The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Mastodon

Erin Kissane wrote a great essay on the differences between Mastodon and Bluesky (two very different decentralized social networks/Twitter alternatives). Read it! I too joined Bluesky a few days ago (no – I don’t have any invites), and I’ve some of the same impressions as she did, but not being a real tech person, I want to talk more about the social differences between the two social media networks

Erin has a lot to say about the clunkiness of Mastodon’s user interface and underlying dynamics, and how clean and easy Bluesky is, in comparison. She’s right, and this is important. But she also highlights Mastodon’s cultural homogeneity. Mastodon is a great place to be, if you are a left-leaning tech policy obsessive, and want to hang out with other left-leaning tech policy obsessives (we all made the jump from Twitter pretty quickly – the costs of sticking around were high, and the transaction costs of figuring out Mastodon’s system and interface were probably less of an issue than they would have been for most non-geeks). But it is not so great for some other people.

I hate it that I can’t in good conscience encourage Black friends to get on Mastodon, because I know they’re going to be continuously chided by white people if they mention race or criticize anything at all about Mastodon itself. I hate that “a difficult sign-up process keeps out lazy people with bad culture” is a thing in so many Mastodon conversations. (Fun fact, if you hold this idea up to your ear, you can hear them say “sheeple.”)

The way that I would put it is that Mastodon (or at least the bit of Mastodon that I’m familiar with) has the strengths and weaknesses of strong community. Those with the community ethos and identity fit right in, and find it not only welcoming but downright comforting. If you don’t fit in though, all that Gemeinschaftery is a whole other story. Strong communities tend to be really parochial, far more homogenous than they like to acknowledge (minor internal differences loom larger than they ought, because the internal discourse is organized around them) highly sensitive to outside criticism, and wary or hostile towards people who don’t look right.

Bluesky doesn’t look to me to be about community in the same sense. Right now, it’s very giddy. A few days ago, it was butt-pictures. Lots of butt-pictures. Then it was sexualized images of Alf (the alien-pig puppet from the old TV show). Today, who knows? It’s mostly left-leaning – conservatives and right libertarians are sticking with Twitter – but relatively hostile to Deep Serious Discussion.

If Mastodon is all Protestant Ethic – serious people concerned with the state of their souls, and everyone else’s too, Bluesky is a lot more like what Weber described in his far less well known paper on the Protestant Sects. One of the big focuses of that paper is America’s happy conjunction between religious organization and commercial self-interest. The way you drum up business in early 20th century America is by joining a church, whose members can vouch for you with the bank, send customers to you and so on. Religious community becomes a means for displaying your wares.

On Bluesky, there’s a lot of the ‘let’s everyone focus obsessively on the topic of the day’ energy that Twitter used to have. Much of this froth seems to me to be ostentatious displays of shitposting virtuosity in pursuit of immediate self-interest. There are a few famous people (AOC, Rian Johnson, Edgar Wright), and a lot of early adopters milling around, trying to get these famous people’s attention and capture their own chunk of the social graph in a network that might take off and go big.

It’s a new manifestation of that traditional American style of business in which sincere-sounding expressions of mutuality and glad-handing cover efforts to probe for temporary alignments of self interest. What feeling of community there is, is the kind of temporary community that you make up as you go along, among people who you don’t particularly know, but know you might want to impress. At its worst, it’s a trade convention for obsessive artists of self image, where the butt pictures are calling cards. Everybody is (in some cases quite literally) exposing themselves to everyone else.

NB: while I may sound above-it-all when I write that, I’m part of this dynamic too, in a backhanded way. Academic conferences aren’t so different, and Edgar Wright following me on social media would be one of the very few things that might possibly make me seem impressive to my sarcastic Cornetto Trilogy obsessed fourteen year old son. At least for a day or so (he’s fourteen, and I’m his dad).

What I’d like in my ideal social media service is something different from both – somewhere a little closer to the middle of the indifference curve between community and self-exposure. It seems to me that one of the big tradeoffs of social media networks is between community and discovery. Community is great up to a point – you want to hang out with people like you. But it also has a tendency to get insufferably narrow minded over time: the same people, rehearsing the same old arguments, and vigorously pushing to exclude outsiders who might disrupt the status quo. Exposure to different people with different viewpoints is fantastic – but all exposure all the time gets you jaded very quickly.

So what I want is moderately cohesive communities, with enough weak ties between them that ideas, arguments, memes can be generated by people very different to you, and spread to you, and that you can spread back. That itself is going to have its difficulties – the idyllic notion of communities happily engaged in mutual discovery and happy broader comity does not reflect the actual networked behavior of actual human beings. We (at least, some of us – or maybe in this context ‘we’ just means ‘me’) want discovery and the spread of new ideas. But discovery and context collapse are two sides of the same coin – it is more or less practicably impossible to have the one without the other. The result is that even intermediary networks that are good at balancing community and discovery are going to have their dystopian moments, where an idea or claim spreads outside its home community, getting people with other values angry, either because they misunderstand it, or understand it all too well.

Sometimes – at its very best times – the old Twitter felt a little like a place that got things sort-of-right. You could find or build community, while not feeling stifled. A lot of the time it didn’t, generating its own crazy large scale dynamics that swept up vast numbers of people around stupid arguments and stupid online personas. dril is funny because it is real and painful. The old school blogosphere, of which Crooked Timber is one of the few surviving examples, sometimes got it right too. Equally, it had its own awfulness (before dril there was Fafblog). But I worry that neither of the two alternatives that we’re seeing is going to be able to recreate this even somewhat reliably. Perhaps, as they get bigger, more will be possible. We’ll see.