Jorijn Schrijvershof’s decision to close the Mastodon instance toot.community, which he established in late 2024, highlights many of the difficulties facing instance administrators on the decentralised social media platform:
Every day, I deal with spam, bots, technical issues, abuse reports, and user conflicts. Much of the moderation ends up being about personal disagreements rather than actual rule-breaking.
As I wrote last week, anyone can set up a Mastodon instance if they want to, but the majority are labours of love, including Aus Social, of which I am a member. They’re not money-spinners.
Unlike centralised social media platforms, such as Twitter/X and Threads, Mastodon instances are usually funded by their founders, together with any donations members might make:
There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.
It’s also a mistake to believe Mastodon is an oasis of thoughtful and considerate discourse. It isn’t always. There’s nothing wrong with robust discussion, but hostility and antagonism is another matter, even if it’s not of quite the same intensity present on other platforms.
Conflict may not be widespread across Mastodon, but dealing with it, as a someone who is effectively a volunteer admin, is time consuming, and disheartening:
More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore. Too often, conversations turn hostile or confrontational. A small amount of conflict and bad actors takes up a disproportionate amount of time and energy.
This was this idea, in the early days of Mastodon and Bluesky, that things would be different, better.
People migrating there thought they were leaving conflict and hostility that was rife elsewhere, behind. And for a time things did feel different. Interactions were relatively civil. There were those who feared this state of affairs would not last though.
But social media is social media, no matter what the platform. Wherever people congregate online, antagonism is seldom far away. As with bad news, discord sells.
The operators of the commercial, centralised platforms, relish tension. It brings in the punters, it engages (and enrages) them. And if the conversation only ever goes in circles, who cares?
Someone once said something like “show me an intelligent TV show, and I’ll show you a dead TV show.” I don’t recall the precise wording, but that was the gist of the quote.
Might it have been Kerry Packer or Rupert Murdoch?
It seems though the same principle applies to social media platforms. But antagonism is not restricted to social media, it’s rampant across the web, to the point it seems endemic to the web.
You don’t need to be a detective to work out why either. The low barrier to entry. The ease with which identities can be concealed. These are of course also advantages, but suit bad actors nicely. People, who supposedly, wouldn’t behave so poorly in face-to-face interactions. Supposedly.
And since every last user of a decentralised social media platform is unlikely to adhere to community guidelines, we’re probably going to see more Mastodon instances close. As with toot.community, trolls and disputes between members won’t be solely to blame, but they’ll be contributing factors.
There’s a thought that social media will kill itself eventually. Users are railing against heavy handed algorithms, abundant AI slop, and misinformation, among other annoyances.
But that day seems far off. Big tech will continue supporting the centralised platforms where the problems are at their worst, particularly if they remain profitable.
Sadly, it’s the not so well resourced decentralised social media platforms that are more at risk of being “killed” though, unless they can receive more support.