Mastodon.se

I’ll never forget first hearing about StatusNet and GNU Social back in 2017, I was mesmerized. The thought of a social media owned and operated by the people was revolutionary to me.

Immediately I started digging into it and registered the domain gnusocial.se, where I deployed my first fediverse node. Not long after that I registered mastodon.se where I deployed the Mastodon software. Gnusocial.se wasn’t around for long, I thought Mastodon would be a lot more accessible to newcomers.

Five years later in 2022 I made the decision to shutdown Mastodon.se and leave the fediverse. In this blog post I will try to explain my perspective of what happened.

Natural born selfhoster.

Selfhosting is an online culture of people who choose to replicate popular services themselves, at home, or on their own cloud accounts. Instead of just using services like Facebook, or Flickr, we would rather make our own and host them ourselves. For example, the first open-source web application I hosted was a re-creation of Yahoo groups.

Today I’m active in the r/selfhosting community on reddit, but I’ve been hosting stuff online for 22 years. It started back in 2002, as soon as I realized we had an IP-address and that I could reach services on that IP-address from the internet, I was smitten. The idea of some stranger that I’ll never meet finding something useful that I had put online was very rewarding.

I remember making friends with Americans on IRC who said they had downloaded stuff from my web server.

When I landed my first IT job in 2004 I hosted a shell server for friends on an old UltraSparc IIi. And from then on it’s just been a series of open source softwares that I have hosted either for friends and family, for total strangers, or just for myself. A long line of now retired bare-metal servers, or virtual machines, and even some cloud services.

So naturally I wanted to host a Fediverse node, and I happened to get lucky and register the very official sounding domain Mastodon.se.

What is the Fediverse?

Fediverse is an umbrella term for a lot of different attempts to make a decentralized social media platform open for everyone to contribute to and operate.

Most recently Fediverse is underpinned by the ActivityPub protocol, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Mastodon is one of many diverse softwares that implement the ActivityPub protocol.

Simplified; using ActivityPub fediverse nodes federate messages between users on different nodes by storing references to these messages in the database of each node. Which makes it possible to read an entire discussion thread on one server, with replies from users on many different servers. And to make these threads load faster Mastodon nodes can also cache media from other nodes.

In the beginning, the Fediverse was a lovely place.

Those first few years of running Mastodon.se were very quiet and not much exciting happened. Obviously it was exciting enough to see the software work, to see my node federate with other nodes, to communicate with other strangers in the fediverse.

But things moved very slowly, new accounts popped up once a month perhaps and my feed was not very active. Like all other things I had hosted I could easily pay for Mastodon.se out of my own pocket.

In retrospect it was lovely, I felt at home in the early Fediverse. I have always felt at home among the misfits, the sub-cultures of society, and the early Fediverse was mostly that.

Everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

I mean when Elon Musk bought Twitter and caused a huge wave of people to start looking for alternatives. Obviously many of them stumbled across this Mastodon thing, and started signing up to whatever nodes they could find.

Before the Twitter Exodus I had signed my node up at joinmastodon.org, so whenever someone searched for a server mine would show up.

Things went from 0 to 100km/h over night, and just kept escalating for months as the scandals on Twitter came one after the other.

At first this was a lot of fun, and a bit scary. Costs skyrocketed, but despite the cost it would take me several more months before I actually started accepting donations. I was shelling out thousands of SEK a month for a while there, just to keep the site running on its own Kubernetes cluster.

Most fun was the amazing and lovely group of people who signed up at Mastodon.se. I will never forget this time, I truly have a lot of love for them to this day. Mastodon.se was not only a node in the Fediverse for me to post dog pictures on, it was a community. Something I had dreamed of hosting ever since the last time I hosted an online community 14 years previous. Which was also what made it so sad to shut down.

Borders being drawn.

De-federation was unfortunately one of the first things I learned about when I started hosting my fediverse node, for a purely technical reason. When a server posts pornography or hateful images they can federate those images with your server, meaning that an end-user can type in mastodon.se into their browser and be faced with an image you might not want associated with your server.

Early on I had to maintain a list of blocked servers that my server would not accept media or messages from. By my rough estimation this was a very small part of the fedi, maybe 1-5%.

To me they were the same type of trolls that I had encountered on 4chan years earlier. These types of people will always exist, and there’s not much you can do about it. But when you’re hosting your own domain and your own storage online you definitely don’t want it associated with their stupid shit.

This became part of standard maintenance for the first years, once in a while a new hateful server full of trolls would pop up and I would add the necessary blocks. I still tried to maintain a relatively open and federated server, my policy was always to delegate most moderation to end users.

The main goal of any de-federation I ever did was to avoid ending up with disgusting, hateful and sometimes downright illegal media being cached on my domain for some other server.

But after the Twitter Exodus started in spring 2022 this status quo was disrupted, severely.

Mastodon.se was supposed to reflect Swedish society.

I never stated this officially when starting Mastodon.se but my goal with that specific domain was to be a town square for anyone in Sweden. I wanted the community to reflect Swedish society, for better and for worse. But there was barely anyone on the server those first few years, so I never saw a reason to make an official statement, it was mostly something I mentioned among friends when discussing Mastodon.

In fact there was this funny moment when I discussed the logo being a Swedish flag combined with the Mastodon logo, some of my friends thought this was a bad idea because the Swedish flag is so often associated with nationalists. I dismissed this opinion because I am in fact proud to be Swedish, and I am proud of what Sweden has done for immigrants, including accepting my own family when they came from Yugoslavia in the 60s.

But that just shows how different perspectives can be.

The BBS law.

Every single message board hosted in Sweden, or by a Swedish person/organisation, has to follow the law on responsibility for electronic message boards (1998:112). I had been aware of this law for a long time, it used to colloquially be called the BBS Law.

Naturally when I started hosting Mastodon.se I kept this law in mind, even before we had an official Code of Conduct this was the law we had to follow.

It’s a very sensible law that basically requires the admin to moderate certain content, for example;

• Personal threats.
• Doxing.
• Incitement of unlawful behavior or terrorism.
• Incitement against ethnic groups.
• Child pornography.
• Illegal depictions of violence.

This was the bare minimum of the server rules on Mastodon.se since day one, plus whatever was required to be listed on joinmastodon.org.

Safe spaces.

With the Twitter Exodus many different people arrived in the fedi, some of them tested these rules and codes of conduct, and others felt like they were under attack by the first group of people.

In a sense the Fedi inherited problems from Twitter, users started demanding safe spaces in the fediverse.

The dog whistle.

For most of my adult life I’ve been very outspoken about class warfare. The fact that there are powerful people in the world who do anything they can to control the working classes. And it was this bluntness that started the spiral of negativity that lead to me closing down Mastodon.se.

I made a joke about the globalist elites of the world, and someone interpreted this as a “dog-whistle” for antisemitism. Which I was floored by because I never saw the globalist elites as jewish, but apparently this person did. Even the Wikipedia article on globalism has been edited to include this perspective, something I was not aware of because my opinions on globalism go back further than Wikipedia.

This was very frustrating because pitting the working classes against each other over race and religion is just another way to keep us distracted from the real issue that is class.

Transphobia.

Before the second half of 2022 I had only banned one other active user from Mastodon.se, it was a person who kept expressing very hateful and disturbing opinions of women. After a warning or two they refused to stop, in fact it was the only thing they ever talked about, so their account was disabled.

During the second half of 2022, at the height of the Twitter Exodus, a new user on Mastodon.se expressed a negative opinion of trans people, and even openly supported the right wing political party SD.

They never broke any of the server rules but it quickly became evident that this was a deeply religious person, which was a very strange fit because so far the server had been filling up with mostly outspoken left wing people, my people!

Users reported the post that they had made expressing these negative opinions, but I did not issue a warning because they had not broken any server rules. I did not consider their post to be incitement or threatening, merely expressing an opinion. Other users disagreed.

This caused a schism among my own users, but it also caused external fediverse admins to add Mastodon.se to a blocklist. This blocklist was then circulated among a lot of servers, in some cases server admins believed these blocklists were a quick way to make a safe entry into the Fediverse. The blocklists were promoted in guides and tutorials as a necessary minimum for new admins.

In the meantime I had tried talking to this religious person and explain my perspective to them, this lead them to leave the server and close their account on their own. They clearly realized that fediverse was too left wing for them.

None of this mattered though, to certain fediverse admins I had gone too far and I was a threat to their safe spaces. So the snowball effect of the blocklist persisted and it kept spreading to new blocklists that were forked from the first one.

Shutting down. 😔

A part of me wanted to say screw these people and keep going, but these blocklists were not only affecting me, they affected every user on my server. And it wasn’t fair to them. I had no idea how far and wide the blockilsts would keep spreading, and I didn’t want to limit the reach my users had in the fedi.

So I made a very hard decision to shutdown, a decision very much influenced by a bitterness I was feeling towards these people. These people that I felt were my people, these people I had been shoulder to shoulder with in the fediverse for years. In fact even our logo at Mastodon.se was made by a person on a server that was now blocking Mastodon.se.

It wasn’t fair to anyone.

I followed the standard procedures outlined on joinmastodon.org at the time, giving my users 3 months to export their account data and migrate to new nodes.

Vänstern letar kättare medans högern letar konvertiter.

During this very difficult time my brother reminded me of a quote that has been echoing in my head ever since; vänstern letar kättare, högern letar konvertiter.

This roughly translates to; the left is looking for heretics while the right is looking for converts.

My brother is much wiser than me and has been involved in left wing activism for a long time, he has seen this pattern repeat over and over since the 80s. How the left wing is so prone to schisms and divisions while the right wing is simply scooping up anyone who’s willing to march on in the same direction with them.

I was devastated to see my own people draw borders and isolate themselves like this. I have always been open to any person and any opinion, I will talk to you, I will try to understand your perspective and explain my own perspective, but if you refuse to change then I won’t shun you for it. I am not afraid of people’s opinions, as long as they follow Swedish laws I think we all have a right to co-exist, and for a chance to change.

Through my brother I have met former neo-nazis who have left a violent past because they came to an awakening. This can happen to anyone, but not if we isolate ourselves from each other.

Isolationism was something I thought characterized the right wing parties, who wish to build walls around our country and keep immigrants out. But now I know that even some left wing people want to isolate themselves, to create safe spaces where they never have to feel violated by differing opinions.

Final thoughts.

In retrospect the biggest issue here was that the blocklists were affecting other users who had not signed up for the ride.

I still think the Fediverse is a very cool place, even more so now that Bluesky has scooped up most of the old Twitter crowds. Now the Fediverse is truly a place of sub-cultures, nerds and misfits, as it should be.

It’s very tempting for me to return but if I were to do so it would be in one of two ways. Completely solo, on my own instance that you can block all you want.

Or if I were to host a public instance again I would make it very clear to users what the possible consequences might be.

The fediverse is now, and forever onwards, a place of borders and walls.

With all that I have learned from hosting Mastodon.se for five years, I have some wishes for how I would want the fediverse to evolve.

• Open registrations do not work, there has to be a person reviewing every new account.
• No massively large nodes, we have to focus on horizontal scaling because we cannot allow open registrations.
• Fediverse could be a coalition of privately run message boards, connected by a common protocol. Something we have been doing since the 90s, but with a new federated component to bring us all closer.
• More hurdles for registering an account. Remember when you had to motivate your account to the sysop of a BBS? Or how private torrent trackers vet new users?
• Possibly donations tied to account access, Open Collective has a great API that could make this relatively seamless.
• If we are to build any borders in the fedi then I want to be part of the coalition that implement these strict sign-up rules, and leave most moderation up to the end user.
• Instead of sharing federation blocklists we could share user blocklists.

But at the end of the day I’m not eager to deal with the politics, I just want to post my thoughts and dog pictures, and follow interesting and cool people. To heck with the drama.

The sad part is that I don’t even feel welcome in the fediverse anymore. I tried to get a regular account at a large instance that I had always admired shortly after Mastodon.se shutdown. They warned me that they would ban me if I mentioned anything about mastodon.se or the events that took place. So I just gave up and left.