Mastodon Research

Exploring the history, capabilities, and negative backlash of the web3 social platform.

Fediverse, Decentralized, Web3.0

ActivityPub is the protocol used to exchange data on web3.0. Instead of 1 person/company hosting web files (godaddy.com, bluehost.com, etc.), a collection of individuals using their own resources to host files on the internet is offered, so there is no 1 centralized station to house data. Each person hosting the data is in control of that data and the community that joins it. This is DECENTRALIZED web, or web3.0. It evolved to champion free speech and break free of censorship.

This is how the platform is ad free. If the owner of one of the instances wanted to start charging or serving ads, they could do so, however it is most likely the community wouldn’t stand for that and the user would simply move to another instance that is ad free.

Mastodon

Mastodon is just one of the platforms on web3.0. It’s most like twitter, but there’s also Pixelfed (like Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), and a plethora of others. Just google decentralized social networks. Also, since all these platforms use ActivityPub, you can see data from different platforms in any platform, for example you can see your Pixelfed data while you are logged into your Mastodon account (that’s what I’ve read, I haven’t gone that far yet).

In keeping with the decentralized theme, any person can spin up an instance of Mastodon and host it on the internet themselves. To join, you have to pick an entry point, or a server… I simply chose https://theatl.social/home, some random guy in Atlanta is hosting this Atlanta based server where we talk about Atlanta stuff. But once your on, you can connect with any person on any server, you’re not limited to only the instance you signed up for. Also, if you don’t like the instance you joined, you can simply change to another server at any time.

2017 – flood of child porn.

Use a different search tool to find ALL the instances of Mastodon, but I see a lot of these instances needs their own specific signup. I can’t just see into any instance: https://instances.social/list/old The child pornography rings may operate under “MAP”, short for “minor attracted person”. I think they may also be hidden in the LGBT communities. Also: https://www.secjuice.com/osint-mastodon-paedophile-csam-child-porn-problem/

The founder of Mastodon clearly doesn’t want search to work, he has made it clear that the lack of search is by design and not a bug. Here he is telling others that the lack of search functionality is intentional “due to negative social dynamics”.

Eugen, https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/

This whole topic reminds me of the dark web (I’m not into it) and brings these dark topics closer to the surface and more available to the average person.

GAB ~2019

GAB, a far right community joined the fediverse I think in 2019. They were known for hate speech towards certain demographics of people. The group(s) gained popularity very quickly, but many of the other Mastodon instance owners blocked these other GAB servers from interacting with their own community(ies) due to the amount of prolific hateful speech.

https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-biggest-mastadon-node/

When GAB found they could no longer connect with people outside their own GAB group on Mastodon, the GAB community left the fediverse. It’s reported they took the Mastodon code with them, created gab.com, which is no longer the fediverse/web3.0. I signed up for a free account. A paid account is marketed to me to remove the ads from the platform.

I don’t find overly hateful speech, but definitely some far right views and a lot of conversation about the control the government and media have on the public. Maybe now that GAB is back to being centralized, the administrators have censored and blocked certain threads/users…. so…. we’ve come full circle back to moderation. How do we have free speech when we are being monitored and censored?

BlockChain

BlockChain technology also supports a decentralized network (ledger), but I read that ActivityPub is not built on blockchain. I think blockchain the same concept though, where data is broken up and stored in different places, and then put back together again when the user calls it. The places to store the data has to be “found” on the internet, so little explorer bots crawl around looking for available space. This is called mining, and the resources to do this are expensive. Here’s my 1 page website on web3.0 I did as an experiment at the height of the cost of Ethereum last year, and I think this cost me about $100 last year (not sure about now)… And so I didn’t spend any more money to even hook up the web domain, but I own SandyNichols.eth (means it’s built on the Ethereum blockchain).

https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmVDc3UsYdXTP7Rc9AQxQjYM8d3sg8fw3qN1uY8FR8fx58