I continue to think about decentralized networks. And I'm wondering, among other things, if we need squares or courtyards, and why good metaphors play a role in wise decisions.
(🇸🇪 Det finns en svensk översättning av den här texten.)
In my previous post, about why I’ve chosen Mastodon as the open social network where I’m active, I quoted a blog post by Ben Werdmuller:
Each Mastodon-powered community should have its own look and feel — and its own distinct features. Mastodon’s greatest strength isn’t in being a single network — it’s in being an ecosystem of communities, each with its own identity, design, tooling, and norms.
It was a quote I added just before publishing and didn’t take the time to expand on. So I’ll do that here instead.
From time to time, I send out a newsletter.
Social Media ≠Social Networks #
“Social media” and “social networks” are two terms often used to describe services and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Bluesky, and Mastodon. But as Ian Bogost pointed out in an article in The Atlantic in November 2022, they’re not really synonyms:
Social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.
The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
In discussions about social media/social networks, “critical mass” is often mentioned. That enough people need to be present for a digital place to be interesting and valuable. What’s rarely defined in those discussions, however, is that “critical mass” depends on your perspective.
For social media, critical mass is a matter of sheer volume: for the companies running commercial platforms, there’s a direct connection between user numbers and revenue opportunities. And for content creators who make a living on the platform, a large user base is also important — they make up the necessary audience.
For social networks, critical mass is something different, depending on context. I’m part of a large number of different social networks: some chat groups of varying size and focus on Signal, a couple of different Slack and Discord servers, a few discussion forums, an account on Pixelfed. And so on. The size of these spaces ranges from four people to several hundred. But each of them has “critical mass” in the sense that those of us in the network find meaningful value in the communication that takes place.
We Are Complex Individuals #
As individuals, we are complex. One way to try to understand who I am is to look at the social networks I belong to: chat groups for family and relatives. Chat groups about technological development and society. Chat groups about football in general and IFK Göteborg in particular. Forums and Facebook groups about photography — both the act of photographing and Fuji cameras. Slack and Discord servers that serve as support communities for specific programs and services.
In each of these spaces, there are people who share a specific interest — but not necessarily anyone with whom I have everything in common.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, Eli Pariser wrote a piece in Wired titled Musk’s Twitter Will Not Be the Town Square the World Needs:
What we should aspire to is an overlapping ecosystem of cross-connected public-service and publicly owned digital social spaces. On today’s Big Social, a few voices do a lot of the speaking, while most users struggle to get heard, get shouted down when they do, or self-censor to avoid harassment and worse—a problem less prevalent in the world of “small social.” Moving to smaller fora creates more opportunity for everyone to actually participate.
What the world needs, I’m not sure. But I’m very uncertain whether I need a global town square. The social networks I’m part of feel more like inviting courtyards, and I’m quite comfortable there.
And to be clear: That doesn’t mean everything is rosy there, with conflict-free discussions disconnected from reality. Absolutely not. But in smaller spaces where discussion and debate happen with good intentions, it becomes more rewarding to engage in conversations where opinions diverge.
When Cal Newport — primarily known for his productivity books — joined Sam Harris for a conversation about knowledge work, the discussion also touched on the town square metaphor.
Cal clearly opposed it and instead drew inspiration from the Roman Empire: On the big, open social media platforms — especially Twitter — we act more like gladiators in the Colosseum, performing for an audience. We want to defeat our opponents and win the crowd’s approval. And whereas the emperor controlled the gladiator games, algorithms now control social media.
What we need are smaller networks where personal relationships can form. According to Cal, network science shows that ideas move between networks — a notion that aligns with many arguments I’ve read suggesting that the risks and problems of filter bubbles may not be as severe as one might intuitively believe.
Decentralized Networks as a City of Distinct Neighborhoods #
So maybe it’s not one or even a few global digital town squares that we need. What we need is a diversity of digital courtyards, built close enough together that both people and ideas can easily move between them.
Which brings me back to the quote I started with, from Ben Werdmuller:
Each Mastodon-powered community should have its own look and feel — and its own distinct features. Mastodon’s greatest strength isn’t in being a single network — it’s in being an ecosystem of communities, each with its own identity, design, tooling, and norms.
This made me reflect on how important the choice of metaphors is.
Unlike centralized platforms, there is an extra hurdle for someone wanting to start using Mastodon: If you want to join Bluesky, you just create a Bluesky account. But to join Mastodon, you must first choose a server. It’s not entirely self-explanatory why that is, or how to think when choosing. This creates extra friction.
And this is where Werdmuller’s post sparked a new line of thinking for me. That maybe there are other ways to describe Mastodon that make both the technical infrastructure — and especially the benefits of it — more understandable.
Instead of talking about Mastodon as one social network composed of many different servers, maybe it’s better to describe it as many digital communities that are interconnected.
Each community has its own small square (that server’s local timeline), but as a “resident” of that neighborhood, you can also meet people who have settled in another part. Either by following them directly or by checking out the cross-network “bulletin boards” represented by hashtags.
A development in that direction would, just as Werdmuller writes, be helped by software that makes it easier to build small, focused communities, with features, colors, and forms that suit that specific group’s needs. Pixelfed is already one example of this — a way to build communities for photo enthusiasts. Bookwyrm for “social reading.” And Bonfire, which seems to be nearing the end of its beta phase, looks very promising to me!
The big advantage of all this software being built on the same open standard, ActivityPub, is that you can, but don’t have to, create separate accounts for each of these different platforms. It’s perfectly possible to follow accounts across server and community boundaries — if you don’t want the full tailor-made experience or find it too cumbersome to create lots of accounts. Plus, this openness also makes it possible to gather all your feeds in a single app, if that’s what you want.
Decentralized > Decentralizable #
All of this strengthens the point I made in my previous post — why I believe that decentralized beats decentralizable: Services built on ActivityPub, like Mastodon and Pixelfed, may not be as polished as the commercial services we’ve grown used to. But while Bluesky is currently decentralized only in theory (i.e., decentralizable), the ActivityPub-based services actually are decentralized.
I run my own Mastodon server because I can — and want to. But even though I’m the only active user on it, I can still communicate with many others. And I’ve connected my Mastodon account to my Pixelfed account so I can give a little extra push to the photos I post there.
I believe this is the right path forward. We’ll have to put up with some friction for now, but we can also do our part to reduce it. I don’t write code, but hopefully, texts like this one can help clarify what decentralization is and why it matters.
Photo: Lexie Barnhorn.