Mastodon is amazing … so far. But can it hold up?

Mastodon initially solved the designed-in flaws of other social-media platforms, which maximize addictive behavior and corporate profit. But the biggest problem Mastodon faces is still unsolved, and will only emerge as Mastodon becomes a major platform. That threat will be from the users, not big corporations.

A very quick background about social media; I’ll be brief since many readers may know this stuff. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media went through three phases:

1. Lure users with exactly the features they want; build addictive networks of interactions that are hard for users to abandon.
2. Use profits to lure advertisers to the large user base, thereby “enshittifying” the user experience to the benefit of advertisers (to use Cory Doctorow’s term); make advertising on the platform mandatory to business success.
3. Once advertisers are hooked, pit them against one another, thereby “enshitifying” the advertiser experience; divert all profits to shareholders.

The end result is crappy for users, crappy for advertisers, and wonderful for investors. And because these social networks are careful to avoid interoperability with other networks, we’re locked in: leaving requires us to abandon important social relationships that we spent considerable time building and enjoying.

Mastodon has solved all of that. It has the features we want — everything in step 1 above. Steps 2 and 3 will never happen; there are no advertisers and no shareholders. And best of all, we’re not locked in; we can switch servers at any time.

And as time goes by, if we can get our friends and family to join, we’ll finally be able to abandon the “enshittified” services we’ve been forced to use and hate.

So what’s the problem?

Mastodon hasn’t yet faced the power of parasitic users, because Mastodon isn’t big enough yet to attract them. But it will be, and soon.

In nature, a parasite is a creature that takes advantage of another species, usually with little or nothing in return. Your body, for example, is a huge pile of nutritious proteins, fats, sugars, minerals, and other food, ready for the taking by any creature that can evade your defenses. And many do: we’re crowded with worms, mites, bacteria, viruses, and many other unpleasant creatures.

It turns out “social parasites” are a thing too, things that prey on us financially or emotionally. These are people who take advantage of the efforts of others without providing anything in return. Bank robbers, tax avoiders, welfare cheats, con artists, and so on. Any time there is a resource (usually money), parasites come along and try to take some of it.

But a key factor in parasitism is that the cost to steal the resource must be less than the resource is worth. If it cost $1,000 to rob a store that only had $500 on hand, robbers wouldn’t bother. We try to make this happen by raising the cost of social parasitism with jail, fines, and other penalties for those who are caught. We also fund police departments and use our taxes to pay prosecutors, all to raise the probability that the parasites will actually get caught.

This gets to the heart of the matter for Mastodon. What happens when there’s a huge, valuable resource that’s essentially free for the taking?

Telephone, text, and email spammers are a scourge on our high-tech society, and cost is the reason. It’s a vast audience for marketing, and the cost of spam — that is, parasitism — is close to zero. The cost to send millions of emails or text messages is miniscule compared to the potential return.

Do you remember getting spam phone calls in the 1960’s? Of course not. Back then, a phone call even within a single seven-digit calling region (i.e. no area code) might cost a significant amount. Calls to distant phones were almost prohibitive. Phone spamming would have been a dead-end endeavor; a million calls could have cost you a million dollars.

Today? Free nationwide calling is pervasive. I think nothing talking for an hour with my sister in Pennsylvania or cousin in Washington. And spammers think nothing of making a billion phone calls with robocall systems. Because each call costs close to nothing.

Will Mastodon be able to fend off the parasites? It’s free too, so spammers will be attracted like flies to you-know-what. Maybe Mastodon can avoid this fate … but it won’t be easy.

Mastodon, like Twitter, Facebook, email, text messages, and all other technology services that are essentially free, is already being targeted by parasites. My own server (@sfba.social) already lists forty-eight other Mastodon servers that are banned:

• 4 – spam
• 3 – harassment and racism
• 11 – hate speech and bigotry
• 1 – crypto discussions
• 8 – poor or no moderation
• 9 – pornography
• 4 – repeating Twitter tweets
• 4 – reasons not listed

So already Mastodon is having to fend off unwanted messages — and this is only the beginning. Mastodon currently serves a few million users, contrasted with Twitter’s roughly 400 million. It’s a much less valuable target for the internet parasites.

Here’s my prediction. Elon Musk’s “free speech absolutism” will turn Twitter into an ugly morass of hate speech, harassment, racism, and violent right-wing rhetoric. As these unpleasant tweets take over, more and more people will look for alternatives. Musk’s take-over of Twitter caused Mastodon’s numbers to surge briefly. This surge receded, but it will be followed by slow, steady growth. At some point, enough people will be on Mastodon that a typical new user will immediately have a community, people they know in other contexts, at which point Mastodon’s growth will accelerate until it becomes dominant.

And when that happens, the parasites will attack in earnest.

The Mastodon community thinks and hopes they can fend off the parasites algorithmically. I don’t believe it. The parasites have money and motivation — lots of it. They’ll invent all sorts of ways to circumvent Mastodon’s algorithms. It will be another whack-a-mole game like the one currently going with email and spam filters: as soon as one is squashed, another pops up.

The Mastodon community will fight these parasites, but Mastodon isn’t really an organization at all (although there is a small non-profit group). It’s more of a loosely knit community of programmers and administrators with a shared interest in a good user experience.

Can such a nebulous community fight the power of parasitic capitalism? Can they beat the powerful forces of socioeconomic Darwinism?

We’ll see.