What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t
Freedom never comes for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they please “within the bounds of the law.” To him, the stakes are nothing short of existential. “My strong intuitive sense,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon.
Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It is not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “instances.” Its code is open source, which allows anyone to create an “instance” of their own. There is, for example, metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people.” Each instance operates its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say across the “fediverse,” or the “federated universe.” On Mastodon, communities police themselves.
