136. NO GODS NO MASTER-DONS - Decolonising Twitter Migration
I have found the last week so fascinating as a real-life example - albeit a virtual one, in the realm of social media - of colonisation happening right before many people’s eyes. Perhaps two examples? The example I have been watching firsthand, has been the migration of millions of Twitter users - including me - to the federated and non-commercial social media platform, Mastadon. But this mass exodus from Twitter is, perhaps, itself caused by the sudden shock to its ecosystem of Elon Musk’s ownership of the old platform, and with it, his attempt to change the culture and norms there by force to fit his own particular vision.
I am not interested here in Musk’s colonisation of Twitter. Ultimately, Twitter remains part of the dominant paradigm of mainstream, commercial, social media networks. What has interested me has been witnessing, as a new arrival there myself, the attempts of former Twitter users to try and colonise the radically different platform, Mastodon, in Twitter - and the dominant paradigm’s - old image, and seek a seamless transition from one platform to the other, with little regard for the fact that Mastadon is not Twitter and was never designed to be Twitter. In fact, fundamentally, it has been designed in many ways to be entirely different from Twitter in its norms and its values and exists for a very different purpose. To turn up in this entirely new place and act as if it is the old one, assuming everyone will be seeking the same experience you seek and be motivated by the same things you are, refusing to change or even alter your old behaviours and obliviously carry on in this new space as if nothing has changed, despite it being in an entirely new environment, already peopled and socialised with very different norms and values, could be considered a paradigmatic example of coloniser thinking.
Colonisation is always thus: an existing place or people taken over by an invading presence with designs of remaking what already exists into their own image, usually to serve their own individual needs but presented as ‘improving’ or ‘developing’ the existing place for some assumed ‘greater good’. Usually we speak of the phenomenon in terms of countries and civilisations - European invaders stomping into Africa, Australia, Asia, or the Americas and attempting to take over. Not only take over, but ignore the pre-existing history and culture of the places they invade, denounce and denigrate the accomplishments of indigenous people. Turn civilisation into savagery and reframe knowledge and achievements they have no interest in learning about as primitive and uneducated.
On the one hand, attempts at colonisation are understandable (albeit not forgivable): we humans tend to seek the familiar. We like our creature comforts, we like safety and security. When those things are missing somewhere new, we attempt to recreate them. Even when we’re a guest somewhere, we like to bring trinkets and habits of our normal life in whatever bags we pack. Maybe a bedtime routine or favourite picture to look at wherever we lay our head? Think of hotel rooms. You can be anywhere in the world, but they tend to be exactly the same, built on the specific model of living of their most likely customers: Western travellers. The premise of the hotel is that you can go out ‘exploring’ in the day, but at night you will still want to rest in the way you are used to resting at home: a comfortable bed, a warm shower, breakfast in the morning, etc. And for the travellers used to using them, it is easy to forget that not everybody lives this way. Not everybody would choose to. Your ‘normal’ is not necessarily normal to the world.
But colonisation takes this instinct for familiarity and comfort beyond a respectful recognition that difference can be jarring, and that negotiating new spaces and modes of life might take time, and lead to some, understandable, discomfort and confusion as different parties adjust, and make space for each other’s peculiarities and non-negotiables. Instead, it attempts to eliminate, usually by the barrel of a gun, all that is undesirable to newcomers arriving, en mass, to takeover and recreate a model of their desired mode of living at the expense of any pre-existing norms, or the needs of the land or the people who already live in the place being colonised.
The hotel example can be used to make a distinction. Such a hotel, erected as a choice, by those themselves within a country, to welcome travellers with different habits and customs from their own, could be seen as a wonderful act of hospitality. The imposition of such hotels, however, by international hotel chains, buying up land and paving the way for unwanted visitors to a region, could be considered something entirely different.
The exodus of Twitter users to Mastodon has similar parallels. The site of struggle here being the realm of social media might seem trivial to some, and online colonisation lacks the bloodshed and brutality of historical imperialisms, but as a living model it has been instructive of the sorts of behaviours we see offline too. Mastodon servers are open and welcoming, and many of the features of the platform are similar in kind to the sort of features you might find on Twitter. Ambassadors from different Mastodon instances even, in some cases, actively courted new users from Twitter and invited them to join. But it is one thing to grab a bag and turn up as a visitor somewhere new, maybe even a visitor who is deciding whether or not they might want to one day stay, and quite another to turn up - even if invited - with the sense of entitlement that you immediately belong, and an expectation that everything will be as you desire it to be. Another still if you were actively not invited (fascist groups, cops, etc.).
Again - I am not a ‘native’ Mastodon user myself, and have only been on the platform since last Wednesday. It is equally paradigmatic of coloniser-thinking to believe you can speak for the colonised and shut out ‘native’ voices already saying what you are trying to say from public discourse. I am not trying to speak for long-time Mastodon folk, or even imply that there is a uniformity in their thinking (another trait of the coloniser). Very specifically, the federated organisation of Mastodon, with distinct and separate ‘instances’ existing independently throughout the ‘fediverse’ and only coming together conceptually, on self-curated timelines, means there is no definitive Mastodon perspective to speak of - only loosely agreed norms that have emerged and evolved over time, and will continue to evolve. But there are some agreed first principles that make the place Mastodon and not somewhere else. For example: a general commitment to the idea of federation as an organising principle. This is not a place designed for top-down hierarchy, single ownership, and uniformity. Nor is it, by design, a commercial space. Each server is self-funded through donations and good-will, with new software and capabilities being programmed in open source ways so that everyone can work together to contribute collectively to the shared improvement of the whole. Advertisers do not run the show and advertisement is not particularly welcome beyond occasional personal sharing of skills and creations that users have made themselves. There are no algorithms driving traffic and aiming at making a profit.
These first two principles already make Mastadon a very different place from Twitter. Twitter is designed to push trends and encourage retweets and mass following. A ‘successful’ experience on Twitter is to get as many follows as possible and as much ‘engagement’ with your tweets as you can. Algorithms work actively towards fulfilling this agenda, filling a constant feed with tweets to entice as well as tweets you have chosen to see. The notion of ‘going viral’ acts in much the same way as the idea of winning a lottery. Even though it is highly unlikely your numbers will ever come up, the possibility that this time they might is enough to get you to play. So too with Twitter. You will shoot out your unseen tweets, your tweets that get back only one or two likes, in the hope that each time you do you spin the wheel, this might be the one that hits the jackpot and gains you thousands of followers.
What exactly gaining all those followers means is unclear until you bring in commercial goals. I will never have meaningful online relationships with 300,000 followers. 300,000 followers is not a ‘community’. I only need 300,000 followers if I am hoping to sell 300,000 people something, whether that is an idea or a product. The entire idea of social media ‘influence’ comes from this logic: the more I gain traction and engagement with my tweets, the more the likelihood of people paying attention to what I say and do, the more easy it will be for me to influence my followers to buy something from me, whether that is material or purely ideological.
This background idea is what then attracts commercial accounts to places like Twitter. Followers are a business. Influence is money. You have to be on Twitter to grow your business or develop your network.
Another form of influence is professional. Academia, for example, shares a lot through Twitter and allows more influential accounts to disseminate knowledge widely across the academic and wider community, reproducing the same hierarchies of knowledge production as we find in the academy itself while allowing a larger diversity of voices to - theoretically - break through too. Teachers, also, spend a lot of time trying to further their career on Twitter, with many engaging in discussions that directly become school, or even government, policy because of its popularity with followers. All of this activity is just as commercial a motivation for sharing as a more blatant advertiser shilling their product: the more followers and clout you have as a professional on Twitter, the more likely your opportunities for promotion and career progression become. Twitter has become an offshoot of the job-market: a place to make contacts for future income-revenue.
So when Twitter starts to collapse and you want to jump ship, and you hear about this place called Mastodon, it’s easy to think the new site has the same sort of culture and purpose as the old. But what I have found is that while Twitter was about growing an ‘audience’, Mastodon is far more about growing a ‘community’.
Users curate timelines of things and people they actually care about, without the noise of algorithmic bombardment trying to sell them on following and sharing things they don’t. You can even hide things you post behind Content Warnings that give people the choice of whether or not they want to see them. At the same time, to avoid insularity and echo-chambers, you have multiple timelines, able to flip between seeing your own curated home timeline, a ‘local’ timeline of those who share a server (instance) with you, and then a ‘federated’ timeline of all the public posts of anyone on any server currently followed by someone on your timeline. So you can branch out or focus in, depending on your needs at the particular time.
When I say that Mastodon is about growing community instead of audience, whereas the aim of Twitter is to be retweeted far and wide, the designed obstacles to such far-reaching sharing within Mastodon de-motivate that goal. Far better to get involved with the smaller community on your server and engage with meaningful conversations with one or two users, developing an actual relationship before following them, than simply follow everyone. As the timeline is a literal timeline, without popular messages (toots) being pushed up by an algorithm, you only see things in the order they are posted. For a message to be re-posted it needs ‘boosting’ by someone, meaning it has to be worth sharing by them. If I don’t know you, why would I boost you? If you are writing about something I don’t care about, why would I boost it. If I know you, and am engaged with what you are saying, I am for more likely to want others to see it too.
Audience and community are not mutually exclusive ideas - but there is a difference between the sort of audience you seek. As a creator myself, I have always wanted an audience who also is part of the conversation - responding to these posts in the comments, engaging with the ideas in my books and songs - not just as many people as possible putting eyes or ears on what I create. Coming from a punk rock background, a community audience is what we call a ‘scene’. An audience not of consumers, separate from creation, but of co-creators or parallels creators, working together for mutual enjoyment. So far on Mastodon, this seems to be the sort of audience I am finding. One of community. A place where I don’t just post about a new song I’ve written or try and sell someone my book, but where conversations lead to a mutual sharing of ideas. Already I have bought music and read articles through Mastodon I probably wouldn’t ever have seen on Twitter, and I have done so because of holding conversations first with their creators, just as people who have spoken to me have ended up buying some of my music or a copy of my book. These are real people, not professional accounts looking to grow a commercial following. Small-scale, individual, and connected.
Coming from Twitter myself, I tried to lurk back and watch when I first opened my account, to learn the etiquette and ways of the fediverse before diving in, and even then I made mistakes. Unthinking, I used a programme to import over people I followed from Twitter if a Mastodon account could be found and engaged in a #FollowBackFriday hashtag to find new people. All of this was on the same day, and as I saw my number of followers grow, and my own followed account list grow, I saw my experience at the new place worsen. New toots were appearing that felt out of place or irrelevant. Conversations that made sense on Twitter but didn’t make sense here. Arguments that seemed fabricated by divisive algorithms and were ultimately about nothing. Conversations I didn’t need to be having. But it gave me an insight into the fact that, away from my little corner of the fediverse, old users from Twitter were simply coming into this brave new world and carrying on as if they’d never left Twitter.
By Sunday I had rectified that and streamlined the list of accounts I was following to only those who I actually wanted to hear from. People who posted stuff themselves and didn’t constantly retoot other people’s nonsense. I realised that copying people over and following anyone who followed me was old world behaviour, from a time where numbers mattered and I was seeking an audience and not a community. The people doing this here seemed brash and out of place. Like a quiet local spot suddenly disrupted by a loud and obnoxious group of tourists who just don’t get the way of life here. Colonisers trying to change the way locals interact.
Which is not to say that all change is bad and that diversity and freedom doesn’t necessitate fluidity with our norms and an openness to new ways of doing things. Often newcomers bring amazing new ideas or different - better - ways of doing things. The key though, is mutual respect and recognition of difference. If I do something you don’t and you like what you see and adopt it, great. If I impose my way of doing things onto you whether you want it or not, there is no respect there. When what I impose actively undermines what you are trying to achieve, such as inviting previously blocked groups like police and fascists into previously safe spaces, I am clearly doing something problematic. Polluting, rather than contributing to the environment.
Some behaviours which might have seemed acceptable on Twitter seem, in this new place, obscene and uncouth. People begging for followers or boosts and asking which account was ‘popular’ so they could follow seems to miss the point of building a community and not merely an audience. Thoughts can colonise too. Ideologies and ideas that crowd out other ways of thinking. We have been trained very well in the old ways and it is hard to undo all those years of (mis)education of how to be. A good piece of advice for finding yourself somewhere new, where cultures are different from your own, is to stop a while and listen, observe, pay attention to what is done and what isn’t. I think what has been disheartening with some of what I have seen during the great Twitter migration to Mastodon is just how many people aren’t interested in doing that. They just turn up and carry on as they were before, without self-awareness or interest enough to revaluate and reconsider what might already be happening in this place they don’t really know.
In Mastodon, as a loosely federated and autonomous space of communities working independently but together, I see a snapshot of anarchism in action, working prefiguratively within the cracks of existing social media use. It’s ability to succeed is something I am deeply interested in as an anarchist, and why I decided to join in the first place on the Wednesday of a week when I had, on Monday, made a decision to try and reduce my use of social media, not increase it.
I I talk to students often, when they share with me their concerns and criticisms about anarchism, about how many of their perceived problems come from trying to imagine the old world taking place, unchanged, within the new. I discus with them how anarchism wouldn’t necessitate giving up everything you love about the old world, but that we would have to reevaluate how much we really need to cling on to everything we used to do and have (and even love) in that old world within anarchy’s radically different framework. I usually conclude that we will need generations of gradual, non-coercive, change to get there, if we ever do. That we couldn’t just smash the state overnight and expect utopia. That if we abolished all laws and governments right now, the embedded and internalised corruptions of the current system would still be deeply felt and would likely make an attempted anarchy impossible.
In my first few days on Mastodon I wondered, publicly, if the sudden and dramatic exodus of users from a very different paradigm of being - Twitter - into its radically alternative one (including me), hoping for an exact like-for-like transfer of their old account onto a new, would bear that thesis out? In the weeks that follow, I look forward to seeing how the platform manages to deal with attempts to colonise it as Twitter V.2, and how it manages to adapt to or resist those most significant attempts at transformation which might undo its collaborative and community-based ethos and turn it into something it doesn’t want to be. My own experience leaves me hopeful. Though old ways are hard to shake, and I’m still riddled with the corruptions of the dominant forms of social media, now shown a working vision of a far better alternative I have been working hard to reconsider and re-learn. Not colonise, but collaborate, not lead, but follow, join but not attempt to dominate. It is my hope that others will be going through something similar. Teething problems, transitional bumps, mistakes and learning - but ultimately a recognition that we don’t need to be part of networks trying to sell us stuff and grab our attention, we need communities, whether online or in real life. That we should be part of social networks, not commercial ones, if we are to be part of such networks at all, and that, with Mastodon, there seems a new and better way of connecting, so long as we don’t kill it with our inability to imagine anything better than the things we already have.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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