Unsurprising: Mastodon announces the signup experience will now happy-path their own centrally-controlled server, and make decentralization an exception case.

They’re not wrong that signup friction is harming adoption… but I feel like I’ve seen this story so many times before: if your plan to gain adoption is to compromise your supposed bottom-line goal, then you become what you claimed to want to displace.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

and I don’t mean that in a dramatic philosophical purity-test sense, I mean that very pragmatically

This is a product decision that doesn’t make sense if the end goal is a social network where decentralization is fundamental to the experience. If most people are on their server, then the Mastodon experience becomes primarily centralized, and federation becomes an edge case. This very directly breaks the value prop, and creates a direct incentive for Mastodon to deprioritize federation-centered features even further.

That’s not to say this is an impossible needle to thread, to make a compromise in order to gain the leverage you need… but it’s very very hard to do, especially when part of the compromise is to structure even your product against your end goal. That in turn structures your institution against that goal, by creating a future pivot point that at any given moment would be extremely inconvenient and even actively disempowering for any future leader to ever choose to do.

And if they’re not acknowledging how hard that is, then, whether by intent or by cluelessness, they’re not serious about it, and they won’t succeed.

Moreover though, I think the simplest conclusion to draw is that the Mastodon team simply wouldn’t agree with me about the goals of the project.

They talk in a way that’s consistent with the philosophy that the main point is to wrest control of social media out of bad people’s hands (Twitter’s), and into good people’s hands (theirs). They talk about decentralization as an ideological liability that makes them the good guys, rather than as a value proposition that people should concretely want.

When leaders think like that, you should expect them to compromise as aggressively as possible on the stated ideal, while still keeping it just barely in play, in order to continue to hold that moral high ground while gaining power—and sucking all the oxygen out of the room for alternatives. And promising to pivot to the ideal world “someday”, once we’re finally at the top, is part of the playbook.

The more likely outcome is for Mastodon’s PMs to, a year or two down the line, start prioritizing mastodon.social as the “main experience”, and start to build first-class functionality that assumes most people are on the central server and doesn’t treat federation very seriously. Just very boring startup shit. Because literally why would that not be what happens next?

One very important test for whether “for-good” institutions are serious about their goals is: would they be willing to make the institution less powerful, if it moved the mission forward?

Most institutions would not—and if you put this question to them, they would very angrily and very seriously argue that this hypothetical is nonsense, because increasing their power as much as possible is definitionally better for the world, as a matter of unimpeachable common sense.

And that’s how you know which of those two priorities is the organization’s actual bottom line.

…I’ll put forward the condition by which I could be proven wrong, though: if this default onboarding onto mastodon.social was quickly paired with a huge push to make it much much easier to transfer your entire identity and history to a new server.

Like, sure, if we get people onto a server asap, but then make it basically trivial to leave, and encourage that once they’ve gotten a taste of the platform? then I don’t really mind it in the same way at all, that’s functionally very similar to the current experience but with the big up-front friction removed

…but I notice that the blog post fully does not mention this. If they were taking federation seriously, I think they would. But I just don’t think the author of this post is actually honest when they suggest this flow is suboptimal. I think they’re just doing their little nods to an ideologue faction they don’t respect, while surreptitiously building the Mastodon they believe is actually better: namely, Twitter under their roof.

…anyway nothing here is actually news, the day I learned Mastodon is a company with a CEO I was like. ah. the playbook is comin’ isn’t it.

I smirk in tragic amusement at being right

would love to start being wrong about this stuff, one of these times, any day now…

@matchu it didn't used to be! but yeah eugen (ugh) has been basically pushing on re-centralization recently

@aria so many people love pro-underdog ideology until they get the power in their hands

and then they’re like “well hold on…”

as if that’s not what most people before them, whom they hated, also did

@matchu i don’t know what the law’s like in germany but in the us if you’re collecting money and paying people everything really wants you to become a company and the person at the top, even when it’s a 1 person llc is always the ceo. i don’t know what’s going on in mastodon corp but the path of least resistance for somebody catapulted into leading an org that needs to meet payroll is some kind of corporate structure, as much to shield them from liability of content posted on m.social as much as it is to not end up paying folks directly out of your checking account which gets real messy real fast

@nsfmc nod nod yeah, I don’t mean to be calling anyone a bad person here, or that this sequence of actions isn’t understandable from an individual level; I have no stake in judging anyone personally, and I understand why and how these things are common

I just also at the same time observe that the path of least resistance here is one that consistently results in projects losing their grip on their stated values, so… if that’s the path that people are taking (understandably, on the personal level of being untrained and getting swept up in social phenomena larger than themselves), then I expect the project to become mediocre if not evil, I say without any specific commentary toward its human architects

@nsfmc (that’s not to say that there are no judgments that would be fair to level against them; just that it’s not really where my interests lie, not really having any stake in or relationship with them beyond the project they’re implementing)

@nsfmc I guess I should probably further clarify that like… my objection is not that they’re literally a registered entity that literally has a leader

it’s a lot more to do with their branding uncritically embracing that, and eagerly leaning into terms like “company” and “CEO” in how they talk about themselves; things that are not logistically necessary for getting people paid, but are strongly indicative of trying to copy the Silicon Valley startup vibe

doing what’s legally and structurally necessary to pay people for their work is one thing; being visibly excited about Mastodon being a “company” is another

@matchu yeah i can dig, i think what i really see happening here is masto going in the red hat/wordpress direction, the sort of safe version that appeals to, eg, news orgs or brands, that gets whitelabeled by folks like aws or whatever (assuming bluesky doesn’t Capture that market). it makes me think about what happens if masto takes the vercel/canonical approach and what that ‘means’ long term. i guess i see such a robust community that i’m not concerned what masto does unless they, eg toxically cause og embeds to stop being supported or something that makes it less shareable.

@nsfmc yeah… and I’m curious how much of the existing robust community is on board with Masto’s vision, vs attached to the more decentralized value prop, and how that will affect the existing community’s attachment to Mastodon the org as it changes

I wonder if we’ll see a bit of a netsplit where Masto forks end up overtaking mainline Mastodon in the broader server space; and mastodon.social then becomes kinda its own social media platform that kinda just happens to support activitypub incidentally, kinda like I remember Tumblr was thinking of doing

@nsfmc one thing I remember noticing when I started looking into fedi was how, in some ways, the Mastodon API was almost the more relevant lingua-franca API for a lot of devs, in addition to ActivityPub itself… how it’s just kinda organically become the standard for servers and clients

it creates an unusual level of resiliency for communities to be able to eject from the mainline Mastodon ecosystem… I wonder how that will play out for them