Home invasion

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. Yogi Berra, et al

Well, it looks like it's finally happened. As news sites began reporting that Elon Musk had finalised his purchase of Twitter, the fediverse's Eternal September — hoped for and feared in equal numbers amongst its existing user base — began.

We've had waves of new people before — most recently earlier this year when Musk first announced his purchase offer — but what's been happening for the last week is different in both scale and nature. It's clear that a sizeable portion of Twitter's users are choosing to deplatform themselves en masse, and many have been directed to Mastodon, the most famous and populated software on the fediverse.

Two kinds of party

In Hobart in the late 1990s, there were basically three nightclubs. They were all sleazy to different degrees, loud to varying levels, and people went to them because that's where other people were — to have fun with friends, to attract attention, to assert their social status, and so on. This is Twitter.

I had a friend who lived in a sharehouse around the corner from one of these popular clubs. He hosted house parties on weekends. Small, just friends and a few friends of friends. This is the fediverse.

Murmuration

For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been overwhelming. I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration.

It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there's been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we're losing.

Viral

On Saturday evening I published a post explaining a couple of things about Mastodon's history of dealing with toxic nodes on the network. Then everything went bananas. By 10pm I had locked my account to require followers to be approved, and muted the entire thread I had myself created. Before November 2022 Mastodon users used to joke that you'd "gone viral" if you got more than 5 boost or likes on a post. In an average week, perhaps one or two people might follow my account. Often nobody did. My post was now getting hundreds of interactions. Thousands. I've had over 250 follow requests since then — so many I can't bear to look at them, and I have no criteria by which to judge who to accept or reject. Early this week, I realised that some people had cross-posted my Mastodon post into Twitter. Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on Twitter.

Nobody thought to ask if I wanted that.

To users of corporate apps like Twitter or Instagram this may sound like boasting. Isn't "going viral" and getting big follower counts what it's all about? But to me it was something else. I struggled to understand what I was feeling, or the word to describe it. I finally realised on Monday that the word I was looking for was "traumatic". In October I would have interacted regularly with perhaps a dozen people a week on Mastodon, across about 4 or 5 different servers. Suddenly having hundreds of people asking (or not) to join those conversations without having acclimatised themselves to the social norms felt like a violation, an assault. I know I'm not the only one who felt like this.

It probably didn't help that every Mastodon server administrator I know, including myself, was suddenly dealing with an deluge of new registrants, requests to join (if they didn't have open registration), and then the inevitable server overloads. Aus.social buckled