# The fediverse will not save us.

published: 2019-01-03

Welcome to 2019. The "year of Vane Vander", as I called it in a post whose name I don't remember off the top of my head right now, is three days, almost four, past us. The past few months have been an avalanche of ever-more-chaotic events- what would one expect from a year that started with the Tide pod challenge? (Yeah, that was a whole year ago, even though it feels like only yesterday.)

Something's changed in me in those twelve months. And yet... I can't seem to put my finger on it. My political stances don't seem to be any different: I'm still an agorist, and I still believe in freedom of association (or disassociation from; remember we're talking about groups and not mental illness here), and I still feel icky around people whose entire identities revolve around seemingly immutable characteristics of themselves. I still write books. I still don't believe in the Abrahamic god, and I'm still working on untangling myself from the spiritual delusions I seem to have picked up seemingly out of nowhere around last April. Or was it May? I can't remember.

Maybe it was... the social media? I'm not on WordPress anymore- there's a change I can put my finger on! Neither am I on Neocities. Or Facebook. Or... Tumblr.

But I still keep making a complete ass of myself, no matter the platform, spurred on by the incessant need for external validation- so maybe that's not a real change at all.

I opened this post today to talk to you about the fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma, specifically, since I've never been an Instagram-type person (as Pixelfed would replace) and I haven't tried Misskey. Although Friendica recently got support for ActivityPub, the protocol that Mastodon and Pleroma speak, it sits closer to the "federation", which consists of diaspora*, Hubzilla, and GNU Social. The federation and the fediverse, despite sounding similar, are two completely different universes. Not the best genius who came up with those names, I think.

Mastodon and Pleroma, for the unaware, are two competing microblogging services on the fediverse. Their userbases have always been more or less at each other's throats, probably encouraged by the fact that the main developers of each are two polar opposites: Eugen, the developer of Mastodon, is just a "normal" middle-aged white dude who rakes in thousands of dollars each month from Patreon, whereas Lain is, as far as I know, completely pseudonymous.

Pleroma users' main complaints against Mastodon:

1. It's bloated and resource-heavy, costing much more to host each month. At the very least, if you don't want to host at home, $3 for Pleroma, >$9 for Mastodon- although Vultr and masto.host's low-tier prices might change at any time. I've hosted a Pleroma instance on my shitty Raspberry Pi at home for a few days as a test, and I was still able to use it for other blogging-related tasks; Mastodon wouldn't run on my device, but I've heard horror stories of someone managing to get it running on FOUR of them interlinked together.
2. Pleroma instances can automatically advertise their MRF, or defederation, policies. This helps in administration transparency, because when admins decide to make the potentially catastrophic decision to mute or wholesale block an instance, the affected users need to know so that they can move to a different instance if they disagree with the decision. Mastodon admins can also make a list of domains they block, but unlike Pleroma, there is no easy way to verify that they're being truthful.
3. The three-paned Mastodon default interface dumps an overwhelming amount of information on the user, and it doesn't scale nicely on screens of different sizes, which means a lot of horizontal scrolling if you click on a post to try to view the full thread. The default Pleroma interface has only one pane, and it doesn't autoscroll with new posts, which means a lot more control over the amount of information thrown at the viewer at once.

Mastodon users' main complaints against Pleroma:

1. It doesn't have an easy way to user-side mute words and phrases and block whole domains from being able to follow oneself. I'd block the infantilizing baby words "cofe", "smol"/"tol", and "pee pee poo poo" (among others) in a heartbeat if I could, but because Mastalab (the fediverse app I use on Android) relies on the server handling mutes instead of the app itself, I can only mute these things on the few Mastodon instances I'm on. And if I need to clean out my followers, I have to do it manually.
2. Because the cost to host it is much lower, it attracts more bad actors. Whether this is from uninspired trolls making throwaway instances to harass people, or stereotypical basement-dwellers with little disposable income who want places to fester in their hatred, shitty instances seem to invariably run Pleroma more often than not.
3. Compounding the issue with bad actors, because Mastodon doesn't give external instances an easy way to see if they're blocked or not, Pleroma instances often still retrieve posts from other instances they're blocked from. And because the default Pleroma frontpage is the Whole Known Network, a collection of all the posts from all the instances that particular instance can see, if Instance A blocks Instance C, but Instance B blocks neither A nor B, a person on Instance C could use Instance B's Whole Known Network to circumvent Instance A's blocks.

Both sides have valid points. And yet, the little discussion I see always devolves into petty discourse where both sides feel like they've been personally wronged.

Which brings me to my main point: just because you are on the fediverse, that does not automatically make you better than whatever hellsites you came from. Being on a FLOSS social media platform that purports to have learned from the ethical mistakes of proprietary social media silos does not mean that you have a free excuse to act just as toxic as the people who probably pushed you off of those sites to begin with.

My time on the fediverse started off very chill. I ran an angel aesthetics bot on an instance recommended by an anon on a Lainchan thread, and occasionally I'd dip into the local and federated timelines to see what community I'd set up shop in. It seemed idyllic: lots of inside jokes I didn't really get, tolerable banter, little discourse. But now I've seen clout-chasing internet celebrities, and witchhunts against people I now consider friends for minor slipups that could have been rectified in direct messages, and literal cults start their own instances. Callout culture runs rampant, and in this place where I thought I'd finally be safe, I just have to watch my words even more in order to keep the mobs away. I left 8chan to get away from the constant slurs and hateful rhetoric: and yet, one could take a walk down any "free speech" or "loli" instance and get a compressed version of the same vitriol. And on most of the queer-friendly instances, I'd get skinned alive for even daring to suggest that maybe, just maybe, big-scale socialism isn't the best solution to corporatism's countless problems.

I wonder what happened to make the fediverse so sour. Or maybe it was always like this, and the more I hop among instances, a migrant of my own making, the more shit that mars my soul, renders me resentful, makes me blind to the few things on this network worth saving.

Or maybe every place on the internet is like this, has these same problems, and no amount of instance hopping and MRF policies will save us. A social site is useless without the people that are supposed to inhabit it, after all.

Maybe the few of us unhappy need to burn everything down and start new again.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander