Billionaire entrepreneur and innovator Elon Musk may have just opened a new chapter in internet history – albeit unintentionally. His new policies on Twitter and the digital refugees he has created, most fleeing to the previously obscure Twitter-like platform Mastodon, could give rise to a very new kind of social media experience.
In buying Twitter, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, reinstated accounts belonging to former President Donald Trump, right-wing satire website Babylon Bee and occasionally crude left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin. This was coupled with removing the verification requirements (which have since been updated), adding a monthly fee, as well as mass layoffs within the company.
More recently, Twitter suspended several journalists who reported information about Musk’s jet.
Unhappy with the changes and the controversy, some users flocked to other services, such as Mastodon, the much smaller European alternative to Twitter, the brainchild of free speech advocate and German software engineer Eugen Rochko. But can Mastodon compete with Twitter’s reach? While Mastodon’s 1 million users pales in comparison to Twitter’s 238 million users, Mastodon’s secret weapon is that it’s more than just a website. It is a federation of sites that can maintain their autonomy while exchanging information with each other. Mastodon uses a free and open social media protocol, ActivityPub, which allows any social media to connect to any other as long as they are open and transparent with each other. Several platforms such as YouTube-like PeerTube, Instagram alternative Pixelfed, and social network Friendica already do this. Twitter’s move to Mastodon and ActivityPub could be an epoch-making digital revolution comparable to the invention of the web itself. ActivityPub can restore the web and its most sophisticated layer, social media, to the open, universally connectable vision of the internet itself. Our most popular social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter and TikTok – remain walled gardens, only allowing users to exchange information within applications under the same ownership or create applications within each platform. This drawback does not apply to ActivityPub-enabled sites. Away from the walled gardens are fields connected by open roads.
What is ActivityPub and how does it work? At the simplest level, it is a method (protocol) for social media servers to communicate with each other, even if they are owned by different entities and dedicated to different purposes. Imagine CBS News, BBC, National Review and Fox News creating their own social media servers using the Mastodon user interface and ActivityPub as a server-to-server protocol. All the owners of these sites have to do to connect with each other is list each other’s server addresses in a “federated sites” list.
Immediately, users of sites chatting with each other will be able to follow the reposts or comments of other users beyond the limits of the server. This has several advantages. The first and most important is that social media owners have a direct and immediate relationship with their users. By the way, owners do not have to be corporate. Independent media organizations, non-profit organizations or user cooperatives can create their own media servers. They can develop their content policies, privacy protection methods, and financial support methods, from advertising (which they control) to subscription or donation-based support. Social media owners can also decide when and how to open access to other federation members. This may include trial periods or communication suspension.
Finally, any business or nonprofit organization can use their own social media interface, not Mastodon, and still be able to chat with other sites using ActivityPub. The interface may include new tools, such as a trust button to replace the like or favorite buttons. My colleagues and I created the TrustFirst social media server powered by ActivityPub and Mastodon. In it, machine learning analyzes the content you are about to share or like and tells you if the content is trustworthy. A new button invites you to trust or not and the trust value is used to more or less divulge the content.
More intriguingly, Musk could also implement ActivityPub on Twitter, as Tumblr did. It would ensure the site’s long-term reach, while Twitter users would eat the cake (they would be on Twitter) as well (they wouldn’t obey the rules).
The genius of the internet is that it allows and should allow independently owned and operated websites to talk to each other. This is reflected in the very name of the internet, which is a network of networks (inter-net), not an integrated network. The closed deviation of social networks in the history of communication can take a very interesting turn. Watch out for sharp turns!
Sorin Matei, Ph.D., is associate dean for research and graduate education at the College of Liberal Arts and professor of communication at Purdue University, where he studies the relationship between information technology, group behavior, and social structures in a variety of contexts. He is a senior fellow at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue.
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