What happened in the Fediverse and to the Fediverse since Musk bought out Twitter

One year of Eternal November: The good, the bad and the ugly

The Eternal November has been on-going for a year now. I guess it's obvious that "Eternal November" is a term coined not by the newbies from back then but by those who had been here before the first migration wave already, those in particular who aren't even on Mastodon.

It's indeed a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Fediverse suddenly became important. At least Mastodon was no longer a toy for absolute die-hard geeks like XMPP or Matrix. For more and more non-geeks, even for some non-geek-tech media outlets, social media stopped being only U.S. corporations. It felt like people began to understand that a PC or a laptop doesn't necessarily have to run Windows if it isn't a Mac, that you can run Linux on it as well and free yourself from Microsoft's spying eyes, greedy claws and controlling clasp.

It's also true that the newcomers started changing the culture in the Fediverse. Some of it was taken over from Twitter by people who couldn't or didn't want to get used to something new. Some like increased accessibility was brand-new because even Mastodon already let people do things that were difficult on Twitter. A lot of this came from how welcoming Mastodon felt to marginalised groups like BIPoC, the LGBTQIA+ community or people with all kinds of disabilities. Culturally, it was no longer otaku and furries who were dominant in the Fediverse, both groups that have been chased away from Twitter before, plus Linux geeks.

The other side of the coin

On the other hand, the technological culture changed for the worse. Before the first wave of migration that started in February 2022 when Musk declared his interest in buying out Twitter, the dominant platform in the Fediverse was probably desktop Linux. If you used any Fediverse project, you probably went all-in in getting away from GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Alternative search engines all the way to Searx. Linux instead of Windows. At least de-Googled Android on your phone, if not even a wholly different free and open-source operating system that doesn't come from Apple or Google at all. The average Fediverse user was very tech-literate.

All this changed increasingly with each wave of migration. Over the course of 2022, more and more people began to trickle onto Mastodon who previously hadn't used anything free and open-source before, especially not knowingly and intentionally. They didn't know what FLOSS is, they didn't know what kind of FLOSS existed, and they didn't care. For many of them, Mastodon is still the only piece of FLOSS they have ever used. Plus maybe their mobile Mastodon app, most likely if they're still on the official app.

Shortly before the end of October, when Musk actually took over Twitter, the floodgates opened. Twitter users came in millions. And they started recommending Mastodon to other Twitter users who up until this point had believed that Elon Musk had the total monopoly on micro-blogging.

Amongst these, it was the marginalised groups whom I had mentioned above who were the only ones looking for something that wasn't Twitter. They wanted a safe haven from right-wing harassment. Their own likes who had already migrated told them that Mastodon was exactly that, not only because it was very left-leaning, but also because it lacked the two major harassment tools on Twitter: full-text search and quote-tweets. Also, these people often were invited to instances created, run and mostly or entirely populated by their own kind instead of the big all-purpose instances.

Different from Twitter equals bad

Everyone else, however, followed the promise of Mastodon being "literally Twitter without Musk". And that's exactly what they expected. Another centralised, monolithic silo operated by a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley corporation. Made by hundreds or thousands of paid software developers in cubicles. One that hands them everything on a silver platter right away without them having to do anything with an algorithm that makes their personal timeline bustle with posts from people they had never heard of before they even follow anyone. And of course with a 100% copy of Twitter's look-and-feel.

This promise almost always came along with a link to mastodon.social, implying that mastodon.social was "the Mastodon website", just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. So people piled on mastodon.social as if there was nothing else because there was actually nothing else for them. They weren't told that Mastodon is decentralised. And they themselves recommended Mastodon to other Twitter users when they didn't even know half of what Mastodon is. Including the mastodon.social URL.

In this regard, the closure of mastodon.social's registration due to the instance being completely overrun had positive effects. For starters, Twitter refugees had to learn what instances are and that Mastodon is decentralised before even registering an account because they had to go find another instance. The oh-so-convenient mollycoddling and railroading of newbies was over, at least until mastodon.social increased its capacities, at which point it began anew.

Many aspiring Twitter migrants gave up immediately. Mastodon was too complicated. They had to fire up their brains and learn about techy stuff before they could start tweeting away. They had never needed that before in the digital world. So they went back to Twitter and told everyone that Mastodon is impossibly hard to use. They're probably still on ?, waiting for the Musk-less 100% clone to come or for Bluesky to open its registrations.

Of those who made it through, regardless of on mastodon.social or having been forced to look elsewhere, many didn't stay for long. Only after settling in did they discover that Mastodon was nothing like Twitter. It looked different. It felt different. And it was dead. They pronounced it dead because absolutely nothing was happening on their personal timeline. There was no secret-sauce algorithm filling it with stuff that it thought they might be interested in. There wasn't even an algorithm recommending them users to follow.

They could have found activity on the local timeline or the federated timeline. But chances were they hadn't even used Twitter's public timeline before. Even if they had, they couldn't find Mastodon's equivalent because Mastodon's default Web interface was not a straight-away clone of Twitter's. Everything was in different places, everything was named differently, and everything had different icons, so they couldn't find anything. Not to mention that is was of course beyond their understanding what a "federated" timeline could possibly be if they were on mastodon.social because they didn't know that the Fediverse is decentralised.

After checking two or three times if some algorithm had finally kicked in and served them what they didn't explicitly ask for, they went back to Twitter without even having tooted only once. Others threw in the towel because they simply didn't manage to even use something that didn't handle exactly like Twitter.

If it isn't Twitter, we'll make it Twitter

Many others chose to stay. They'd rather put up with Mastodon's weirdness due to being different from Twitter than with a raging Nazi making all the wrong decisions and threatening Twitter's very existence by blindly firing all the wrong departments. Still, many of them didn't want something completely new, something different. They wanted the closest thing to Twitter that they could get. And Mastodon was the closest thing to Twitter that they had heard of, also because Twitter and Mastodon were the only micro-blogging platforms they had ever heard of.

While other Twitter refugees started establishing a decidedly "un-Twitter" culture, they continued to act exactly like on Twitter. It was hard enough for them to understand and accept that it's "toot" instead of "tweet". Still until today, many haven't gotten it into their heads that it isn't even "retoot" instead of "retweet", it's "boost".

They kept and often still keep on tooting as if they were tweeting. They still stay below 280 characters. They don't use hashtags because they'll never get used to there not being an algorithm forwarding their toots, and that hashtags are critically important in making your posts visible. They don't use content warnings for anything, and they don't describe their images and media. They had never done either on Twitter, so why do it here?

Their "hack" around the lack of an algorithm shoving all kinds of uninteresting stuff into their faces via their personal timeline was by opening the federated timeline and following everyone they saw. What these people posted didn't matter as long as they posted something. That's why there were so many Mastodon users with blank profiles and hardly any to no toots of their own, but they followed a completely incoherent and random bunch of hundreds of users. All just so that Mastodon felt another bit more like Twitter.

At least early on, they also demanded Mastodon itself become more like Twitter so that their likes don't have to adapt to something new. Nagging Eugen Rochko for full-text search and quote-tweets was fairly harmless in comparison to demanding the default Web UI and the official mobile app be re-styled into Twitter look-alikes. They only stopped when they realised that nothing of this would come to fruition.

A few who were experienced in Web development decided to take the lack of full-text search into their own hands before they actually knew about the nature and the culture of the Fediverse. They built their own Fediverse search engines. Proprietary, closed-source, centralised and with no way to opt out, much less opt in. And then they stood and watched in disbelief how instance after instance blocked their search engine, spearheaded by BIPoC and the LGBTQIA+ community who had moved over to Mastodon because it didn't have full-text search in the first place.

The Fediverse outside Mastodon neither knew nor cared. Many barely had any Mastodon connections. What they had instead was full-text search readily available, so even if they knew, they didn't understand all the ruckus. For them, the only bad thing about these search engines was that they were closed-source and especially centralised, contradicting the core principle of the Fediverse. Oh, and all these search engines were built against only Mastodon and nothing else because their creators didn't know at that point that the Fediverse was more than Mastodon. So people outside of Mastodon weren't even affected by any of this, especially not those who had no connections on Mastodon in the first place. Some saw it as good, some more probably saw it as discriminating.

The Fediverse does not equal Mastodon?!

Which brings me to the next point: the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. It had already existed for years. In fact, Pleroma, Friendica and Hubzilla are all actually older than Mastodon. Pleroma is older by a few weeks. Hubzilla is older by almost a year, almost four years if the Red Matrix counts. Friendica is older by almost six years and actually even predates Diaspora* by two months. But hardly anyone knew any of this.

Most newbies who had joined since February 2022 spent a whole lot of time believing that "Mastodon" and "Fediverse" mean the same, that they're mutually synonymous because the Fediverse is only Mastodon anyway. Of those who had joined since the start of the Eternal November, pretty much all did.

And they did so for months, usually at least three to five months. Some were slowly convinced otherwise when they kept reading about Pixelfed and PeerTube which were being talked about and advertised a lot. And it became increasingly clear to them that these two projects were part of the Fediverse, too. So there wasn't only a Twitter, but also an Instagram and a YouTube, and the Instagram and the YouTube were both connected to the Twitter. Little did they know that the Fediverse had more than half a dozen Twitters at that point, neither of which was significant closer to actual Twitter than Mastodon.

Others learned it the hard way. Maybe one of the Mastodon users they were following boosted a post from outside Mastodon. Maybe they themselves had followed a non-Mastodon user in their federated timeline following spree. Either way, a very non-Mastodon post appeared on their personal timeline. They were highly irritated because that post looked so weird. Mentions looked freaky because they used the full name instead of the short name. Even more likely, the post was simply way over 500 characters long. Something which these people had deemed absolutely impossible in the Fediverse because tooting over 500 characters is impossible on vanilla Mastodon. And they complained to the author about that alleged "toot" without having the foggiest idea how it could even be possible to "toot" something like this.

Or they were talking like it's the most normal thing in the world that Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the same, and that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Who would ever doubt that? Well, those following their talks who aren't on Mastodon themselves would. Maybe they were developers, and they had just built another Fediverse tool that'd be useful for the whole Fediverse, but they had hard-built it against only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon because they didn't know anything else.

Whatever the cause, these people suddenly found themselves being lectured by a non-Mastodon Fediverse user about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. It's true they had never known. But it's also true they had never wanted to know. They had never even expected anything like this. And chances were it was too much tech-talk for them. Not to mention that it felt like dozens of non-Mastodon projects suddenly intruding on their cosy little Mastodon. Not seldomly, they didn't want any of these to exist. They wanted them to go away again. Never mind that at least three of them had been around when Mastodon was launched.

I've been in this situation a couple of times myself, enough so that I believed that hundreds of people started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because they considered me a "Fediverse guru" from whom they could catch posts that'd explain the Fediverse outside of Mastodon to them.

What certainly helped was my most popular post by far, "Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist" from around March with 288 likes that I know of. It's about nagging Eugen Rochko to introduce certain features on Mastodon while the self-same features have been readily available on other Fediverse projects for ages. And indeed, I guess this post was an eye-opener for many Mastodon users. Not only because it was me whom they learned from that other Fediverse projects already had stuff like text formatting, full-text search and quotes, but especially because it was me whom they learned from that other projects than Mastodon exist in the Fediverse in the first place. I had quite a wave of new followers on the weeks after this post, and those of them who had been around since November actually followed me to learn about the Fediverse outside Mastodon because it felt like everyone else only knew and talked about Mastodon.

But I often had to tell people in person that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. And sometimes it was hard to tell them because it was hard for them to even grasp.

No, I'm not on Mastodon.

I'm on Hubzilla.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is its very own project.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla is fully independent from Mastodon.

Yes, Hubzilla is fully connected to Mastodon nonetheless. As you can see because I'm writing to you directly from Hubzilla right now.

In fact, Hubzilla is even four years older than Mastodon, technically speaking. When Mastodon was launched, Hubzilla had been around for four years in some way.

Yes, really.

Yes, this is normal. This is what the Fediverse is. A network of all kinds of different projects with different capabilities for different purposes. And not only Mastodon.

See, there's Pleroma which is another Twitter and older than Mastodon, too. And there's Akkoma, another Twitter. And there's Misskey, another Twitter from Japan. And there's CalcKey (Firefish today, but it was CalcKey back then), another Twitter. And there's PeerTube, a YouTube "clone". And there's Pixelfed, an Instagram "clone". And there's Friendica which is more like Facebook. And there's Funkwhale which is more like SoundCloud and the like. And so forth.

What I wrote completely obliterated their new worldview.

Worse yet, some people still can't accept the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. And it was even worse back then. I've heard a story from a Friendica user who was blocked by a Mastodon user for communicating with Mastodon users while not being on Mastodon. For that user, the Fediverse was a Mastodon-only walled garden, and any access to it from something that wasn't Mastodon was some kind of evil black-hat hacking.

Still today, there are Mastodon users who want the Fediverse to be only Mastodon, who might actually be in support of fediblocking everything that isn't Mastodon, even though that'd be a game of Whack-a-Mole. Others can tolerate the presence of other projects than Mastodon in the Fediverse as long as everyone using these projects behaves exactly the same as on Mastodon so that their posts cannot be distinguished from Mastodon posts. No more than 500 characters, no text formatting, no quotes, and they'd better turn those freaky looking mentions off. And "this is hard-coded and has been since before Mastodon was made" is not necessarily accepted as an answer.

Something that I found particularly jarring was members of marginalised groups writing about Mastodon and the Fediverse being a safe haven because full-text search and quote-tweets are absent from the Fediverse. Because they're absent from Mastodon. Some of them had probably never heard of anything else than Mastodon. And it was obvious that none of them had ever heard of what non-Mastodon Fediverse projects are capable of.

For almost all projects that can do something in the direction of micro-blogging had full-text search which did not exclude Mastodon toots. So there were indeed places in the Fediverse where Mastodon toots were full-text searchable as long as they were known to the respective instances. Also, most of these projects could do quotes. And Friendica, Hubzilla and the budding nameless, brandless non-project commonly referred to as (streams) could even do what would amount to "quote-tweets". And yes, with Mastodon toots. They call it "sharing", they do it by referencing the original post rather than copying it, but still.

It happened that I tried to tell these people that what they don't want on Mastodon was readily available elsewhere. That I could full-text search, quote and "quote-tweet" Mastodon posts on Hubzilla. I guess it went beyond their imagination because I never really got a reaction. It didn't help that Mastodon couldn't display quotes properly yet, and it still can't display shared posts properly, so even demonstrating these capabilities didn't have the desired effect.

In hindsight, this was actually good because these groups of users would otherwise have loudly demanded all non-Mastodon instances be fediblocked.

What has happened since then: Bluesky and the third wave

Around December, the second wave came to an end although there were still people moving from Twitter to Mastodon. This was when mastodon.social had increased its capacity. So new registrations focused more and more on mastodon.social again.

It was one thing that it often took people at least three to five months to learn that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. But now that mastodon.social was open again, more and more people came who spent months believing that the Fediverse is only mastodon.social, especially after Mastodon itself built a milder form of mollycoddling and railroading into the official mobile app.

Still, those who have joined in the second wave and its aftermath have mostly settled in. They have learned what it means that Mastodon is decentralised. They have come to terms with the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. In fact, some have moved elsewhere entirely like Firefish or Friendica in the meantime, often taking their connections with them regardless.

This summer, Twitter closed its API to all who wouldn't pay a substantial license fee. They followed Reddit's example which had caused the Threadiverse to explode and adopt that name in the first place. Many of those who were still on Twitter were willing to put up with rampant open fascism and hatred being commonplace, but not with the official mobile app or the official Web interface. And all alternatives were killed off in one fell swoop. A third wave of migration began.

However, this wave was different. For one, the likeliness of these people wanting something entirely new was much smaller. Had they wanted something substantially different from Twitter like Mastodon or any other Fediverse project, they would long since have moved there. But they hadn't.

Besides, Bluesky was already there. And Bluesky is widely being seen as "actually Twitter without Musk" due to having been founded by the same guy as Twitter. However, Bluesky was and still is invite-only. Many would have moved there if they could, but they couldn't. And Threads wasn't and still isn't seen as an alternative because its users are regarded as a subset of the notoriously obnoxious and attention-whoring Instagram crowd.

So while people were waiting for a Bluesky invite, they had to choose between enduring Twitter's hate-mongering and enduring Mastodon's being different and complicated. When the former was no longer accessible through third-party clients, the latter became the lesser of two evils.

This brought us new Mastodon users who only use Mastodon as a stopover, like a refugee camp, until they can finally get to their desired destination, namely Bluesky. For this reason, they aren't interested in Mastodon itself at all. They don't really care what it is and how it works. They see its decentralisation as a nuisance they temporarily have to put up with. And they keep acting like they're on ? and refusing to adopt any of Mastodon's or the greater Fediverse's mannerisms. They actually hope that they can continue behaving like on ? once they're on Bluesky. It's Twitter without Musk and without Nazis after all, right?

The irony is that there will never be a Bluesky with open registrations that's so nicely and conveniently centralised like ?. As long as Bluesky has only got its one "mothership instance", it will remain invite-only because the capacity of that instance is limited. Registrations will be opened when there are more instances, and then they will be opened only for these other instances. This will be to keep people from piling upon the "mothership instance" like on all decentralised projects that were ever created from Jabber to Matrix to Diaspora* to Mastodon to Lemmy to Misskey to OpenSimulator, in fact, even including e-mail.

So when you can register an account on Bluesky without an invite, it will no longer be Twitter without Musk. It will become the same degree of complicated that keeps people away from the Fediverse because they have to choose an instance first without being railroaded to one. And until that happens, I bet that Bluesky will have grown its own culture and its own mannerisms and reject at least some of those from ?. So even if you should manage go to Bluesky, you will have to learn, and you will have to adapt.

Fortunately, not everyone who came over to Mastodon during the third wave is like this. Some may simply have been slow. Some may have refused to move from ? to Mastodon because "but muh followers, but muh fame"; some of these might have been convinced by tales from others who said that they actually get more feedback from fewer followers. Some may have believed mainstream media that had pronounced Mastodon and the whole of the Fediverse dead in early 2023, just to learn that they're alive and well when Mastodon became the talk of the town again due to ?'s increasing enshittification.

And truth be told, I guess ? was so utterly enshittified at this point that not exactly few of these people moved to Mastodon because they decided they wanted something as un-? as possible instead. And I wouldn't be surprised if this eagerness had actually driven some of them to try out other Fediverse projects as soon as they had heard about them.