All right, Jesse, sound like a plan? - Yeah, sounds great. - All right, well, let's go on to our deep dive. I'm calling this one a world without Twitter. So I made what's perhaps the mistake of checking in this week on media coverage of Twitter, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, what's going on there.

I regret it. I kind of want those 30 minutes of my life back. Here's what I noticed in my cursory examination of media coverage of Elon Musk and Twitter is that essentially a decision has been made that Elon Musk is public enemy number one, and it has led to news coverage that I find to be both boring and ironic.

So I think it's boring because what we have is just everyone lining up to take their shot at attacking Musk and why he's bad, right? So there's a pinata hanging, a proverbial pinata hanging, and there's a full consensus that this is a bad pinata that is going to destroy democracy.

So I don't know where you buy your pinatas from, but don't buy it from that store. And everyone's just lining up to take their take. Now, why this is ironic is because it feels as if this consensus of he is bad guy number one needs to go away was formed on Twitter, is being enforced on Twitter, and after everyone takes their turn with their takedown piece on Musk, they then return to Twitter to see if they're getting enough lottets or how much celebration they're getting.

So it's this weird sort of incestual circularity going on where all these reporters are obsessed with Twitter, that obsession with Twitter is fueling their takedown of Twitter on which they're seeing what the reaction is to their takedown of Twitter, all of it's all mixed up, and it's just uninteresting to me.

So I thought, let me come at this topic from a different angle. So one of the discussions that's happening, which I think is more interesting, is will we see a viable alternative to Twitter emerge? And in particular, there's a strain of conversation that's big right now that's saying, will the potential fall of Twitter lead to the rise of one of the independent social media alternatives?

So these independent social media alternatives that are not massive platform monopolies owned by billionaires. Now, I don't wanna act as if I'm ahead of all trends, but I do wanna point towards an article I wrote for "The New Yorker" back in 2019. I'm loading this on the tablet now for people who are watching at youtube.com/calendareportmedia.

This was actually my first article I ever wrote for "The New Yorker." It is from May of 2019, and the title is, "Can Indie Social Media Save Us?" So the point of this article was to look at this subset of the social media universe which had been overlooked, which is independent social media services, small, often open-source social media alternatives.

At the time, there wasn't much discussion of these. Today, there is. And in particular, in the last new cycle or two, there's been a lot of focus on one particular independent social media service called Mastodon. I'm gonna scroll here in this article to show you that Mastodon is something I mentioned about.

So here we go. From my piece, "Mastodon, "another popular indie web service, "exists in the middle ground "between centralized and decentralized social media." So I talked about Mastodon back in 2019 as a potential Twitter alternative. So this is what I wanna get into today. How does Mastodon work? Will it emerge as a potential, more independent alternative to what Twitter was doing?

And if so, will that be better? And if not, what does that tell us? So how does Mastodon work? Will it become an alternative to Twitter? And then I'll return to what I wrote in this article, and we'll see how my conclusions from back then mesh with what I'm thinking today.

All right, so what is Mastodon? Well, the right way to understand it is it is an open-source Twitter-style service, but unlike Twitter, it is distributed. So there is open-source software for running a Mastodon server. Anyone can go and download the software. They can install it on their own server, and they can run a Mastodon server.

It's open-source, so it's free. You just have to give proper acknowledgement that, hey, this code comes from the Mastodon project. A little aside, there's a whole controversy that only really tech nerds understood, but when Donald Trump first launched his social media network, Truth Social, they essentially just stole all the code from Mastodon without doing any of the acknowledgments, and that created a bit of a problem.

That sounds familiar. Anyways, so anyone can download the software, start their own server. So Jesse and I could put a computer here in the studio, and we could run a Mastodon server on it. When you're running a Mastodon server, you can have users join, sign up, have a username for your server, and what the server implements is something like Twitter.

You can post things on the server, up to 500 characters, and you can see what other people have posted in reverse chronological order. So very much like a Twitter short form post, reverse chron, sorting type system. It has a similar follower dynamic to Twitter as well, so you can actually say, "Well, here are the people I wanna actually follow, "so show me their posts when they come up "in reverse chronological order.

"I don't wanna know about that person," et cetera. All right, so that's the core of Mastodon. I can start my own mini Twitter for free. Anyone can join it. Typically, the way these servers are supported is Patreon, that's pretty common. I mean, it's not super expensive to run one of these servers but you might just ask the members, "Hey, can you kick in and donate?" So that's a nice benefit from those who are concerned about attention economy dynamics.

It's typically not ad-based. It's, "Hey, this is gonna cost whatever, "couple thousand dollars a year to run. "Hey, users on my server, can you chip in some money?" Mastodon also comes with a protocol for different servers to talk to each other. So now what can happen is, let's say you have an account on the server that Jesse and I have here in the studio and there's whatever, 100 users who use this server and you follow some of them and you post and it looks like Twitter.

You can follow people on other servers as well. So let's say someone else we know has their own Mastodon server and someone else who's interesting, who you find to be more interesting than Jesse and I, is over on that other server. So maybe you're like, "You know, I kinda like the Cal and Jesse server.

"A lot of Harry Potter talk going on. "Not so sure that I only wanna hear what they have to say." But someone else we like is on another Mastodon server. You can say, "I wanna follow them." And this protocol, what it will do is basically your server will then talk to that other server and say, "Hey, we have someone over here "who cares about a user of yours.

"Let us know when they post things." And so now I can see posts from other servers show up in my feed. All right, so it's a distributed solution. Individuals run these servers, but the servers can talk to each other. So I can see what people post on other servers if I choose to follow them and send a request.

That's Mastodon. It has a real community niche feel. So traditionally, each individual Mastodon server, which are called instances in Mastodon speak, will develop their own, often quite complex community standards. That's the whole feel of Mastodons. Like over here, we have very specific rules about what you can and can't talk about.

Over here, they might be different. This is similar a little bit to what we see with Reddit and subreddits. We get these very specific community standards that exist on different Reddits. As it's become clear in the recent news cycles, it also has very powerful banning type features. So you can easily, as an admin, kick people off your instance.

You can also block people on your server from following anyone from another server. So I can, if I run the Jesse Cal server, and I don't like this rival Harry Potter server, I can ban that server, which means no one on my server is allowed to follow anyone from that server.

You can also ban individuals. No one on my server can follow this particular individual. So there's a lot of power the admins have to control not just what's posted, but who the people on their server can actually follow or receive information from. All right, so that's basically how Mastodon works.

So it is Twitter, but it has its own thing going on. Back to my 2019 article, I'll just show a couple things I wrote about Mastodon back then. So one thing I wrote in that article is, because most Mastodon instances are small, each typically, typically each number is a couple thousands of users, and crowdfunded by their members, they feel different from mass social media with an enticing freeform energy reminiscent of the internet's early days.

The contrast between this atmosphere and the one found on existing social networks is striking. So you definitely get this feel. I hung out a lot on Mastodon when I was writing that 2019 article. It feels like early web stuff. Very specific niche communities, very specific rules, reminiscent of the textual conventions of Usenet news groups, or the weird acronyms that were developed, the standards that were developed on early bulletin boards like The Well.

Here's a more concrete summary I gave from that experience. Mastodon, at least for now, is a human scale environment in which users are happy to chat about quirky things with other quirky people. Recently, when I logged into the Mastodon instance, sunbeam.city, a quote, "Libertarian socialist solar punk instance," I found a photo of someone's blooming spider plant next to a conversation about the consequences of ethical transparency and hierarchical systems.

It struck me as the quintessential early internet experience. Right? So that's what Mastodon looked like to me in 2019. It's like old Usenet boards. It's cool. Everyone's doing their own thing. The following between servers didn't seem widespread. It was more, "I like sunbeam.city. I like these people. We have our own quirky thing going on.

Let's just go hang out there." So a really good early web energy. Can this be a replacement for Twitter that doesn't have one person? Priorly, that might've been Jack Dorsey. Today, it's Elon Musk. Can we have a version of Twitter then where there is no one person, some sort of a utopian alternative to Twitter?

Can these good vibes I picked up in 2019 scale to be a Twitter-size impact on the internet? And here my argument is no. Mastodon will never be Twitter. It will never have its same significance or its same audience. The reason for this, and as I've talked about before on this show, Twitter is incredibly successful because it is a finely tuned engagement machine.

That is very difficult to do. So we've gone into this before, but at the core of Twitter's success is three elements. One, that it has a massive user base that includes many potentially interesting people with engaging things to say. So you need a huge foundation of potentially interesting people with potentially interesting things to say.

And I'm using interesting here in a completely value-neutral manner. It could be, interesting means engaging. So it could be outrageous. It could be shocking, or it could be funny, or it could be very smart. So you have comedians, you have expert commentators, you have celebrity figures, you have figures who have interesting takes on different aspects of the culture.

It's huge user base. Number two, Twitter has this massive social graph where all of these people have painstakingly defined these one-on-one dyadic follower connections. This creates this densely connected social graph that is encoding these type of social cultural capital relations. I'm following you because of, I just, all these subtle things I know about you and your standing in society or the content that you produce.

You combine that with the retweet button and they come together to give you this sort of emergent, distributed curation algorithm that's fantastically effective. So you have all these interesting people throwing out potentially effective things. Then you have the cumulative impact of 237 million users clicking retweet in this complex social graph.

And what emerges is this really successful filtering function where stuff that's engaging is identified and spread. As a result, if you click that Twitter app on your phone, its ability to show you thing after thing after thing that's going to capture your attention, that you could lose hours into, is almost unparalleled.

Instagram can do this pretty well with a similar sort of setting. Facebook is used to do this pretty well, but is now struggling. TikTok is doing this very well, as we've talked about before. They've replaced this human centric distributed curation with pure algorithmic curation, but it works pretty well in the sense of you can get lost in TikTok even more effectively than Twitter.

But very few people can do this. It is a tight wire act. It is very difficult to pull off. This, I can get lost in hours streaming almost everything I see scrolling on this app is gonna catch my attention in some way. Mastodon can't replicate that. It doesn't have enough critical mass of interesting people.

It doesn't have this existing deep complex follower, social graph, which does a really good job of amplifying things. In fact, the dynamics of the Mastodon, there's a few choices that they've made specifically. And by they, there's an actual founder, Eugene Rochko. They've made these decisions to try to cut down on virality.

You can't quote tweet people, whatever they would call it on Mastodon, quote post people. It's difficult to spread other people's things. Eugene wanted it to be more people just talking back and forth. It's difficult to do threads. You have all this dynamic of very niche content moderation and banning back and forth between different people.

So you don't have that virality. You don't have the core of interesting people. So what you don't get on Mastodon is that experience. So if I open that app and I am engaged for as long as I wanna scroll, what I saw when I was on Mastodon, which I think is true of the experience today, is you enter a conversation with a community.

Most of the stuff you see is not that interesting. It's more about going back and forth with people that over time you get to know. And you find interesting things. You have to do a lot of work. You have to do a lot of sifting. That's early web stuff.

And it's cool. But from a pure engagement perspective, can't hold a candle to Twitter. No one is gonna fall down a Mastodon rabbit hole hours at an end. As reporter after reporter is realizing as they write about this service, it's actually kinda hard to spend a lot of time on Mastodon.

It's like a Usenet news group in the early days. It's like the well. There's some cool stuff. You meet some cool people. Most of it's not that engaging. So no, I don't think Mastodon's gonna be a replacement for Twitter. Is that a problem? I would say no. I don't think we need a replacement for Twitter.

There is a great danger in taking essentially the entire populace of internet users and putting them all together on a homogenized interface. Everyone has easy access, the exact same accounts, all information looks the same, the network of connections through which information is being amplified, the curation is happening on the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

I think that is a dangerous recipe. I think that is a dangerous recipe. It does not play well with the human social brain. It create, the virality dynamics create these, as we've seen, intense tribal pressures, intense psychological distress. Yes, it's very engaging to look at Twitter, but Twitter over the last three or four years has become engaging in the same way that the Roman Colosseum was engaging.

It's more about watching gladiators from your tribe do battles from gladiators from the other tribe, reveling in the outrage when someone from your tribe is being unfairly speared with the proverbial trident and the people commenting on how unfair this is, celebrating when your team gets someone from the other team.

We found an angle of attack. We threw that net thing around them and dragged them into the lion pit. It's spectacle, it's a spectacle of the elites, as I said in a recent New Yorker piece. Yeah, it's engaging, but we don't need that type of engagement. And I know there's lots of other arguments in favor of Twitter.

Journalists like it because it helps them find what's going on in the news. I don't mind if you have to work harder to find out what's going in the news because the side effect of you all using the same platform is that everything becomes consensus. Everyone just says, what is our particular tribe in the world of media think about this?

Great, let's go. There's not enough interesting new angles. There's not enough, I would say, diverse viewpoints of world events. It all just breaks, balkanizes into three viewpoints and everyone goes back to the arena. So I don't care if it's harder for you to find news. Yeah, it can help you connect with interesting people.

There's other ways to connect with interesting people that aren't gonna put your blood pressure through the roof. That's not gonna give you a low grade anxiety disorder like Twitter can do. Mastodon is great for that. Join an instance, have several instances. If affinity groups are related to things you care about, you can build really interesting relationships there.

It's a small scale, it's a human style scale, but it's connecting you to people that you never otherwise would have found without the internet. That's brilliant social internet possibility at work without those downsides of Twitter. And the engagement part of Twitter, find other things that are engaging. Read books, watch streaming shows, listen to episode after episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

Do stuff in the real world. Make more Harry Potter references. I don't know. The fact that this is engaging is not enough of a justification for we should keep it around. So I don't think Mastodon could replace Twitter, but I don't think we need anything to replace Twitter. So let me go back to the conclusion I made in that 2019 article.

Let's see if I was clairvoyant or not. So I did say the internet may work better when it's spread out as originally designed. So I like this idea of more distributed, more niche, less universal. But then I conclude, despite its advantages, however, I suspect that the Indie web will not succeed in replacing existing social media platforms at their current scale.

For one thing, the Indie web lacks the carefully engineered addictiveness that helped fuel the rise of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This addictiveness has kept people returning to their devices even when they know there are better uses for their time. Remove the addiction and you might lose the users.

All right, I think that's just another way of saying what I'm saying today. Those existing giants were fantastically effective at generating engagement. Indie social media can't compete. Get rid of the engagement, you lose most of the users. As I go on to say, though, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It may be too that people who are uneasy about social media aren't looking for a better version of it, but are instead ready to permanently reduce the role that their smartphones play in their lives. That I think is the most hopeful potential conclusion here is, sure, there's alternatives that can, some people who are into social internet stuff can find actually healthier, more community-driven, more eccentric, original, early web-style online communities, and I'm glad those exist.

Most people will say if Twitter fell, I'm not gonna sign up for a Mastodon instance, and honestly, it's kinda nice to be able to hear the birds again and see the sunshine. I'm sorta glad this thing is gone. I don't need a replacement. So that's where I fall. No, we're not gonna see an obvious replacement for Twitter, and I don't care that that might end up being the reality that we go into next.

I mean, the real question, Jesse, is Twitter gonna go away? I'm not convinced. It's hard for me to tell. - I don't think it's gonna go away. - There's issues about engineering. This is the conversation right now is because so many people are being fired that it'll literally crash.

Putting those aside, it's an engagement engine like almost no one else. Like for people who are too old, or I'll get yelled at for this, or have too much self-respect to be on TikTok, it's the next most addictive thing to have, right? I mean, it's an incredibly engaging thing, especially if you're a well-educated, upper-middle class, sort of elite knowledge worker type.

It's put it in my veins engagement. It's like, yeah, there's very few things that can compete with that. And it's really hard. That's my thing is that engagement requires all of these elements to come together. And a lot of them relied on first mover advantages. 237 million users that include all these interesting people, this incredibly valuable social graph, that the interface retweet dynamic that does such a good job of curation.

It's hard to do that. So yeah, I'm kind of with you. I mean, unless Musk shuts it down, like the tech crashes and he says enough of it, let's just shut it down, which I don't think is gonna happen. - He wouldn't waste $40 billion to do that. - Yeah, his debt service on his Twitter acquisition is a billion dollars a year.

He owes a billion dollars a year just to service the debt on Twitter. So I don't think he's gonna do that. I think what's gonna happen is, and it's something I talked about a while ago, is that Twitter was actually well positioned to be taken private like he did.

It could easily be something that generates a couple of billion dollars a year in revenue, pretty sleekly with really high profit margins, which is really all Musk needs out of it. So once you lose that ambition that Facebook has to be a trillion dollar valuation company, which was their ambition before the wheels fell off.

Once you're like, "We don't have to be a trillion dollar competitor to Apple." Once it's, "Hey, this thing generates 2.5 billion a year off of 150 million really engaged users and it has a sleek background and we have a 2000 employee company and we can service our debt and it makes good profit for the people who own it." I mean, I'm sure that's the play.

The question is whether he's all there. That's the only eight ball here. I don't know. It's hard to tell because everything's so negative on Musk right now. I mean, if he's literally losing his grip mentally, then God knows what will happen. But if we assume a strategic Musk, I don't think it's that hard to make this a sleek, profitable, semi-niche service.

It's not trying to be TikTok or Facebook. It's not trying to be Mastodon. It's somewhere in between and generates like a reasonable amount of money for a small number of people. That's probably where it'll end up. - You should ask your boy, Lex. - Yeah. Yeah, I should. I think Lex is buddies with Elon.

- Yeah, he's on a show. - Yeah, yeah. I think they're buddies. I'll ask him. I'll say, "What's going on here?" All right. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)