The fediverse day to day: the friction nobody mentions

A friend asked me to help him leave a social network that was wearing him out. We sat for twenty minutes in front of the Mastodon sign-up page. First question: which server. He looked at me as if I’d asked him to pick an electricity supplier before he was allowed to switch the light on. He wasn’t wrong.

The protocol works, and that’s already huge

ActivityPub is a W3C recommendation, not a piece of activist tinkering. An account hosted anywhere can follow, reply and be followed from any other server that speaks the same protocol, including completely different software: microblogging, video, photos, forums. My feed mixes short posts and videos published on software I’ve never installed. Technically, the matter has been settled for years.

And above all, nobody is selling me anything. There are no ad slots, no feed reshuffled by a model that measured that anger keeps you around. The order is chronological and dull, in the most restful sense of the word. On my instance, hosting is paid for by donations, and the amount is public. You know how much the service you use costs, which is a rare experience.

Where it really rubs

Choosing an instance is an entry tax. It commits you to the moderation you’ll live under, to the servers blocked by the administrator, to latency, and to the chance that everything stops if the person in charge gets tired. Migration exists, and it moves your followers, not the posts you’ve published. You need to know that before, not after.

Search is the other sore point. A server only knows what has passed through it, so searching for a topic gives different results depending on where you look from. Discovering people is more a matter of chance encounters than of queries. After a year, my list has perhaps three hundred accounts, all arrived by bouncing from one to another. It’s pleasant and it’s slow.

Add the part nobody likes to talk about: moderation rests on volunteers who read reports in the evening after their working day. When an instance shuts down because its administrator can’t take it any more, that isn’t a technical failure, it’s an unpaid burden that finally overflowed.

What the friction buys

Every annoyance corresponds to something the advertising model had removed for us. Instant sign-up assumes a single operator. Perfect search assumes a central index. The feed that never ends assumes someone is trying to measure your attention to resell it. The fediverse makes these choices visible instead of taking them on our behalf, and it costs three extra clicks.

I haven’t closed my other accounts. I still post elsewhere, because that’s where people I don’t want to lose are, and I can’t claim any particular merit for that. My friend, for his part, eventually picked an instance at random from the list. Six months later he’s still there, which says a lot about how much the choice that had blocked us for twenty minutes really mattered.