I logged out of Mastodon on September 07. I do not remove my account. I will just let it die. And I know that day will come.
Previously on this blog: My teaching career (2019): A Consolatio
My action was not because of the fact that I didn’t like Mastodon. Judging from the frequency for me visiting it, I actually liked it a lot. The frequently quoted reasons such as difficulty to use or the people aggressively defending the “fediness” of Mastodon weren’t concern me. It was due to just one reason.
The trigger point was the upcoming closure of my instance in December this year. Yes, it is easy to jump to another instance (I did it in the past) and I decided not to do that and made a conscious choice to quit Mastodon. It was due to the unsustainability. The technology, e.g. the development of software Mastodon, is going strong and I think there is no sustainability issue in that regard. I am talking about something else.
I think the closure statement of my instance is super indicative of what I said about the unsustainability. I mean the unsustainability of maintaining a “social media” as a grassroot, non-commercial initiative. The admin said they are (singular they here) 1 tired. The closure statement cited the difficulty to keep illegal content at bay on the instance, as well as the burden to moderate content and uphold the roles 2. People yelled at them, doxxed them and made threats against them and their family. If my own information need like keeping up about programming or my editor is based on the suffering of the admin, I think I am contributing to their suffering. I am part of the problem, even thought I did not post or follow any illegal content; or contributed to any controversy on their Mastodon instance. However, I contributed to the massiveness of the information they had to administrate and moderate.
I actually donated some money to the admin in the past to support their effort. Although money might cover the running cost of the server, it never covers the mental toll done to people: the man hours they and their team to admin the server, to moderate content; the mental health impact when the assholes under the protection of anonymity harass them; or simply the “obligation” for them to make their users like me happy. It is actually very similar to the so-called hidden cost of maintaining an open source project. You can donate money. But it can never cover the toll to actual humans. You see, these humans doing things like maintaining a Mastodon instance usually are not for the monetary gain. They do that for other purposes: for building up a community, for the nostalgic feeling of the “older” internet ; for fighting against Surveillance Capitalism or Enshittification; for the disagreement with that rich asshole who bought Twitter. As a matter of fact, I never see a Mastodon instance that is for the monetary gain, either from the donation or from amassing data.
Social media is a death end. From my opinion, it is quite a huge part of social ill such as harassment, extremism, and consumerism. Because Mastodon was the only social media (narrowly defined) I use, the decision to not use Mastodon anymore actually also means I will not use any social media. Confucius says: “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.” I have no doubts and I almost know the decrees of Heaven. Fear of missing out (FOMO), one of the biggest driving forces for people to use social media, is just a doubt which I no longer have. Probably I will write here more often through, like I did in the past when I still have that doubt.
I only know them by their first name. I don’t want to disclose too much about them or try to make the internet remember them and help the doxxers. I want to protect their identity. In the end, they even needed to close their personal account on their own Mastodon instance. ↩
As a matter of fact, this burden is also a burden for Facebook and Twitter, which these US companies usually outsource the burden to other countries. See this article about the human toll of a Facebook content moderator in Berlin. ↩