Mastodon’s Eternal September has only just begun.
Tags: opensource, activitypub, mastodon
Published: 2023-01-25 21:10:19

In August 2018, when Diaspora* (at the time being heralded as "the new Facebook") had already drove me away with its silly gatekeeping, something that I have since forgotten tempted me to look around further in the "Fediverse", to which Diaspora* [also belongs](https://fediverse.party/en/diaspora/). I quickly landed on Mastodon, which looked (and still looks) a bit like Twitter.

However, it fulfilled completely different purposes in completely different ways: If Twitter was a network for shouters, politicians and commercially oriented self-promoters, Mastodon was instead a relaxed network for open-source friends and nerds. There was no shouting, hardly any politics (and anyone who tried to do so without a content warning was admonished to be prudent); there was what activists wanted to make of Twitter right up to the end, namely a safe space for people who would also like to be among their own kind. The brief influx of users that the press had brought to Mastodon since 2017 was hardly worth mentioning and quickly died down again, as is the way with artificially fuelled trends. As recently as April 2022, I suggested in my blog (those who can read German are kindly invited to [read there](https://tuxproject.de/blog/2022/04/mastodon-im-weltknall/)) that Twitter's users should help Twitter regain its lightheartedness instead of taking their melancholy elsewhere.

The deactivation of third-party clients, i.e. the reduction to the "official" Twitter app, the equally awful Twitter in the web browser and TweetDeck, which is basically good but hardly usable on the move, almost a fortnight ago made even me, the old stubborn one, change my mind - my Twitter account, which I refuse to delete because I have many rather good memories with the platform (it is "not just Twitter" is a popular saying there, and rightly so), has since been automatically filled from my Mastodon account, with the exception of a few interactions. Many others feel the same way.

But when Twitter comes to Mastodon, Twitter does not become Mastodon - Mastodon becomes Twitter. All the rules of the community are simply ignored, it's all about war and Putin and politics. The "content warnings" provided for this, i.e. headlines that give the reader the choice of whether to unfold the post, are also ignored. Twitter didn't have anything like that either.

But at least it's still a free platform, you may be saying. Time for [some IT history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September):

> **Eternal September** or the **September that never ended** is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.

Recently, the creators of Tweetbot, a Twitter app for iOS that recently required a subscription but which I also appreciated, can now be found on Mastodon with <a href="https://tapbots.com/ivory/">Ivory</a> instead. They definitely wanted to avoid the big mistake that Tweetbot <a href="https://tapbots.social/@paul/109735448243327428">had been "way too cheap"</a> this time. The availability of "Tweetbot for Mastodon" was *of course* what some people call a "no-brainer": many subscribed without much thought and without acknowledging free alternatives like <a href="https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp">Ice Cubes</a> (which I personally like a lot, minus a few annoyances that are already planned to be fixed), some even signed up on Mastodon specifically to be able to use the new app - briskly bringing the hashtag *#Ivory* into the trends there.

The fact that it (still?) lacks important functions such as the possibility to specify the language of a post (Mastodon allows filtering the timeline by language; I only get posts in German and English, for example, but users have to be able to select them for that; Mastodon's web interface can do that, as can Ice Cubes), doesn't seem to matter. People know the name, so they like the product.

Another risk lurks: it is certainly a good idea to financially support a network programmed and equipped with servers by volunteers, but the money spent on any subscriptions is ultimately missed by those who maintain the infrastructure. The Fediverse is also not Twitter in the *other* way: the server operators, unless they are providing corporate or club servers, do this mostly at their own expense in their spare time. In the Fediverse, you can change servers at any time with your account, but it would be nicer if that were never necessary. It's like in Usenet: don't pay those who want to earn money from it - pay those who enable you to use it at all. Without a server, even the most beautiful client is useless.

In other words, if you're going to come to someone else's party uninvited, at least wipe your shoes and bring beer. Then maybe, just maybe, you'll be invited next time.

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*Comments? Contact [tux0r@layer8.space](https://layer8.space/@tux0r) on Mastodon - the staff does not let me comment here on DEV anymore.*