Credit: Adam Berry/Getty Images
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Eugen Rochko is softly spoken, German, and immaculately polite. “Thanks for interviewing me”, he said, as soon as he appeared on Skype. Eugen loved Twitter for many years, notching upwards of 90,000 posts under his nom de plume @Gargron. But he had done so with a growing disquiet.
In Eugen’s eyes he, along with the hundreds of millions of other Twitter users in almost every language and country, were all subjects of a single, central ruler. All the money that Twitter made, all the data it produced and its control of the huge network it formed all eventually settled in one large building on Market Street in San Francisco. A building, perhaps appropriately enough, that has just the smallest of passing architectural resemblances to a Soviet Ministry.
Eugen decided to experiment. He began to build a new social media network. It looked like Twitter, felt like Twitter, but was set up in a completely different way. He called it Mastodon. Eugen’s vision was both eerily similar and drastically different to those of the tech giants. Just like Twitter, Mastodon lets its users post short ‘micro-blogs’ that others can interact with. There is one list constantly filling up with new posts, and another list of notifications related to the user. Very similar, indeed hardly different at all from, Twitter.
The big difference was the unseen plumbing beneath. Eugen had designed it so that neither he nor anyone else would be in charge; no one would control of it. Mastodon was a protocol, not a commercial service. It has no central server, and Eugen hadn’t started a company to run it. Anyone can take Eugen’s protocol, set it up on their computer, and become a Mastodon server that other users could set up accounts with. Effectively, Eugen’s technology basically allowed anyone to become their own mini-Twitter.
After Mastodon went live, it did what hardly ever happens to new social networks: people actually started to use it. At first, it was mainly technical users, and then small communities began to migrate to it. “Queer people joined”, said Eugen, “and Furries. It comes in waves. We see a spike, then it falls down as users go back to the commercial platforms. But it never falls back as far.”
In 2017, Mastodon passed a million users but – as was Eugen’s vision – this was not an online nation governed from a single place, but a constellation of around 2,000 villages. Equestria.social ran Mastodon “for all pony fans”. Scifi.fyi was for the sci-fi community. Bookwitty.social was for discovering books. One server was dedicated to Catalan users, another for computer fairies: “as queer, friendly and furry as possible”. One Mastodon server sprung up for the G20; another, writing.exchange, was for poets, writers and bloggers. Mastodon. friendlydads.net celebrated “the friendliest dads on the net”. Socialists, anarchists, Marxists, ecologists, greens, vegans, anti-racists and social democrats all had dedicated spaces.
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