![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*0BvftQyn72ierSIunJbnwg.png)

So I decided to get on Mastodon. This was one of those “I should take a look at what’s going on here” moments for me; I don’t regularly just willingly add myself to a new social media platform (I have \*plenty\* already) but I figured, this is a good time to start looking at what the buzz has been about amongst my friends and occasional enemies.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*_mAKk4iTPvBKjAaBv0eIyw.png)

I also explicitly called out Mastodon as being a little unapproachable from a social friction coefficient perspective in my recent talk, _The Dark Side of Free Software Communities_, where I stated it has a fairly high social friction coefficient compared to Twitter or [Facebook](https://hackernoon.com/tagged/facebook).

I figured I should put my money where my mouth is and actually _join_ mastodon. Devote enough energy into actually overcoming these coefficients and I might find something interesting.

I should explain, a little, first.

In physics, there exists a “coefficient of friction” — how much force it takes to move an object along a plane or in reference to another object. A round ball on a flat plane has a low coefficient, whereas a dense rubber block will have a high one. This is _vastly_ oversimplified, but you get the idea.

The “social friction coefficient” is how much effort (socially) it takes to maintain your peer group in a new social [network](https://hackernoon.com/tagged/network). If all your friends are there already, or a vast majority of them, the frictional coefficient approaches zero. Conversely, if none of your friends are there or none of the content there is considered interesting to you, the coefficient approaches infinity. Compounded on this is a further scalar that indicates how friendly/approachable vs. “toxic”/unapproachable the community you’re joining is: If you only saw assholes on Facebook, would you join? (This is, incidentally, one of the compounding factors that makes Twitter frustrating for people.)

The “Technical friction coefficient” is how hard it is, at a technical level, to engage in a new social network. This includes, but is not limited to:

*   Learning new terminology
*   navigating a new application
*   knowing if you’re doing the right thing
*   Picking among options of varying quality
*   Contributed documentation

Facebook hit a nice, prime spot:

*   Memorable, monolith name: there is but one _facebook dot com._
*   They _explicitly_ use well-known, friendly language: your _friends_ _like_ the _posts_ you make to your _wall_ — analogies that make sense to anyone who’s been in a college dorm or community shared space.
*   The social graph encouraged “bring your friends” as well as “find your friends”. It made it very easy to buy in _fast_.

Facebook has a near-zero social coefficient and a near-zero technical coefficient.

You’ll notice I haven’t touched on surveillance. That’s intentional: Those who care about surveillance have an additional vector that has to be considered: The _privacy_ coefficient. For the vast majority of humanity in a modern population, _this coefficient is effectively epsilon_. That, or it _actively lowers one of the other two coefficients_. This is the dangerous part: Facebook’s surveillance is pitched as a _means to find your friends and connect you_. It’s _literally_ a selling point of the platform. The same applies to Twitter: The social graph that Twitter has for its users is stupidly strong, and it helps people find those who are aligned with their own interests, lowering the social coefficient.

So, let’s talk about my journey in the last few days of getting into Mastodon

### Day 1: exploring

I found my way to Joinmastodon, where I got kinda overwhelmed. There was a lot of choice, and I quickly found myself going “… but which one do I choose?”

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*3Zst_o5CtERjuEmeFhSddg.png)

oh boy; let’s run through the thoughts that go through my head as a _technically savvy person_: Uhhhh… There’s some uhh… Japanese places? There’s one with the weird xyz TLD… I’ve heard of Framasoft before, aren’t they a company? Aren’t I supposed to shy away from the whole “coprorate ownership” thing? I don’t speak French, or Japanese, so uhhhh… Okay, so let’s try narrowing this down uhhhh

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*tkR6b02GJxrNb1V3TmEFyw.png)

_oh man, furries that might be fun but what’s chaos.social let’s go look at them._

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*uQplhjA-60lLl4Z0sCYSYQ.png)

(Also, if you’re wondering, yes, that is a rooster for the MSPSocial.net: It’s a local landmark; image my own)

What’s the first thing I see on vulpine.club?

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*4HXJ70NJK80emFvOimTCfQ.png)

Am I going to get in trouble opening this at the coffee shop? My parents house?

Right. Okay. Uhhh. Okay, This is… _not quite what I expected —_ I mean, I like furries and all but this feels a little bit exclusive? Let’s try chaos.social:

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*tWBwDshdqGPsRxOrPcrebw.png)

Okay. I uh. Might be able to get into this? maybe? I’m not sure. Hmm… it says “small” — I… don’t feel like I’d fit in here. Uhh…

_I’m going to give this a bit and come back tomorrow_.

### Day 2: A search engine is found.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*4de2V_C-mDAZPHBIcKgegg.png)

this looks promising!

I find instaces.social through some exploration after stumbling upon some closed instances. The idea of a “closed” instance isn’t well explained, but it kinda makes sense to me? With nobody to really explain this, it feels weird.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*iZD808BWiiNkiFZ_GIncCA.png)

So I tell it what language I speak and I’m asked how many users an instance would have? Okay, with no context I’d prefer having fewer neighbors, I guess.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*PtbT_ln9is1Xx-dcnh9drg.png)

Woah now, what’s all this about? Fuck it I don’t care. _I just want to talk with my friends_. Clicking “Next” gives me a blank list. _The fuck?_ Let’s try the advanced button:

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*V-2LPrUUxEswFMH89zy4ow.png)

I can guess what some of these numbers mean! I want the one with the most people. Also, the thing saying “down” or not seems to be broken because those are all up.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*90_11xnLMxt_yr3AOt-Ttg.png)

Oh. Uh… _down_ isn’t typically a good word. Let’s uh… try a.. oh, this seems broken:

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*6sCUVgAuwyuLTFDPHq6qOA.png)

okay, so Pawoo seems like a big one. Let’s look at that

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*UoUcuJBfRrFv4upEwr5_Sg.png)

Thirty percent of all users are on Pawoo.

Let’s look at their front page

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*cBomcLzKbwkmKo0QPpT_ZQ.png)

So it’s

*   in Japanese
*   Filled to the gills with porn

Well, you [know what they say](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc)…

_If you dig for a little while longer, you’ll find that there’ a not insignificant number of places that “silence” Pawoo because of, well… Japan’s got a different way of viewing, socially,_ **specific** _kinds of artwork._

I’ll leave it at that.

In fact, out of the top 10 largest instances by user count:

*   The top is Pawoo, which is full of porn and blocked by a lot of instances
*   Four of them are Japanese, which would be great if I spoke Japanese.
*   Three are run by Pixiv
*   Two are focused on porn _and not_ run by Pixiv (Switter and Switter’s test instance)
*   An _overwhelming_ number of the rest of the content on the rest is in French, _which would be great if I spoke French_
*   There’s a good chance you’ll see something very quickly on the front page of one of these instances with a post with… _possibly objectionable content_. More than a few times I encountered _a good number of “yup that’s a Nazi” posts_.

### Day 3: I pick one.

I eventually picked mstdn.io — The guy who runs it is pretty clear what he expects out of the people on his instance, and he’s got a good community going. _I was also just fucking tired of reading through codes of conduct here and there and everywhere_.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*y7bXk8OVwwAxswflSVnIbQ.png)

The semi-official mstdn.io logo

I go through the hoops. I _kinda_ know what I’m getting into already: I need to hunt down people. There’s a bridge that helps me find some of my twitter friends, but a large number of them seem to have vanished.

Then, as I join today, one of the other large instances, witches.town, is going to topple because there’s drama.

### Takeaway

There’s a _lot_ of Mastodon instances.

There’s a lot of _really oddly specific_ ones.

If we consider the OECD findings on computer literacy accurate, Mastodon is inaccessible to all but maybe 25% of the population. It has a high social friction coefficient and a disturbingly exponential technical friction coefficient.

_There’s nearly a dozen apps for Mastodon, all of varying quality_. There’s no one “official” Mastodon Android or iOS client. There’s a list of suggested ones, but you have to dig around in a wiki on github to find _that_ out. I found it _once_.

Overall, Mastodon needs to find how to get the coefficient of social friction down. A search engine for pepole might be helpful; A lot of my friends on Twitter are friends I found because I was like “oh this person I just followed also follows <these people> mutually. I’ll follow some of them too because we share interests”. It’s going to take a lot of _organic_ growth.

A feature request I’d like to submit (and I plan on seeing I can hack on this) is being able to filter _specific_ instances out of my view of the federated feed. As much as I like the federated stream, I’d appreciate the ability to Somewhat tune out certain instances for the overwhelming amount of content in a language I don’t speak or just don’t want to see for _whatever_ reason.

_Follow me on Mastodon: @indrora@mstdn.io_

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My journey into the Fediverse: Three-ish days of overcoming friction and joining Mastodon.

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