Jack Dorsey, March 2006:

just setting up my twttr

Eugen Rochko, March 2016:

Hello world

It barely occurred to me that Facebook, Twitter, and friends had been around for two decades. But the slowly evolving feeling of their effects, initially one of enthusiasm, amazement and wit, with room since made room for some graveness and foreboding, is there for the recalling.

What surprised me even more, though, was that Mastodon has been around for a whole ten. I originally paid little attention to it. I took note of a couple of users who seemed to be emitting something like a compromise between excitement and awareness that their technical explanation could only ever be so enticing to people who weren't interested in technical explanations. My readiness to move on wasn't for lack of an interest in technical explanations; it was perhaps that I sensed a philosophical aspect beneath it all. It all felt a little "ideological," in a word. It was unclear how, but the same feeling had felt like a red flag in the past, as though Mastodon users would turn out to be from the same unfamiliar quasi-political camp or something. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter seemed imperfect but satisfyingly bustling at the time. It would be four years until I began leaving them.

And when Twitter in 2022 began turning into Zombie Twitter, having once heard and forgotten about Mastodon came in handy. Still confused, I investigated – this time, with a desire to understand the technical side. Anyone can install Mastodon on a server, make their rules for it, invite people to use it, and interface with any other server. If you need a metaphor, think "virtual village" in a world of villages. It has more going on than an individual Web site, but it's closer to that than the single-megalopolis Facebook or Twitter are. I've always been a great fan of the Web, and such reference points have been helpful in making Mastodon's technical nature feel as intuitive as anything. (This framing leaves out one main element, which is that Mastodon supports the ActivityPub protocol, making it only one software product which participates in "the Fediverse." Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, and other users could see follow each other from whichever they were using.)

In addition, Mastodon turned out to be not at all "ideological" in the aforementioned. I would say Rochko is principled, as was Tim Berners-Lee when inventing the Web. And like the ability to publish on the Web: the ability to start, shape and govern a Mastodon server is available to everyone, so many perspectives can be found there. Mastodon has grown a great deal in its own first decade – currently half of the duration of Twitter and Facebook. It's still never been as big, but I have the feeling it will prove more enduring.