularly competitive with Meta and poses no real threat to them. You might as well be talking about Kellogg’s looking to shut down a one-woman granola stall on Norwich market.

Indeed, as the (shall we say) spirited reactions to my previous post often stated, a great deal of Mastodon’s users do not want mass adoption. In which case, what’s the issue with Meta “embracing, extending and extinguishing” anyway? Nobody can prevent you from using vanilla ActivityPub and keeping Mastodon as the tiny, irrelevant niche social platform it is at present – it’s just that Meta won’t be joining you on it. Isn’t that what you want?

So what else is there?

“Meta are evil bastards and they’ve done lots of evil things so they’ll clearly do the evil thing I just imagined they will, for no other reason than they are evil!”

I agree that Meta are not a nice company. I use what services of theirs I use basically under duress. But I’m not sure what relevance that has to any kind of cold discussion over why Meta might want to link Threads with ActivityPub.

Is the idea here that Meta Platforms Inc., a large, publicly-traded corporation, is going to harvest non-specific data from a tiny, niche social media platform, or work to kneecap Mastodon (in a way that won’t work), in ways that involve a great amount of time, effort and money, solely because it is made up of horrible people that want to do bad things because they’re evil?

Have you seen the inside of a big corporation before? I can’t say I’ve got any personal insight into Meta’s corporate governance, but I very much doubt their board meetings resemble Dr Evil discussing a plot to take over the world, and everyone simply going along with that. (For a start, Nick Clegg is a far worse person than Dr Evil.)

In reality, launching a service like Threads is a massive undertaking with a lot of moving parts. It’d involve, at a minimum, engineering time, marketing spend, legal discussions, hiring, branding discussions (probably involving external parties) and trademark registrations. Probably a lot more than that. In a company the scale of Meta, you’re talking millions – possibly tens of millions – before you’ve even shipped a product. All of this time, money and effort spent, essentially just for the lulz.

All of this in a publicly-traded corporation that is accountable to its shareholders, to whom it has to provide regular financial and strategic reporting which cannot include a simple line item for “nefarious ne’er-do-welling”. And this would be happening while these same shareholders are already not all that impressed with Meta to begin with, because it turns out the hare-brained metaverse bollocks they’ve bet the farm on might be the only product less obviously useful to end consumers than a decentralised microblogging service. And microblogging platforms are themselves not a famously profitable undertaking, which is why Elon Musk had to be legally threatened into completing his purchase of one just as soon as he realised that actually it was a complete waste of money.

In short – are you fucking high? At least Meta’s other various acts of nastiness had some sort of positive result for them. What does this accomplish? What actual benefit would any of this accomplish.

So why is Meta going to use ActivityPub?

Here’s the thing; I haven’t the faintest fucking clue.

It does not obviously help Meta in any way to have interoperability with ActivityPub. Threads would probably gain a lot of users whether it had ActivityPub or not, simply by virtue of a popup appearing in the Instagram and Facebook apps advertising it. While I’m sure it’s comforting for the people who subscribe to one or more of the above conspiracy theories to believe that actually Mastodon is really interesting and consequential, the reality is that Meta doesn’t need them.

The Jabber analogy works in a different way here, in that it’s not particuarly clear why Google Talk needed to interoperate with XMPP at all. Google gained a user base for GTalk in spite of its Jabber integration, not because of it. The users it would have found most useful to its end goal – ultimately, revenue – were not the sort of, bluntly, nerds who loved XMPP because of its intrinsic XMPP-ness.

In the same way, what Meta really needs for its purposes is not Mastodon users, but the sort of people who your average “normie” social media users follow, and whom Mastodon does not have and is largely hostile and/or unappealing to: sports stars, celebrities, journalists, brands, influencers. Basically none of those people or companies use Mastodon; they all use Instagram. They also all use Twitter. Network effects matter, and Mastodon doesn’t bring much of one to the table.

The best explanation I can come up with is that federation with existing Mastodon servers, and their content, allows Meta to effectively “bootstrap” Threads, rather than it being obviously a ghost town. But then they don’t need to do that either. Most social networks started with nothing and nobody. And Meta is starting with the prospect of cross-sale to people who people might like to follow. Integrating it with Instagram – or essentially turning Instagram into a front end to Threads – instantly gives it a user base that is likely to outstrip both Mastodon and Twitter combined in a matter of weeks, even days.

But the main point here for me is that a gap in why Meta are doing this does not automatically make bizarre and unsupported theories or assertions about why they are doing it any more likely. The key ideas that get thrown around don’t make any sense, business or otherwise, and/or rest upon Mastodon being a far more important and consequential platform than it is. Given that there is, to put it mildly, an information gap, and so much of this is speculative, it’s not entirely clear why “wait and see and then block them if they actually do something bad” – or even “find out what this thing actually even is” is as unconscionable as trailed.
Bloonface

July 3, 2023

Internet

ActivityPub, fediverse, Mastodon, Meta
Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?
I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, and have been doing so full time for about six months, following Elon Musk buying Twitter (since on principle, I decline to give Elon Musk money or attention.) This latter part coincided with the “November 2022 influx”, when lots of new people joined Mastodon for similar reasons. A lot of that influx has not stuck around. Everyone is very aware at this point that active user numbers have dropped off a cliff.

I have evidence of this. I recently shut down my Mastodon instance that I started in November, mastodon.bloonface.com, and (as is proper) it sent out about 700,000 kill messages to inform other instances that it had federated with that it was going offline for good, and to delete all record of it from their databases. Around 25% of these were returned undelivered because the instances had simply dropped offline. These are people and organisations who were engaged with Mastodon and fediverse to the point of investing real time and resources into it, but simply dropped out without a trace some time between November 2022 and now. I know multiple people who tried it and then gave up, due to lack of engagement with what they were posting, lack of people to follow, inability to deal with the platform’s technical foibles, or worse because they found the experience actively unpleasant. Something has gone badly wrong.

There are some good reasons for this that really point to both shortcomings in the whole idea, and also how Mastodon is and was sold to potential new users, some of which might be uncomfortable for existing Mastodon users to hear. There are some conclusions to draw from it, some of which might also be uncomfortable, but some which actually might be seen as reassuring to those who quite liked the place as it was pre-November and would prefer it if it would go back to that.

Much of this is my opinion, based on my personal observations and experiences as someone who’s been all-in on fedi since November, and has been on it since April 2022, starting off on Mastodon.social and moving to my own instance in November. I’m happy to trail it as just that, my opinion, in advance. But I think it should be food for thought either way.

Mastodon here is also being used as a shorthand for various ActivityPub-interoperable platforms for making short messages, including Pleroma, Misskey, Calckey, whatever.

Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users

As it exists at the moment, Mastodon functions essentially as Twitter did in about 2008. In some ways, that’s nice. The userbase is calmer, the DiscourseTM does not get spun up as easily.

But the thing is, functionality-wise, Twitter in 2008 existed in 2008. We are now in 2023, where someone can use the Twitter of 2023. From a functionality standpoint, Twitter in 2023 is quite good, with some of the alternative Twitter-style frontends (e.g. Misskey and Calckey) being at about parity.

So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation. This brings me to the first thing that might piss off a lot of Mastodon users:

Decentralisation is not a selling point for 99% of people

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:
- Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
- Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
- When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.
You might be able to swing some people round to the Richard M Stallman way of thinking. But most people don’t give a shit about freedom, they just want their computer to work and perform X task for them in a way they find acceptable. Proprietary software largely delivers that to them. Your average Windows user does not care about software freedom when their computer is not, to them, a means of self-actualisation, but is instead a tool they use to accomplish computer things, and Windows serves that purpose well enough.

Mutans mutandis, the same applies to fedi with regards to decentralisation. Most people don’t care. It is not something you can sell people on Mastodon with unless they’re predisposed to care about such things. It is, at best, a third-order issue.

Yes, this applies even if you say “but Elon Musk can’t buy it!”. Someone who is still using Twitter right now obviously doesn’t care about Elon Musk owning things, or they consider it a lower-order issue. Remember – people are quite adept at making compromises on their beliefs for the sake of utility or pleasure. There are plenty of people who are deeply worried about climate change and urban sprawl who still drive cars; do you think that Musk owning Twitter is going to make them stop talking to their friends?

Decentralisation makes the user experience worse

As a brief explainer (without wanting to turn this into yet another technical explanation of the fediverse), if you start up a fresh new Mastodon instance, it will see no posts. Its “federated” feed will be blank, the search will not find anything, searches for hashtags will show nothing, it will ingest no posts from other servers. For the instance to start seeing posts, you must follow people.

How are you supposed to find people to follow in this case? Well, either you know someone who also uses it so you follow them (great – your instance now sees the posts of exactly one other user) or you go to one of the directory sites that exist to find accounts to follow. Both of these involve leaving Mastodon and its UI to go to some other place. That’s already a source of significant friction, if not an impossibility.

Then there’s the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you’re linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won’t see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter’s handling, which is where you search for a username, can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.

Either way, an instance will then only see the new posts of people who someone on the instance is following. This means that the more people on the server, with the more diverse follow lists, the better things work; the more hashtags will get useful results, the more the federated feed becomes useful as a means of discovery. Conversely, if you are the only user – of one of only a few users – on your instance, your federated feed will just be basically your follow list, so your means of discovery is limited to things your followers boost.

This means that for new users to Mastodon, objectively the best experience is delivered by joining a big instance, e.g. Mastodon.social. .social’s large user base means that its users follow more accounts on more instances than any other, which means it sees more posts than any other, which means new users have a rich source of other users and posts to find and follow, and thus infinitely better discovery options.

However, new users are also encouraged to join small instances, and often explicitly not to join Mastodon.social, typically in service of avoiding centralisation and pursuing a properly decentralised fediverse. Sometimes this works, in that the user joins a smaller instance that is still reasonably active and has enough active users following enough active users. Often it doesn’t. Often they get frustrated and leave because they’re not seeing any posts that they’ve not seen before, when if they were on .social or another massive server they’d be seeing all sorts of content and have a reason to stick around.

Paradoxically, therefore, the best way for a person completely fresh to the decentralised Mastodon network to experience the benefits of that decentralisation, with its variety of different instances and different perspectives, is to join its largest possible instance, thus effectively contributing to its de-facto centralisation.

I don’t think there’s a good solution to this. It’s an inherent issue with the entire model. There are clearly trade-offs in play between decentralisation and convenience, but most users are not willing to accept these, or find Mastodon’s implementation of it so obtuse that it becomes frustrating. Existing users resist the centralisation and get pissed off with .social, its owner (the evil “Website Boy”) or its users, but they don’t really have a good answer to the paradox either, other than to simply ignore it because it is not a relevant issue for them.

The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge

Let me return back to my Linux analogy.

Linux, as a desktop OS, is 98% there. For most intents and purposes, a person can use Ubuntu or Mint or whatever as a drop-in replacement for Windows and be able to achieve their immediate goals 98% of the time – type document A, view website B, play game C. Cool.

The problem is that 2%. Because the proposition is not the 98% in a vacuum; it is that there is an alternative that meets 100% of the user’s needs, and they already have it. They are being asked to accept a trade-off of not being able to play their favourite game X, or communicate using app Y, or do work using piece of software Z, in place of something that does those things for them. They have no incentive to switch to something that provides them objectively less utility.

However, the people who are in charge of Linux distributions and are making decisions about how they’re structured, what they include and their compatibility level with other things, are going to be existing Linux users, who use it because it meets 100% of their needs already. That’s an exceptionally different viewpoint from that of someone for whom that 2% is a dealbreaker. That’s why you get the “works for me” stuff on bug reports, it’s why you get joking concepts like the Linux Fault Threshold – the viewpoint they have is of this working thing that works for them so it doesn’t need to change, the world just needs to accept it, warts and all. It takes someone externally to come in and say “fuck this, this is stupid, let’s fix it”, much like Mark Shuttleworth gave everyone a solid kick up the arse with Ubuntu.

Once again, mutans mutandis, the same applies to Mastodon. The people who use it day in day out as their primary or only social media are weird relative to the rest of the Internet. While they’re probably quite happy with Mastodon’s awkward onboarding UX, or the piss-poor approach to cross-instance following, and get frustrated by newbies asking “I’m on mastodon.social, do I have to register on mstdn.io to follow someone there?”, this is because they are used to it. They have a very different perspective from someone who may not even understand what a server is – there’s an increasing number of people who simply never grew up having to comprehend the idea of a server, or even the notion of using a desktop OS. Those people are quite simply talking on a completely different wavelength to people who are already all-in on the fediverse.

And again, as analogised to Linux, the people who are broadly “in charge” of Mastodon, as much as anyone is “in charge” of it, are those who are happy with it as is. So things like the follow UX do not matter to them, because they are already on big servers and have big follow lists already, so they have no insight into what new users go through. The new users have no real feedback mechanism, so they just leave and get frustrated, so things will never change.

To strain the analogy to breaking point; rather than a nice desktop login screen, a new user to Mastodon on pretty much anything except a big server gets presented with the equivalent of the blinking white-on-black text of a barebones Debian login screen. This is not fine. No wonder people left.

Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity

The Mastodon software is computationally expensive. It requires significant quantities of disk space without actively taking steps to purge cached media every so often. The distributed model means that a single post from an account with followers on (e.g.) 400 instances means that that’s 400 connections to 400 servers, all at once. It’s very easy for a small server to get overwhelmed and appear unresponsive. Larger instances that exist have had to progressively scale up to handle the disk space and processing demands of Mastodon. The more instances there are overall, the greater the server load on every other instance.

(There are less computationally-intensive server packages – Pleroma, Calckey and Misskey – but Mastodon is now, for better or for worse, the standard. It’s what people expect, and its feature set and API is the key driving force behind the feature sets and APIs of the others.)

The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining, and been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.

This is not really compatible with the demands that running an instance places on its owners. Here we have a catch-22 – everyone should join small instances, but the costs of running those instances will get more prohibitive the more join them, but trying to recoup those costs in any sustainable or consistent way will lead to that instance getting blocked, which means nobody will join them. If you do somehow keep growing through charity or goodwill alone, your instance will become big enough that it isn’t “small”, so naturally nobody should join it.

One interesting development is that Meta (née Facebook) are apparently planning to start a new Twitter-alike called “Threads”, based around the ActivityPub spec. Already, instance owners are threatening to block it entirely, based around concerns as diverse as “Meta can scrape all our data” (which they could anyway, and could already be, because the fediverse is not a secure communication medium in any sense) to “Meta will embrace, extend and extinguish”, something that in my view is a false worry (if they did, all that would happen is that the existing AP spec servers would form their own separate social network… exactly as they did before Threads was a thing). But the reality is that all blocking Threads will do is cut the fediverse off from its most significant expansion possible.

To be clear, I’m not a fan of Meta or Zuckerberg, nor do I think that either would be adopting ActivityPub out of the kindness of their hearts; but I’m also not convinced that repeatedly pushing away any entity with any kind of resources and ability to match the server scaling that a proper decentralised network demands is going to help anything. You’re not going to be able to run a social network the size and breadth of Twitter purely based on generosity when the scaling of the network is so abysmal, or otherwise accepting a significant level of centralisation. The only other alternative, really, is that you don’t have one.

In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary

All of the above is tolerable if you want to keep Mastodon/fedi as a niche interest platform for people with niche interests, run for fun and/or based on the goodness of peoples’ hearts. Or if, conversely, you want to make the learning curve deliberately hard and the UX deliberately obtuse so that only the people willing to put up with all manner of bullshit bother to stick around (what I’d like to call the “Arch Linux” approach to community building). It is, however, completely incompatible with mainstream adoption.

In the wake of November 2022, however, a good number of existing users absolutely made it clear that they did not want mainstream adoption; or if they did, they wanted it on their terms and their terms only. It should only include people who matched their specific ideological niche, and completely failing to 100% match the existing norms of the network as it existed then was grounds for banishment.

This did not help with the reputation Mastodon gained as a place where you are subject to the whims of both other users and other disparate community admins, who can and did arbitrarily cut people off from their followers and friends based on non-adherence to some ideological prior or other. This instance includes a “cop”, or a “lib”, or this one journalist on an instance of thousands is a shithead and the (overwhelmed and new) admins didn’t react properly, so out goes the baby with the bathwater.

This was also not helped, to be entirely even-handed, by some recent transplants from Twitter becoming, essentially, born-again evangelists – taking the messages about the existing broad norms around alt text and content warnings and using them as cudgels against others, including both other newbies and people who had been on Mastodon for far longer than they had, and (most disturbingly of all) against any kind of mention of discrimination because it wasn’t “nice” and they didn’t want to see it. Despite the reputation as a “nice” place, there are plenty of people on fedi who (fairly) disdain being “nice” and disdain being “SFW” constantly and also (completely fairly) disdain the idea of having to content warn every single brainfart someone has that might not be about “nice” things.

To be clear; it is absolutely fine to want to keep your existing community as is. Blocking servers that are actually infested with harassers and bigots is A-OK, and indeed a worthwhile leisure activity. It is the right of every instance to block whoever and whatever it likes.

It is not fine to act in the overtly hostile way that a lot of people did to newcomers. It is not fine to decide that whatever ideology you have about the Internet, politics or the world in general should also be enforced on everyone else. It is not fine to make sweeping and exclusionary judgments about anyone who is “using fedi wrong” by joining a big instance, despite this as noted being an objectively better experience. It is not fine to fail to remember that other server admins are humans who are capable of making errors of judgment, just as everyone else is. It is not fine to react in the way a lot of users did in November, as assuming that anyone who was not 100% on board with their particular brand of anarchism should be silenced, and then wonder why everyone fucked off.

The lesson to learn

I think it is safe to say that Mastodon’s expansion from now on is, in the absence of Twitter actually finally imploding, going to be a trickle rather than an explosion. BlueSky has its problems – most notably that it’s being run on a dumb “freeze-peach” basis with only token moderation – but it’s sucked up all the oxygen in the room by simply not presenting this decentralisation stuff front and centre, and making it all but irrelevant to the end user by having only a single large instance. Meta’s new “Threads” could lead to more mainstream adoption, but is likely to be cut off from the existing ActivityPub-based networks and effectively be its own defederated silo, along the lines of Counter.Social, Truth Social and Gab.

We are, however, getting something of a repeat of this with Reddit’s current brouhaha over API changes, only this time with the mooted alternative being Lemmy and more specifically Kbin.social. The latter has already avoided a lot of the above pitfalls, and is growing quite nicely, but the worry from my side is that the same purism and proselytisation about decentralising everything will eventually bugger up the #RedditMigration exactly as it did the #TwitterMigration.

In truth, I don’t think these things are truly fixable. The decentralised nature of the network introduces inherent issues and trade-offs that ruin the end user experience, and the people who are by and large responsible for anything that might ameliorate those trade-offs are also the people who are least likely to perceive an issue with them. Mainstream adoption as such is not really possible, without pissing off a lot of the people who have made Mastodon their home, or at least getting those people to make some compromises they will not want to make. If they don’t want to, that’s fine, but that will have to come at the same time alongside it remaining an obscure, niche network.

My instinct is that that is where Mastodon will land. It is niche and it will stay niche, and as above I don’t think the conditions that existed in November 2022 for a potential surge in adoption will exist again. Mastodon had its chance and it blew it – if it wants mainstream adoption, it needs to work on the above points and more so that the next time Elon fires the Chief Not Being A Prick administrator at Twitter and there’s another potential exodus, Mastodon is seen as something better than it currently is.

To be clear, this isn’t my “I’m leaving Mastodon/fedi” post. I’m not going back to Twitter, I am happy with my Mastodon follow list as it is. But I have given up on trying to recruit people and instead have taken a more “build it and they will come” approach with my current instance, Fine City Social. I’ll try and bring people over if they’re interested, but I find it very hard when discussing fedi to try and not get bogged down in technical minutiae, or to have to outline processes and user journeys that sound stupid to me even as I’m typing them, or to answer questions that basically boil down to “that sounds overcomplicated and too technical for me” with a question mark on the end. Maybe one day, that will change. That day is not today.

UPDATE – 25th June: I’ve decided to stop using Fedi. I’m not going back to Twitter (and will not use it while doing so delivers money, however small an amount, to Elon Musk, who is a repellent arsehole). But Mastodon has driven me up the wall recently for all the above reasons and more.
Bloonface

June 12, 2023

Internet, Uncategorized

Calckey, fediverse, Fine City Social, Internet, Mastodon, Misskey
“Car owners are arseholes” is not transport policy

Public transport in the United Kingdom, unless you happen to live in London or a couple of other conurbations and only want to travel within those conurbations, is shit. Make no bones about it, it’s dire.

Bus deregulation and defunding has combined with significant barriers to competition (including directly anti-competitive behaviour on the part of certain companies) to give us infrequent, unreliable, dirty, inconvenient and expensive bus services – certainly expensive relative to the quality of service that’s delivered. I live in Norwich city centre, and point to point journeys are simply not an easy thing even though 90% of the buses are run by the same company, while the timetable is indicative at best – it’s basically impossible to actually plan around the bus turning up on time, because it frequently won’t.

Meanwhile, rail is even more expensive – intercity rail tickets are frequently more expensive per mile than international flights, despite the variety of taxes and surcharges included in air fares and the fact that it’s a plane that flies through the sky to go to another country – and almost as unreliable and inconvenient as buses. Advance tickets reduce the upfront cost, but also make train travel an exciting game of making sure all of your connections can line up at once to avoid being in the cool zone of “your rail ticket has no value”. Meanwhile, the passenger network has still not recovered from the Beeching cuts, and the process of building a new railway line (or new railway stations on existing lines) or reopening a closed one is rendered difficult by both Britain’s chronic NIMBYism and its obsession with the price of public spending over its value.

Then consider the holy grail of integration. Outside of the aforementioned conurbations, there isn’t any. And there frequently aren’t bus services to where you want to go anyway. So you are stuck with taxis, which are at the very least private and relatively comfortable but are also monstrously expensive compared even to bus travel.

Your other option, of course, is to walk – and in fairness, UK cities and towns are relatively walkable as things go. But if you’ve arrived at e.g. Thetford station because you want to go to the Center Parcs near there, as well you might, guess what; you’re not walking that. Not unless you enjoy diesel fumes and the near constant risk of being run over, for a delightful 1hr and 43 minutes according to Google Maps (which also outright refused to provide any kind of public transport route, because there isn’t one.) Taxi it is.

I say all this to illustrate the point of my first paragraph. Public transport in the UK is piss poor. The system (outside of London, for whose residents Transport for London gladly sprays around its buckets of cash) doesn’t have enough money in it or anyone really compelling private providers to do a better job, and the government as it stands is simply not interested in investing more money or improving regulation for a variety of reasons, mostly ideological. All of these problems are solvable, it’s just that the only entity capable of doing so doesn’t want to.

Pretty much everyone will agree on these points. Nobody says “I love taking the bus!” or “I feel like my rail ticket was excellent value!” or “it’s good that I had to spend £20 on a taxi to travel the last four miles of my journey” except the truly odd, or those who don’t have to do it very often and thus see it as a novelty. Try and rely on public transport as your only means of getting away from your local area and your world suddenly gets a lot smaller, a lot more inconvenient and a lot more expensive for the privilege.

I know this because I did that for 15 years of my life, ever since I moved out of home, and I can assure you that commuting to work frankly sucks balls when it’s 45 minutes each way on a bus that only comes once an hour and stops at 7, and grocery shopping sucks even more when your choices are either walking to M&S or getting a bus to somewhere more reasonable; to say nothing of actually trying to furnish the place you live (have you seen how much Ikea charge for delivery?). Meanwhile, visiting your family being a £50 return at best if booked weeks in advance is something that reliably makes you feel very sharply cut off from the rest of the world.

In a vicious feedback loop, then, owning a car has become steadily more attractive. The more attractive cars become, the more society restructures itself around them. The more society restructures itself around cars, the more attractive they become. There are strong reasons that people in such a circumstance might prefer or need to use a car – practical (“I can’t get to work unless I drive”, “the alternative is 2hrs on buses”, “I can’t walk to a food shop of any reasonable size but also don’t need enough to make up the minimum order on a delivery”), economic (“the bus fare to and from work is several times more than the petrol would be”, “a return train fare would be over £100 but the petrol would be £20”, “I can’t spend that much on taxis a month”) and social (“I simply can’t afford to go anywhere on public transport”, “if I don’t have a car I can’t visit Aunt Dora”).

The question I have then is this. Given all of the above, which again I believe everyone would agree on bar the aforementioned oddities, why the peculiar moralism about car ownership, and why the contention that if we simply make driving a car miserable enough an experience then it will go away?

We have all, to an extent, agreed that there are societal reasons why normal people might do things that are broadly defined as “anti-social” – that no man is an island. No leftist worth their salt would accept any proposition that the societal and economic circumstances that people have had inflicted upon them don’t in any way limit their options or inform their behaviour. We’re all also basically agreed that car ownership as opposed to the provision of public transport is a bad thing for society, including me, even as a car owner (honestly I’d really rather not – I tried to stick it out, I really did).

That said, a lot of the same people who are happy to handwave away e.g. crime as being a response solely or almost wholly to societal problems seem at the same time unwilling to accept that people might drive cars for any reason either than other ignorance, selfishness or simple spite. It’s a very peculiar form of moralising that if nothing else makes their own jobs a lot harder and limits their potential for popular support. And It’s a rather odd worldview where a guy who nicks someone’s phone is blameless and punishing him is unfair because of complex social factors that led him to the point of jacking peoples’ phones, whereas a person driving to a supermarket has personally drowned six polar bears in doing so and is a moral void as a result.

(There is another wider point here in that “none of us are free from sin” – unless you literally want to live in the woods and subsist on mushrooms foraged from the forest floor, your existence and participation in society and our economy as it exists is going to involve you either directly or indirectly creating carbon emissions, other forms of pollution and ultimately harm to the ecosystem through various means. This isn’t a point of judgment – don’t mistake me here for some Ted Kaczynski-style primitivist – but it’s a simple fact that even the people presently travelling to big cities to glue themselves to roads will have caused quite a bit of fossil fuel consumption both in the course of living their lives and in the actual fact of realising that protest. Even beyond merely depending on our current carbon-spewing capitalistic system, most of us actively enjoy a lot of the things that simply wouldn’t exist or be possible at present without it, and it’s fair to point out that either the energy to sustain those things must come from somewhere or they will go away. But I digress.)

Of course, there are limits to my generosity of spirit towards drivers. Buying an SUV to drive in an urban environment makes you a prick, full stop. There’s no reason to do that. I wouldn’t go and let their tyres down, but nor do I think it’s a reasonable or even comprehensible thing to do. It would also probably be better overall if we had some regulations, e.g. mandating the purchase of hybrids in the time before new combustion engine cars are banned entirely, or setting regulatory limits on engine size and emissions. This would probably upset the car enthusiast crowd, who will be upset that they can’t buy a giant Audi/BMW monster with a massively wasteful engine solely to drive up and down a motorway for half an hour each way, but it would also recognise that while it’s a desirable goal, at the moment getting rid of cars entirely is a long term project and not something you can do overnight.

Which is the crux of the matter. Sorting out the myriad issues with public transport – its bizarrely overinflated cost to the end user, its inconvenience and downright unsuitability for a lot of things people might conceivably need to use it for, the fact it’s universally run by private companies that don’t give a shit – is something that takes political capital, will, time and money. There isn’t any of that. So demanding that people currently reliant on cars stop using them (or fossil fuels in general) all of a sudden, or blaming them for not doing so, or seeking to enact “solutions” which in reality are just motivated by spite, is in the absence of workable alternatives tantamount to telling them to screw their own lives up. The people doing so are quite right that stopping global climate change is more important in the round than some bloke’s commute to work, but that bloke probably wouldn’t agree with you that he should quit his job solely so he doesn’t have to drive to it, removing his ultimately rather marginal contribution to national CO2 emissions, and so can make some campaigners think better of him.

This gets rather infuriating in particular hearing from cycling evangelists, who spend a great deal of their time complaining about the dismally shit state of the UK’s cycling infrastructure and about the relative lack of safety involved in being a cyclist on British roads – which, to be clear, are both perfectly valid concerns! – but then also telling everyone they should be riding bikes everywhere because cycling is great and that they’re an idiot if they’re driving a car instead, with some going the extra mile to also say that cycling is a better solution to our current woes than public transport. These don’t, to me, sound like compatible concepts. Pardon me if I’m not racing to do the thing that you’ve just told me involves riding a bike over a bunch of potholes and rubbish before I get sideswiped and killed by some dickhead in a Merc. Also pardon me if riding a bike in the pissing rain doesn’t appeal over sitting on a heated bus, or if things like “our cities and towns are very small and cramped and we would literally have to demolish lots of little things like peoples’ houses if we’re going to retrofit them with both massive cycle lanes and also the roads for motor vehicles (which we will still need, even if you ride a bike)” sound like petty objections to building cycling superhighways everywhere.

(For what it’s worth, please do not @ me on this or any other point in this article. You’re welcome to think I’m a dick, I neither need to hear that you do or care if you do.)

The sad truth, quite a dispiriting one really, is that the UK has refactored its entire society over the past several decades to be restructured around the use of private cars for personal transport, with significant incentives to do so and significant disincentives to rely on public transport. Fixing that simply will not happen probably even within a decade, even with vast amounts of money and government will that are presently not forthcoming, and in the meantime that car-dominated society will still factually exist with all of its significant incentives to drive a car. That this is the case is not the fault of individual car drivers, any more than it’s the fault of any other random individual compelled to interact with and live within a system they may not necessarily agree with that that system exists.

For sure, my ideal solutions (aside from the mandate on hybrid vehicles as above) would involve a heavy reinvestment in public transport infrastructure, including substantial increases to the central government funding of loss-making services to serve smaller populations that would not be otherwise commercially viable – in particular, late night services and services to further-flung destinations whose traffic may be small but that act as important feeders into other forms of transport. This would also need to be coupled with an incredible amount of either fare subsidy and/or direct government control to again run the services either at cost or at a deliberate loss. Both in concert would reduce two of the pull factors towards private car ownership (uncompetitive pricing of public transport and its relative inconvenience). We also should retrofit proper separated cycle lanes into existing streets wherever this can be accommodated alongside existing traffic; although this is probably never going to be possible at the level the aforementioned evangelists would like, it would help make cycling a more palatable option relative to driving.

Naturally none of this is going to happen under the current government, and Keir Starmer’s Labour absolutely won’t do it, meaning that the societal pull factors towards private cars still factually exist and are going to for the foreseeable future, unless something magical happens and either or both of those entities get a clue. It would probably help, therefore, if people who want to get rid of cars – something which, again, I am more than happy to endorse as a long-term, if far-fetched, goal even as someone who owns a car – to blame that system and those entities that are preventing meaningful solutions, rather than moralising about how individual drivers are evil.

Bloonface

May 11, 2023

Politics

Cycling, Driving, Politics, Transport, UK politics
Better things aren’t possible

One of the articles that frequently springs to mind when contemplating the utter bleakness that is the British political scene of 2023 is the pithily-titled I Hate Keir Starmer, a piece by Tom Whyman which makes a compelling argument as to why futile, impotent hatred of Labour’s current leader is a rational response:

Keir Starmer exists, less as a person than as an institution: he is a decision that has been decreed from on high. And so there is nothing that I can do about him, except fume and moan and shitpost about him online. If I met him, I sometimes think, what would I say to him? I’m not sure I would say anything, to be honest. I’m not sure there would be any point.

I think about this quite a lot because it neatly encapsulates the complete futility of being even centre- or soft-left in 2023 Britain. To explore why, we need to go back to the point at which the hope of better things being possible was finally put out of its misery; the 2019 election, followed by the 2020 Labour leadership election.
(more…)

Bloonface

March 10, 2023

Politics

Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Politics, UK politics

“Mastodon is easy and fun, except when it isn’t”

“The ecosystem is moving”

“Meta just proved people hate chronological feeds”

Tangibles

Intangibles

The solution

How fedi works

The privacy problems

Anyone can run a server, and they don’t have to be identifiable

As soon as a post reaches another server, they control it totally

Server blocking cannot fully mitigate this

Your posts are only as secure and private as the least secure and private server that can see them

You don’t even need to go outside the spec to suck down everyone’s posts

The upshot

GDPR

“Meta are going to harvest all our posts!”

“Meta are going to embrace, extend and extinguish ActivityPub!”

“Meta are evil bastards and they’ve done lots of evil things so they’ll clearly do the evil thing I just imagined they will, for no other reason than they are evil!”

So why is Meta going to use ActivityPub?

Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users

Decentralisation is not a selling point for 99% of people

Decentralisation makes the user experience worse

The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge

Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity

In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary

The lesson to learn