4min chapter

Decoder with Nilay Patel cover image

Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter?

Decoder with Nilay Patel

CHAPTER

The Future of Social Media

Mastron is a product built on top of this protocol that focuses on short micro-blocks. There already are other Fediverse projects that focus on different aspects of the social experience, like Pixel Fed and PeerTube. It maps back onto each other not always 100% and it doesn't have to because as you say, it's so versatile.

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Speaker 2
One of the things about activity pub that is interesting is it is closer to format agnostic than sort of the other. Very versatile. Right. Inversatile. That's a good word for it. In the way that an Instagram is sort of incompatible with a tweet from the jump, like they're just not the same thing or a TikTok is not compatible with a Facebook post from the jump. And you can see how much work Facebook internally has had to do to retrofit something that looks like TikTok onto Facebook. Activity pub is just more versatile than that. The posts can be long. They can contain multi mode media pictures and text, whatever it is. Do you think that someone might fork it and make it more specific? Because those are the social platforms that tend to win, right? The ones that kind of funnel everybody towards a particular format that captures the zeitgeist. And I'm specifically thinking of, if you talk about Friendster to my space to Facebook, to Instagram to TikTok, the funnel has been now just point a camera at your face and go. And you're kind of back at, well, actually writing is the nape plus ultra of the internet. We should just do a good job at it.
Speaker 1
I would argue that this has already happened, but not in quite the way that you've described it. Okay. So, the problem is the protocol for exchanging information in the programmatic way, right? And in the programmatic way, an Instagram photo maps onto the same structures as a video on YouTube or a post on Twitter, right? You can map these concepts onto very generic concepts and add all the necessary metadata as extra on top. Now, Mastron is a product built on top of this protocol that focuses on short micro-blocks, on short posts with videos or images attached or polls where people follow each other. But there already are other Fediverse projects that focus on different aspects of the social experience, like Pixel Fed, which is focused entirely on photos, right? It's a photo app. It isn't not really concerned with short-form blogging. It's just concerned with photos. But you can follow a Pixel Fed user from your Mastron account and vice versa. And then, you know, in your home feed on Mastron, you get all these photos that people on Pixel Fed post. And on Pixel Fed, you get all the photos that are Mastron on user posts. It maps back onto each other not always 100% and it doesn't have to because as you say, it's so versatile. It doesn't always make sense if there is a new platform that does something very, very unique that would have no way of mapping onto what Mastron is doing today. They would not have to share any space, but there might be another platform that is kind of similar to that one. And they would be able to interoperate using that same, those same semantics, right? There's a variety of these platforms and on the Fediverse and Pixel Fed and Mastron are just some of them. There's another one called PeerTube, which is one where you have channels and you publish long-form videos on them. And again, you can just follow a channel on PeerTube from your Mastron account and get those videos in your home feed. And you can leave comments and then those comments appear on the videos because a reply on something like Mastron, which could be compared to Twitter, really maps well onto a comment on a video on YouTube.

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