TL;DR? Pick a server to join. Follow me. Share cat pics.
I’ve learned to accept that my blog posts tend to come in waves, but just because I haven’t been blogging recently doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. In fact, I’ve been actually posting rather consistently for the past couple months over on Mathstodon. More specifically, I’ve been engaging in “Category Theory Caturday” where I share cat pics and math on a weekly basis. If you follow me on other platforms, you may have been missing some quality cat content such as this:
Now, I hate to disappoint you if you’re following me on other platforms but “Category Theory Caturday” will most likely stay exclusive to Mathstodon for the time being. I don’t want you to think you’re missing out on it, but I also want you to have a reason to join the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is not really about an app, but an idea. It’s the idea that the value of social media lies in developing a relationship of trust between participants. It’s the idea that the people who produce the content should control that content. It’s the idea that the people or hash tags you explicitly choose to follow should determine the content that appears on your feed.
The Fediverse is not Facebook or Twitter and this is simultaneously both a blessing and a curse. Social media didn’t have to be about selling your eye-time to advertisers in a never-ending quest for more click-throughs, but that is ultimately what these giant websites have sculpted it into in an effort to keep the business model sustainable. In contrast, the Fediverse solves this problem through decentralizing the social network using a common standard called ActivityPub. It’s like having a bunch of mini-Facebooks and mini-Twitters that have all mutually agreed to cross-share content between their communities. The “app” I use to connect to the Fediverse is called an open source web application called Mastodon which enables anyone to easily host their own server. However, the downside of being in a system of inter-connected communities is that you need a community to start with that can absorb the operational costs that hosting a server necessitates.
This is the hardest part about asking you to join me in the Fediverse is that in order to “join me using Mastodon”, you must first choose a home server. This is difficult because you don’t really know how this will impact your experience until you do it. Each server has its own vibe. You’re just going to have to go with your gut feeling and take comfort in knowing that you can always migrate later. Today I’d like to share my experience so that you might have a better idea of what to look for when making that decision.
I was fortunate to be part of a existing community of math teachers that migrated from (the site formerly known as) Twitter to Mastodon en masse. I’ve been on Twitter for years, so as people started posting their new handles in my feed I started adding them. It’s not even an understatement when I say that the methods of that migration were actively hindered by Twitter. The decision to join the server I did was made easy when I saw that the admin, Christian Lawson-Perfect, had added support for mathematical expressions through LaTeX. If that that doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s okay; it’s just a very specific technology that enables mathematicians to better communicate with one another. That’s the power that a properly selected home server can have on your experience. Once I chose a server, it was a fairly easy process to log in to it through the official Mastodon app on my phone. The only downside to the official app is that it doesn’t have LaTeX support (yet).
After joining a server, there were some settings that I changed that greatly improved my experience. The first was to enable dark mode, which makes it way easier on my eyes. The second was to “Enable Advanced Web Interface”, which allows you to set up a multi-column view of incoming “toots” in real time. These two changes make the Mastodon interface look and feel more like the “Tweetdeck” view I had grow accustomed to over the years. I also turned on the “Always show media” option but choose not to “expand posts content warnings”. The people in my network have been generally good about using content warnings where appropriate.
One of the advantages to being having my home server being “Mathstodon.xzy” is that I get to see my server’s “local timeline”. Each time someone from the server posts something, it shows up here. It’s really fun to see the juxtaposition of posts containing complex mathematic research with deeply personal glimpses into the lives behind it. There’s also a “federated timeline” that combines my server’s feed with a combination of every connected server, but that feed is way too fast and chaotic even for me.
One of the downsides of the platform is that the user base hasn’t quite reached critical mass yet and it can feel a bit lonely when you only have a limited number of people you’re following. I found that one of the easiest solutions was to “follow hashtags” in addition to people. This takes that federated timeline and filters it down to search terms you’ve explicitly added. I might regret following #CatsOfMastodon at a later point in time, but right now there are so few posts in general that I get an acceptable quantity of cat pics in my feed. The community driven nature of the moderation system seems to be keeping the majority of spammers away for now.
It’s important to understand that the Fediverse has something of a “do it yourself” culture behind it. I’m not going to lie to you and say that it didn’t take effort to construct a feed of interesting content, but only that what I produced was worth the effort. When I log into other platforms now, I find myself scrolling through an endless stream of the content “they want me to see”. Being able to choose the content that “I want to see” and get it is so empowering that I don’t think I can go back.
That’s not to say the platform doesn’t have problems. It does. There are going to be problems with any sufficiently large social media app. The code needs to run on a physical server somewhere in the world and is subject to laws thereof. There is a risk that the government will seize your host’s server if they suspect illegal activity. Your messages in Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted and could theoretically be read by a server administrator. For these reasons, it’s popular for Americans like me to choose a server in the European Union where there’s better data privacy laws. You’ll also need to mitigate your own risks by not posting any sensitive information to begin with.
With that being said, if you’re looking for a social media outlet for a larger organization, you also have the power to start your own server! Perhaps your email server is a good analogy for a Mastodon instance. Sure, you can get free email from a search engine giant like Google or Yahoo, but there are hidden costs associated with it because the organization needs to “keep the lights on” somehow. Many servers, like mine, are supported through donations. Consider helping your local admin out if you’re able to.
If you’re running your own business, you can probably afford to buy a domain “YourCompany.com” so you can have a branded email address like “you@YourCompany.com” that you have complete control over. Rather than having to rely on brand recognition of an icon that could on changed spontaneously on the whims of an idiot, you can post your updates to a Mastodon instance that you control down to the bare-metal. If you don’t feel a need to go quite that far, you can still use your control of “YourCompany.com” to verify your identity on whatever server you do decide to grace with your presence. Nobody can threaten take your verified checkmark from you either!
Anyway, I hope that this post has been informative and gives you the courage to try it out if you were on the fence about it. Here’s that link to join again if you need it. I look forward to seeing you when you get there and will try to continue keeping a steady supply of math and cat pics!