This has been churning in my brain for quite a while now. Inspired by the post You Can’t Join Mastodon by Brook Miles I finally stopped the churn and wrote it out as best I could.

Fleischhauer, C. (1981) Branding Irons. , 1981. May. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ncr001826/. Credit: Paradise Valley Folklife Project collection, 1978-1982 (AFC 1991/021), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

When I worked for a TV station a big part of my job was to get the TV people to quit either ignoring or fearing the web. Sometime they’d use the word “television” and I’d ask them to clarify what they meant. That always confused them because you know…it’s television.

But from my perspective they were really unclear about what television was. There’s the terrestrial broadcast medium we call television, the extension of that medium to wired cable systems we call television, the content shared on these systems but often accessible through other systems that we call television, and the hardware devices used primarily to watch that content though also often capable of displaying other types of content and connecting to other media distribution systems that we call televisions.

My goal in challenging them (which admittedly I was at best only partially successful at) was to get them to stop fretting about the decreasing broadcast and cable audiences or what hardware devices people were watching with. That was all outside their control. They needed to focus on “television” as a content form and let go of it as a medium and a hardware device.

When I say “I saw something on Mastodon” it’s a lot like saying “I saw something on television.” For those of us who unpack things it’s not really clear what I mean by the word “Mastodon.”

The server software called Mastodon is roughly analogous to television broadcast equipment. It distributes an encoded signal that is a medium for communication to client software.

The medium of television really is an encoded signal based on the medium of radio carrying the medium of encoded moving images coupled with the medium of transcoded sound.

Mastodon is an encoded signal based on the ActivityPub medium protocol specification carrying the medium of encoded information and sent over the medium of HTTP, and rendered into hypertext when software clients decode it. Clients may further request additional media indicated by pointers in the hypertext that can be images, video, etc. delivered via HTTP from servers that may or may not be Mastodon servers.

Software clients may be all-purpose browsers for the medium of the web, running code with the specific instructions necessary to render the Mastodon front-end. The browsers themselves are content agnostic and will display anything that conforms to the HTTP spec, though there may be idiosyncrasies unique to each manufacturer. In this way browsers are quite similar to televisions, albeit with two-way communications capabilities entirely lacking in traditional TV.

The clients may also be standalone software, such as mobile phone apps. Some ore from the Mastodon project and sharing the server’s name. But other clients have names like Tusky, Mammoth, etc.

At this point we’re clearly describing a content form called “Mastodon” that exists independently of the server, the client, or any particular piece of hardware. When I imprecisely say say “I saw something on Mastodon” I might have seen it as rendered on my web browser or a third party client.

Although like television stations, Mastodon servers share an encoding of a multi-level nested medium, the core specification on which Mastodon is based is not named, or controlled by, the Mastodon project. It’s ActivityPub, published by the W3C.

ActivityPub is a medium designed to be flexible in the types of content it supports. What Mastodon servers serve then is not a medium, but something more akin to a television channel.

In this model it’s possible to say there are other channels available through the ActivityPub, such as PeerTube, Misskey, Flipboard, and even WordPress. And on those channels each server could be thought of as a distinct program. Hashtags are perhaps programming categories that go across channels, tuned as finally as the poster chooses from the general (“#Sports”) to the specific (“#PremiereLeagueFootball”) to the detailed (“#WolvesFC”).

Unlike a TV channel, Mastodon servers allow individual accounts to view all activity on the server of their choice but also custom tailor their feeds to follow accounts originating on non-Mastodon servers. This is an intentional ActivityPub design choice that if it was also possible on television would allow a viewer to tune into a CBS station and see all the shows broadcast by it, but also watch the NBC Nightly News, the BBC’s broadcast of Doctor Who, and the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes without changing the channel.

(Crucially, there are also tools that allow holders of individual account to not see, or allow interaction with, accounts as well. Moderation on the internet is beyond problematic and overlaps with things like identity and context collapse in ways that are a whole other discussion but need at least to be acknowledged in this one.)

The non-Mastodon servers using ActivityPub previously mentioned also allow subscribing to Mastodon accounts, but there are even severs such as Bluesky that don’t use ActivityPub for their feeds but will consume ActivityPub-compliant data and transform it to comply with their own medium protocol. Or so I understand. I’m not really motivated to create a Bluesky account and experience it myself.

Conceptually, there are similarities with the way cable systems take broadcast television and repackage it for carriage through intermediary hardware. This was more obvious when subscribing to cable meant having a transcoding set top box on top of your television. But the point is that a thing shared in one technological medium can be repurposed to another without completely altering it beyond recognition.

I imagine there are probably people now saying “I saw something on Bluesky” when the thing they are referring to originated “on Mastodon.”

Where there might be a conversation between two people about television in which they both agree they saw the same thing on station KXLY, even though one saw it via the broadcast signal and the other on cable, this concept gets flattened when an aggregator combines ActivityPub sources. Before we were talking about Mastodon as a medium, then a content form, but even this concept fails to survive aggregation.

Bluesky has its own protocol, but if the idea of channels exists in ActivityPub it’s not getting bubbled up to the user experience. The name of the specific client/server pairing through which content is being viewed gets applied to everything in the feed.

What the Mastodon project has done, and I’m certain it was with the best of intentions, is use the word “Mastodon” in ways that unintentionally replicate the problem of “television” as an unpacked word containing within it multiple meanings.

This makes it hard to have accurate conversations because not everyone is using the same terminology. It makes it hard to represent the benefits of the networked medium model the Mastodon project believes it promotes. And it reinforces the sense that other projects which should be complementary to Mastodon are in fact in competition with it.

The “eyeball count” approach to defining success in television and proprietary web products can be an issue in the context of open-source projects. Is a project more successful because it has more users or is it more successful if it introduces innovations that are integrated into other projects? By dominating the public image of ActivityPub implementations Mastodon seems to have largely settled on the former. That is its right but also is arguably and ironically holding back the broader adoption that might bring the Mastodon project’s software even more eyeballs.

But ultimately the problem lies with branding at a higher level. “ActivityPub” is a perfectly good name for a standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium. But how often, other than when it’s followed by the word “Consortium,” do you hear anyone say “World Wide Web?” It’s cute in a deeply nerdy way that got the idea across to the standards writers and developers who needed to be interested in the beginning, but to the average person it is simply “the web.” “ActivityPub” has the same problem, compounded by not being easily shortened to something less awkward.

I’ve avoided using the term “Fediverse” so far because Fediverse. Why do people say “Mastodon” when it’s not the only usable implementation of ActivityPub? Because Fediverse is even worse when it comes out of your mouth in front of your life partner who really doesn’t think about the same things you do at all.

What better choice for a brand that means something to the average person is there? Mastodon works precisely because it is devoid of any obvious attempt at a specific meaning. It’s just a brand, while ActivityPub and Fediverse are tech-speak and tech-speak gone cute, respectively. I have no problems using them with an audience that is used to them, but I’ve found them worse than useless when describing why I like my…uhm, Mastodon(?) account so much. I could call it by the name of the server I have that account on (sunny.garden), which is nicely branded in my opinion but the real conversation needs a unifying brand (“television”) rather than a channel brand (“KXLY”).

The Mastodon project certainly isn’t the enemy, but it’s not always a friend either. It has its own goals and purposes, which is fine. But like its namesake it’s big and hairy and sits wherever it wants. I don’t know what public branding should replace ActivityPub and Fediverse, but I do know that neither one is doing well at supporting what I think is the worthwhile larger goal of attracting “normie” users away from for-profit social media sites where eyeball counting takes precedence over constructive focus on safety, moderation, or considerations of outcomes.

There will always be ragebait accounts sowing the seeds of mayhem, but if we can show people who aren’t necessarily drawn to that kind of stuff that they have options without drowning them in a sea of nerd-speak then we’ll be getting somewhere. Unfortunately this post is itself the exact opposite of movement towards that goal.