Since 2016, the year of its launch, Mastodon has been known as a “Twitter type”, but it never took off. When Elon Musk bought the bird’s social network, disgruntled users and concerned about the billionaire’s management jumped to Mastodon. However, not everything is rosy for the platform team.
With the increase in the number of users, Mastodon’s admin and moderation format is overloading. In the social network, users enter servers. Each server has its administrators, all volunteers, who work to keep the space respectful on the social network.
Overloaded Mastodon can cause administrators to “leak”
Mastodon’s proposal is similar to the forums and Discord servers, a decentralized place that follows “Murici’s law”: everyone takes care of themselves. Violated your group’s rules on Mastodon? An administrator, with no connection to the company’s management, will be responsible for applying the penalty — whatever the violation and the applicable punishments. Here is one of the current platform issues🇧🇷
With the user boom, which jumped from 300 thousand active users to 2 million in October, these administrators had their (voluntary) work multiplied. With this overload, violations of social network rules, servers and legislation are going unpunished.
For example, if any posting violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (the one that Epic Games didn’t follow), it is the role of the server administrator to take control of the situation, blocking the content and reporting the user who committed the violation. Otherwise, the blame falls… on themselves.
In an interview for Ars Techinica, Corey Silverstein, a lawyer specializing in digital legislation, explained that administrators do not understand this risk. To make matters worse, there is still a discussion in the area about the scope of the laws of other countries on social networks: if the server can be accessed in Brazil, it also needs to follow our laws — and we are not talking about having an office in the country.
The advantage of this format is that the social network can run with a reduced moderation team, the downside is… everything else. With overloaded servers, the chances increase that administrators will not moderate content in time. If they can be sued for not removing content, why would they want to remain admins?
With this format, Mastodon could see growth stall or even start to lose more traditional users. Even they are outraged by the new members of the social network.
The Mastodones: Civil War
Apart from these problems, Mastodon is the same as almost all social networks today: it has short posts (up to 500 characters), DM, feed, photos, videos, sharing, option to favorite messages. Similar to Twitter, but it’s not twitter🇧🇷 Here begins the Civil War of the social network.
Longtime Mastodon users like the social network the way it is. Those who came from Twitter want the platform to become Twitter without Elon Musk. At the moment, there are no indications that Mastodon will adapt to be Twitter before October 2022. Whichever way the platform goes, it cannot please Greeks and Trojans – and then Mastodon will end up losing part of the “defeated” group .
With information: Ars Technica
https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/2022/12/26/mastodon-descobre-que-crescer-nao-e-tao-legal-quanto-parece/