Mastodon or, Designing Sociology (Patreon)

I joined Twitter nearly 10 years ago now, which was fairly early on in terms of Twitter’s popular growth. I was there back when it was akin to shouting into the void, I was there when it was a place to get into beefs with your friends other than just facebook, I was there when it morphed into a vacuous self-promotion platform, and I’ve been there recently, as it has become infested with accounts like “deathtojews1488”, while people I know get suspended for telling a transphobe to fuck off. I’m not really going to dive into an experiential comparison, as I was 12 when I joined Twitter. I don’t really have comparable notes from back then, I just have memories and feelings spanning a near decade, and I don’t think that’s enough to talk about the history, design, and community of twitter with. I’m not qualified. I am qualified, though, to say this: Twitter has a moderation problem.

So yesterday I made an account on Mastodon. You could call Mastodon a Twitter clone and you wouldn’t be wrong. Not by a long way actually. It’s a micro-blogging social network with followers and media-attachment functionality and hashtags and @ing too. What I’d like to talk about though, are the features Mastodon has that Twitter doesn’t. I think there are features on Mastodon that are pretty fucking neat, and as a designer, I’m even a bit jealous of them.
This isn’t an ad for Mastodon though guys. It’s still a very small platform, it might disappear tomorrow. I’m not making a Mastodon ad. This isn’t a Mastodon ad.

CURIO MAKES A MASTODON AD [always Sunny music]

As a designer, I personally feel that design is the practice of being conscious of what questions you are asking, what decisions you are making. You can design intuitively but to learn design, to refine your practice, to apply design theory, you need to take steps back, and be conscious of what you are doing.

Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, said that a good door is a door that you don’t notice you’ve walked through. Norman puts all the burden on the designers of systems, of products, of things. If you have a bad experience with a product, the designer didn’t put in enough thought into how you would experience it. A good door should be unnoticed because the designer should have put more thought into making it function without impeding the user, so that the user has to put less thought into using it. 

If you’re finding this a bit opaque, if you feel like doors are just things that should be there and don’t need that much thought put into them, I’d say to go read about the new Apple headquarters in California. They wanted the building to have entirely both glass walls and doors, to be on brand with Apple’s minimalist design ethos. The problem is, nobody could tell where the doors were and people kept walking into walls and hurting themselves. Now, if you’re still not on Donald Norman’s side here, that the designer needed to put in more effort - in case you’re watching this thinking these Apple employees are dumbasses for not just remembering where the doors were - you should also know that the employees tried putting up post-it notes on the doors, so they’d know where to walk through, but Apple had them taken down.
This is a fantastically clear example of the wrong motivations informing a designers decisions, even to the point where they were defending that bad decision by trying to remove the solution the users implemented. It’s a beautifully transparent example. It’s so perfectly clear you could just walk right into it and break your nose.
Now, onto Mastodon’s features. Instead of tweeting, on Mastodon you Toot. Instead of RE-tooting someone else’s toot, you “boost” them. This subtle change is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say that design is about knowing which decisions you are making. Re-toot might have been the most obvious thing to call that function, and without thinking about it most of us might have just called it that, but the designer here was conscious of a problem they wanted to solve and they made a different decision. If someone says something you don’t like on Twitter, you are wont to retweet them so you can talk to all your followers about how much you hate them. I however, can’t imagine seeing a toot by, say, a Neo-nazi, and choosing to “boost” it.

Mastodon also includes the ability to warn people about sensitive content with a custom warning and then uses a click-to-reveal function to show the content. This obviously is useful in case you want to hide graphic imagery or spoilers or something, but also is a huge step up over Twitter, which hides content somewhat arbitrarily, based on flagging and moderation. Twitter’s model can be harmful to people who might… want to post “graphic content” -- okay I’m talking about nudes guys, I need to get around euphemisms to discuss this. If you are a sex worker advertising on social media, you need to be able to decide what to hide or show, it needs to not be obscured against your will by a moderator.

This brings us neatly full-circle Twitter’s moderation problem. Almost like I planned it. When I went to join Mastodon - out of curiosity - I saw that the site copy described it as being “decentralised”. I thought this was an odd thing to say because it doesn’t seem like there’s anything particularly “centralised” about Twitter, or about social networks in general. Every user is simply a node. You can have your account verified if it is important people know that you are the real you, but that’s true on Mastodon too, and it doesn’t inherently create more power. What they meant by “decentralised” though, was referring to the moderation system. On Mastodon, people can run their own servers and each server has its own moderators, who are not necessarily anything to do with Mastodon as an organisation - Mastodon is after all an open-source platform.

This gives people the opportunity to create communities that are moderated relative to the standards of their own community while still being accountable to the overall community of Mastodon. This is… well I can’t say social engineering because that means something else entirely, but this is design of a system with a consciousness of how people socialise. The designer is aware of what decisions they are making and why.
There’s a cautionary tale in design to be looked at here, and that’s the story of Pruitt-Igoe. For those unaware, there was a time in the history of architecture when architects decided collectively - or lots of architects decided independently - that they could solve societal problems with design alone. In this spirit, architect Minoru Yamasaki designed a set of blocks in St. Louis which were supposedly going to dramatically improve the lives of the people who were, before the towers were built, living in slums. The short story is that without any kind of intervention, the towers became notorious for crime, poverty and racial segregation, and the buildings were dynamited two decades after they were built.

The image of these buildings being demolished has become iconic, representing the demise of this attitude, that design alone can solve societal issues - human issues. Where Mastodon might - and that’s a big might - do better, is that the design of this system is a design of how human intervention can be used. It has the human element baked in.
I’m not hitching my wagon to Mastodon here, I just wanted to write this short piece to briefly look at some of these ideas, and explain why I’m hopeful that Mastodon might bring about some change in how we use social networks. Of course, any number of things could go wrong, the most likely being that people just don’t move over from Twitter. Whatever happens though, I intend to make a sequel to this video some time a while in the future, looking back, and going over these ideas, maybe in a bit more detail.
I’m on Mastodon @curio. And now, since I never know how to end videos, I wrote this very quickly, and I like symbolism more than oxygen, here’s some footage of Pruitt Igoe being destroyed.