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The Internet’s directory was once a simple text file on a single computer but has evolved into many directories world-wide that enable the Internet as you know it.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

In 1972, four years after the Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center might have felt like it was falling apart. More and more folks who had worked on Englebart’s NLS were moving on, many of them up the street to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre.
But that didn’t mean Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center was closing. Over the past few years ARC had been working with the Advanced Research Project Agency on its new network, the ARPANet. It had launched October 29, 1969, and had 29 computers connected but new hosts weren’t moving as fast. So Bob Kahn at ARPA wanted to show off to everyone what this network could do and why it was worth funding.
Kahn was planning a big demo of ARPANET at the first International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington, DC and needed someone to organize all the info into a handbook to go along with the demonstration.
Elizabeth Feinler, aka “Jake,” was a biochemist. But she was also fascinated with how to compile large amounts of data. She had worked on a project to index all the chemical compounds in the world. And in 1960, joined the Stanford Research Institute where she developed the Handbook of Psychopharmacology and The Chemical Process Economics Handbook.
By 1972, she led the Literature Research section at SRI. And she told Webster University Professor Julia Griffey in 2019 that, of course, she knew Douglas Engelbart
So Engelbart asked her to come over to the ARC team where she wrote the Resource Handbook for the ARPAnet demo.
You don’t put together all the info about how the ARPANet works without becoming a useful resource people rely on when they have questions about how the ARPANet works. By 1974, Feinler was one of the people planning and running the Network Information Center.
NIC was the reference desk of ARPANet. You needed to know something you called NIC. Literally. On the phone. You could also send a letter if your request was less urgent. NIC published a book– the successor of that Resource Handbook from the demo– listing all the protocols of ARPANet and all the registered names and and terminals.
That demo had worked and more computers were connecting to ARPAnet all the time. In 1974, the network working group decided to create a text file to list all the host names, so they didn’t have to keep publishing a pamphlet. You had an information network after all, why not use it.
Feinler took charge of making sure it was updated. She’d keep doing that until 1989 when the domain name system came along and made it easy to find a machine on the now Internet just by typing in a name. Without it, Feinler at 92 might still be updating that hosts file.
So let’s help you Know a Little More about the Domain Name System, aka DNS.
DNS stands for the Domain Name System. It’s essentially the system that lets you type google.com when you want Google search rather than having to remember something like 142.250.68.46.
That string of numbers is an Internet Protocol Address or IP address. That’s actually how computers on the internet talk to each other. They identify as numbers.
Domain Names are associated with those numbers. When you type in a domain name in a browser the browser goes and looks up in a table which number (or more often range of numbers) goes with that domain name so it can find it on the internet. The same way you just go to your friends name in your phone’s contact list to call them. You don’t tap in their phone number by hand.
The Domain Name System provides a worldwide distributed directory of which domain names go with which numbers. It’s not just one table (anymore) it’s lots of tables on lots of servers around the world. So DNS also defines a communication protocol for how all those directories communicate with each other so that any computer can find another on the Internet.
But it did start in 1974 as that HOSTS.TXT file on a machine at the Stanford Research Institute developed and maintained by Elizabeth Feinler. She mapped host names to the numbers she found in the Assigned Numbers List handled by Jon Postel at USC. Feinler and her team managed that list for the ARPANET– and later Internet– until 1989.
But along the way that host table became slow and unwieldy. And on January 1, 1983, the ARPANet and Defense Data Networks switched to the TCP/IP standard and became the Internet, That meant all networks could be connected by a universal language. It also meant a lot of safety nets that existed before were no longer there and there were a number of issues that needed addressing. Some of them were considered very important and got a lot of attention. Others not so much.
That’s Paul Mockapetris talking to the Oxford Internet Institute about taking on the task of automating and publishing the original spec for the domain name system in November 1983.
Four UC Berkeley students wrote a UNIX implementation of the spec called the Berkeley Internet Name Domain or BIND. BIND is still the most widely used DNS software on the Internet. And yes it has been updated several times since then.
The domain name system itself is made up of multiple domains. The most familiar is of course .com. There’s also .org, .net .fr .biz and on and on. Each of those domains has an authority responsible for assigning domain names and mapping them to the corresponding numbers. Each domain has multiple name servers that you can call on to find which domain name goes with which IP addresses.
But it’s not just one server with all the addresses. In fact the process involves different servers for different parts of the domain name.
You see the domain name itself consists of multiple labels. Let’s take knowalittlemore.com The right-most label is the top-level domain .com. Each label to the left specifies a subdivision. So the first to the left is knowalittlemore which is the domain of this show. For websites usually the last label is www to specify that you mean the web server on that domain. So when you type in http://www.knowalittlemore.com you go to the website for knowalittlemore.com not the email server. If you’re thinking you don’t type in www ever, well, browsers can add it for you and you can configure your nameserver to assume www was meant if nothing else (like say SMTP for email) is to the left.
Each label in your domain name can have up to 63 characters. A full domain name with all subdivisions can’t be longer than 253 characters in text or 255 octets of storage in binary.
The characters in a domain name are officially A-Z, 0 through 9 and the hyphen. However the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications or IDNA system can map international characters into this set so locals can use their own alphabet.
Each domain, like .com. .uk. etc has a set of authoritative name servers that are either primary or secondary. A primary server has the original up to date copy of all domain records. Secondary servers communicate with the primary to automatically update.
In practice, information is cached to speed things up and you’re almost always calling on cached information when you browse. But let’s pretend there was no cache available and you want to go to knowalittlemore.com. The request would start by finding the closest root name server. These are spread throughout the world. The root name server would direct you to the nearest .com name server, that server would then tell you which IP address goes with knowalittlemore.com you’d check there to find out which server is the web server at knowalittlemore.com and potentially with more complicated requests, onward until you get the exact server you’re looking for.
With all these intermediaries it’s possible for malicious actors to figure out how to insert themselves and give you the wrong IP address for a domain that would then take you to a malicious version of the site that might look just like the real site but infect you with malware or something.
Domain Name System Security Extensions or DNSSEC requires each level of DNS server to digitally sign its requests to assure they haven’t been intercepted. It is deployed at the root level but has not been fully deployed across the system because of complexity and also reasons.
As I said, in practice so much of the process is cached, that root name servers get a very small fraction of requests, otherwise they’d get overloaded. Records may be cached in your browser, in your router by your ISP and so on. Cached records have a time to live set on their records so they are forced to go update and look for changes regularly so they stay pretty well up to date.
The name servers record more than just domain name and corresponding IP address. It also includes mail exchanges, known as MX records, domain name aliases known as CNAME as well as responsible persons, there’s even a real-time blackhole list or RBL for combating spam.
And it can do more than just tell you what domain name goes with what address. The DNS can provide the IP address that is closest to the requesting computer. This function is essential to cloud services and content delivery networks. Netflix doesn’t have one machine at Netflix.com. It has thousands and the Domain Name System is the first step in routing your Netflix app to the closest set of Netflix servers so you have the least delay in getting that episode of Stranger Things.
OK so I know a lot of you have questions about registering domains and how that fits in, let’s touch on that briefly.
Registrars
To register a domain name and get its record created in the DNS directory you need to deal with an official domain name registrar. The registrar is different from the registry. Each domain like .com or .us has a registry. The registrar is contracted to handle requests for domain names and collect and verify the information that is then entered into the directory by the registry. Registrars can and do charge fees for this.
And yes registry and registrar are different and really should have been named something that made that a little more obvious.
Let’s use an example: for .com, authorized registrars – like say hover.com– must pay the registry – in the case of .com that’s Verisign. The registrar also pays a small administration fee to ICANN for each domain it handles. The price the public pays the registrar is these fees plus some markup. The maximum registration period is 10 years, though some registrars offer longer periods by legally binding themselves to renew the domain at the end of each ten year period.
There are usually more than one registrar per domain and in fact registrars usually handle more than one domain. Registrars can also authorize resellers as affiliates.
So there you have it. You pay a registrar to register a domain name with a registry and then when someone looks up your domain name the domain name system directory, or likely a cached copy of it, will point a browser to the IP address of your web server.
And Jake Feinler doesn’t have to be involved anymore.
Oh and one more thing. If you’re wondering why Elizabeth Feinler went by Jake, Feinler told the Computer History Museum in 2001, that when she was born in 1931, double names were a fad. Her middle name was Jocelyn, so they called her Betty Jo. Except her sister, Mary Lou, pronounced it Baby Jake. Eventually she grew out of the Baby, but the Jake stuck.
And we thank Jake Feinler for her hard work keeping that Hosts file going in the early days.
In other words, I hope you know a little more about DNS.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

What’s really being celebrated on Black Friday and is it the biggest shopping day in the world?

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Send us email to [email protected]

Episode transcript:

At the end of the civil war the US government was deeply in debt, both from the cost of fighting and reconstruction. When General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president 1868 it had grown to $2.8 billion. That would be around 103.8billion in 2023.
To help pay for the war the government had begun issuing “greenback” dollars. These were not backed by gold or silver but promised an unspecified future payment. They had the effect fo driving up the price of gold.
So Grant’s administration pursued a policy of selling gold to buy up wartime bonds and by May 1869 the debt had been reduced to $12 million and the price of gold was suppressed.
All that cheap gold gaveJay Gould an idea. He was friends with Abel Corbin, who just happened to be married to Jennie Grant, the president’s sister. If they could prevail not he president to stop selling gold, the price would start going up. Knowing this in advance they could start buying up gold drilling up the price faster. Done right, they could corner the gold market and get unreasonably rich.
Gould enlisted one of his fellow directors at the Erie railroad, James Fisk into the plant.
On September 1, 1869 they started buying up large amounts of gold under other people’s names and driving up the price. Corbin planted the idea with Grant that selling gold would hurt western farmers and the plan should be suspended. But they got greedy. And when Grant’s personal secretary turned down an offer to open a gold account, they did it anyway. When he told the president about it Grant figured out what was happening. And on Friday September 24, 1869, the government resumed selling gold. Gold prices plummeted. And hundreds of people who were riding the gold wave along with Gould and Fisk, lost everything.
Stock prices plummeted 20 percent between that Friday and October 1st. Brokerage firms went bankrupt. Farmers really did get hurt this time with wheat and corn prices dropping by half. The economic turmoil lasted for months. Anti was all traced back to that one Friday. That Black Friday, in September 1869.
And it was that day that would, somewhat ironically, lend its name to what would become the biggest shopping day in the US.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about Black Friday.

Thanksgiving day was established by the US first constitutional president, George Washington in 1789. On the recommendation of Congress, President Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a Day of Public Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving days were proclaimed by subsequent presidents on a regular basis but the dates varied. It wasn’t until 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving should be commemorated on the Last Thursday of November each year.
The regularity made it a nice signpost not he calendar. Retailers began promoting holiday shopping starting the day after Thanksgiving.
That lasted until another economic depression, the great one. In 1939, the economy was showing signs of recovery. But Thanksgiving that year would fall on the very last day of the month. That meant the shortest possible holiday shopping season, meaning the smallest boost to the economy So President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation that Thanksgiving would take place on the second to last Thursday of November, adding a week to the shopping calendar.
16 states refused to move the date and for two years, a third of the country celebrated Thanksgiving a week after the rest of the country.
So in October 1941, Congress passed a resolution declaring the fourth Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. This kept it as the last Thursday most years, unless November happened to have 5 Thursdays. That kept the holiday shopping from getting too small without pushing it so far up the calendar.
Once that pattern was set, the Friday after Thanksgiving started to take on a character of its own. Workers began to call in sick on Friday in order to have a four day weekend. In 1951, the journal Factory Management and Maintenance began to refer to this phenomenon as Black Friday, referencing the panic of 1869. Friday also became a huge shopping day of course, and police in Philadelphia and Rochester began referring it to Black Friday as well because of the crowd management.
But the reference did not become common. The New York Times first called the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” in tis November 29, 1975 issue referring to the traffic in Philadelphia. But even as late as 1985, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that merchants Cincinnati and Los Angeles were unaware of the term.
Meanwhile merchants were trying to avoid the usages connotations of a panic and disasters. As early as November 28, 1981, the Philadelphia Inquirer picked up an explanation put out by merchants that it was being called Black Friday because it was when retailers got “in the black” – aka profitable.
But by the late 1980s the term had gained wide acceptance. Retailers across the US began advertising Black Friday sales. More companies began to just give in and give workers Friday off since they were going to call in sick anyway.
By the mid 2000s the day had inspired “Cyber Monday” when workers came into their offices with computers and high bandwidth and shopped for deals online. Giving Tuesday was a counter-celebration to encourage people to spend money on charities instead of products.
The lockdowns because of COVID caused a lot of people to shift to online shopping on all days and by 2021, the Black Friday sales were no longer limited to Friday.
The prevalence of US-based retailers have caused the promotion of Black Friday sales outside of the US, even though those countries do not have the November Thanksgiving holiday. Some countries even promote Black Week or Black Month sales.
The success of Black Friday sales may have inspired Alibaba to co-opt a dating holiday in China called Singles day – on November 11th – to be a big sales day which now has passed Black Friday as the largest shopping day in the world.
Steely Dan wrote a song called Black Friday, released in 1975 just as the New York Times was picking up on the phrase in its post-Thanksgiving context. Steely Dan was writing about the 1869 panic but its words could apply to both

When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out
I’ll be on the road

I hope you appreciate the probably unintentional double meaning. And hope you know a little more about Black Friday.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard extend their merger deadline to October, the UK’s CMA grants initial approval to Broadcom’s VMware acquisition, and Intel licenses its NUC designs to Asus.

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Show Notes
To read the show notes in a separate page click here.

Could an open source alternative finally spell the end of Twitter’s short-form bulletin board style postings? It’s been tried before, but now there’s perhaps the best contender for the Twitter throne yet: Mastadon.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

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Episode transcript:

Twitter.

“This website.”

A platform that people love to hate.

A platform people love to yell “I’m leaving.”

But they always come back.

They left for Pownce. And they came back. And Pownce died.

They left for Plurk. And they came back. And Plurk went niche.

They left to start whole new protocols like Diaspora and Identica.

But every time they fly to an alternative, they also fly back.

Except. Maybe this time? Is this the exception?

Because this isn’t the story of Twitter. This is the story of a place that has almost all the ingredients to keep the Twitter exodus.

Let’s help you know a little more about Mastodon.

It’s March 2007. The SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas is filled with Web 2.0 pitches and internet stars. But one website is standing out. Twitter, with a giant screen in the convention center showing “tweets” as they happen in real time, steals the spotlight.
That feels like the last time people unanimously loved Twitter.
In 2009 a group calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” hacks Twitter through a DNS exploit. It won’t be the last time Twitter gets hacked. But it will cause one of the first big rounds of questions about whether Twitter is safe. It won’t be the last time that happens either.
In 2011. Twitter posts are credited with fueling uprisings in the Middle East known as the “Arab Spring” BUT it also launches the “Quick Bar”, a floating bar at the top of the iOS app which was withdrawn after loud user complaints.
Then there was #gamergate and the vitriolic arguments and harassment about what was true journalism and who were fake gamers. That led to calls for better Twitter moderation.
You get the idea. Controversies happen frequently on Twitter and when they do, users storm off to try an alternative.
And in 2016, the US presidential election made every one of those controversies look mild. A month out from election day, a European developer decided to be the latest to try to make yet another Twitter alternative. Maybe this would be the one.
Mastodon launched October 5, 2016 Developer Eugen Rochko posted on Hacker News, “Show HN: A new decentralized microblogging platform” It linked to a Github page.
There you could find the basic code of yet another decentralized social network. It stood out from previous attempts in a couple ways. First, it was truly open source, not a proprietary service pretending to be decentralized. Anybody could set up a Mastodon server. And second, it was polished. It looked like a slick implementation of Tweetdeck.
Developers in general were complimentary and several jumped in to help work on the project. Since anybody could set up a Mastodon server, lots of them did, showing that it could work as a truly federated and decentralized platform.
You just needed people to use it.
It simmered away with people wandering in as they heard about it in various corners of the internet. But that calm period changed. In March 2017.
The rancor on Twitter had been snowballing since the election of President Trump. It seems like background noise now, but at the time it was overwhelming. People got angry on Twitter before but not in the numbers and not with this kind of sustained rage. Almost every user on the platform was picking a side and firing shots at the other.
That may explain why a seemingly innocuous change began another exodus.
On March 30th, Twitter announced that the names of people you are replying to would not count against the character count, and if you replied to more than one person, only the first person’s name would show with the rest available with a click.
Minor stuff right. WRONG
With everyone angrily replying to each other and laser-focused on shaming their opponents by name, this was seen as hiding important information! In reality, this was the straw that broke the camel’s ability to stay on Twitter.
So when big names like IT Crowd creator Graham Lineman (aka Glinner) and Community and Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon started accounts on Mastodon, a wave began. Motherboard’s Sarah Jeong had been working on an article about the little platform and found herself documenting a mass migration.
Mastodon users jumped 70% in 48 hours and Rochko met his $800 a month Patreon goal. Jeong posted her Motherboard article on April 4th. Mashable’s Jack Morse posted the same day with the title “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon.” A few days later, April 7, Quartz and The Verge both had published guides on how to use Mastodon.
By April 9, 2017 Mastodon had 129,302 accounts. Nothing compared to Twitter’s hundreds of millions, but a hockey stick-like growth that caught people’s attention.
Rochko’s main instance, Mastodon.social had to lock registrations to encourage new users to sign up on one of the other 1,200 or so servers.
Mastodon was having its moment. Like Pownce, and Plurk and identi.ca and Diaspora before it.
And almost as quickly as it began. It ended.
The pattern held. The Twitter faithful got mad. The Twitter faithful fled. The Twitter faithful realized that they still liked yelling on Twitter and returned.
By May 22, the headline on the Verge was “What happened to Mastodon after its moment in the spotlight?”
Thankfully for Rochko and friends the story was more Plurk than Pownce. The flood had stopped but there was still growth.
The Verge’s Megan Farokh-manesh described it as a grab bag of “personal observations, video games, politics, comics, and a mix of users speaking in French, Japanese, Spanish, and more.”
In fact it was now a cozy community. Slightly bigger than it had been a few months before but the better for it. The Twitter masses had gone.
For now.

Let’s take a minute to look at how Mastodon works. Because it’s not exactly a Twitter clone. And it points out some of the reasons Mastodon is seen as a good Twitter alternative, and also what its actual road blocks are to becoming massively popular.
Mastodon’s code is issued under the AGPLv3 open source license built on the W3C ActivityPub standard. That’s a standard used not just by Mastodon but other federated services like PeerTube for video, Pixelfed for images and Friendica, another social networking alternative.
But the point here is Mastodon is standards compliant. ActivityPub is a World Wide Web Consortium standard, like HTML.
Mastodon’s open source code is free and the license does not allow anyone to reverse that. It is administered by a German nonprofit called Mastodon which owns the trademark and runs two servers, the original mastodon.social and mastodon.online.
Mastodon describes its federation of servers as the ‘fediverse.’
Basically, anybody can take the code and start a server if they want to maintain it. And those servers can then integrate with other servers in the fediverse as much or as little as they want. Each server will have its own policies and moderation rules. So you can be on a server and see posts on every other server but you can choose a server that plays by rules you’re comfortable with. Want maximal free speech? Find a maximal free speech server. Want strong moderation and crackdowns on offensive speech, choose a server with those kinds of policies. You can still interact with the rest of the fediverse, but with filter levels and other rules that you’re comfortable with.
So for example a Mastodon server can see all the posts in the fediverse, but a particular server may choose to ban a list of swear words. If you sign up on that server you’d see all the posts from the rest of the fediverse unless they had swearing in them. But swearing doesn’t have to be banned everywhere. If you don’t mind seeing swearing you can choose a server that doesn’t block it.
And you can also block server yourself on your own account. Don’t like the policies or perspectives of the people who post on the mastodon server blacklicorice.rocks, you can stop it from ever showing up in *your* feeds, without needing the server you’re on to block it for everyone.
Of course, most people will pick a server that has policies they agree with, so they don’t have to do a lot of maintenance and blocking. But what if you change your mind. Or pick the wrong server. Or your server changes ITS policies?
This is where another feature of the fediverse comes in handy. You’re not locked into a server. You can try one out and then change your mind and not lose your data.
Mastodon makes it possible to take your follower lists along with you. With Facebook or Twitter that would mean abandoning everything. With Mastodon it just means a couple of export and import clicks. There are one or two steps depending on what you want to keep after you move. If all you want to keep is your followers– so people find you immediately at your new server– you can do that automatically. If you want to keep who YOU follow, as well as mute lists, block lists, bookmarks, domain blocks, you need to export a file with that info and import it when you set up the new account. The point being, it’s not complicated to move from one server to another.
This is also why Mastodon usernames look like email addresses. [email protected] for example. The first part is the user name and the portion after the at symbol is the server name.
Even with the ability to switch servers, the choice makes it daunting for some people to sign up in the first place. Not just for the simple reason of having to choose, but because the various apps are still developing better ways to make it easy to see what’s available and get signed up.
Whatever server you end up on, you’ll be able to view multiple feeds. And they’re pretty familiar if you’re a Twitter user. Different servers can tweak them a little but usually there’s one for people you follow, one for interactions with your posts, one to see everything on your local server and quite often one called “Federated” which lets you see every post from every server your server interacts with.
A lot of servers also have a feed called Explore which lets you see posts from across the fediverse that are getting a lot of attention. That’s the closest Mastodon gets to a “trending topics” feed.
There are also Direct messages, Favourites and Bookmarks. Favourites let other people know you like something, bookmarks are for you to reference something later whether you “like” it or not. And you can make your own lists.
The standard message posting on Mastodon has a maximum of 500 characters. You can attach an image, run a poll, add a content warning and select a default language that the post is in. Posts were jokingly referred to as Toots in the early days, a play on Tweets and because Mastdon’s logo is a big hairy extinct elephant. While the word toot is still in use, it’s somewhat deprecated.
Posts can also have varying privacy settings. You can let a post be public across the fediverse, private to only your followers, direct between users or even unlisted, so anyone can see it if they know where to look but it won’t be discoverable.
There are some differences from Twitter too.
Search is more limited as well, with most servers only returning searches for user names and hashtags. For example, the Explore feed only follows hashtags, not individual words in posts. And Boosts, the mastodon equivalent of Retweets, do not allow you to add commentary.
One of the downsides of Mastodon’s federated approach is that not every server is as well run as every other. Large popular servers have few problems but niche communities rely on the good graces of small teams or sometimes individuals. There is no monetization built into the platforms so the folks who run servers rely on crowdfunding like donations or Patreons.
So not every server is secure, and things like posting images can become an ethical dilemma if you know each image is increasing the cost of the volunteer who runs your server.
That boils down to two things working against Mastodon’s uptake with the wider populace: ease of use and difficulty of maintenance. Hold that thought though.
The tradeoff is that you get that ability to pick and choose moderation. Something that attracted people to another run at Mastodon in 2022. This time was much bigger.

By October 2022, Mastodon had grown to 300,000 users. A little less than three times what it had during the great yet brief migration of 2017. It wasn’t booming but it wasn’t declining. Just a nice slow growing community of people. A small suburban feel.
Then. On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk closed his long embattled acquisition of Twitter.
It would be an entire separate episode to discuss all the events of Musk’s first few months owning Twitter. Lifting the ban on President Trump, firing executives, firing more people, lifting more bans, launching paid verification, unlaunching paid verification, laying off more people, making decisions by poll. And with each event, the Twitter user did what Twitter users have always done. Flee to try something else.
And there were new platforms to try like Hive and Post and platforms on the comeback trail from decline, like Tumblr. But the biggest by far was a familiar furry trunk.
Mastodon had never gone away. It was never in decline. But it had never grown like this. Between October and November 2022 it grew 800% to 2.5 million. Still much smaller than Twitter’s 350 million plus, but now in the conversation.
The holidays took some of the momentum away though as people paid less attention to whatever wild thing Twitter’s CEO was posting. And after the first of the year, CES diverted the tech world’s attention such that Musk’s antics seemed to engender less panic than they had.
By February, Mastodon users had fallen from the 2.5 million high to 1.4 million.
It looked like an old story. Twitter users angered. Twitter users flee. Twitter users get over it. Twitter users come back. Alternative platform left to pick up the pieces.
Except.
January 19, Twitter changed its API kicking off third-party clients. That left developers of the clients wondering if they shouldn’t make a Mastodon app. The folks who made Tweetbot launched Ivory. The folks who made Aviary, launched Mammoth and even got funding from Mozilla. Suddenly there were easier ways to get started with Mastodon with experienced developers who by all rights should not have been given the opportunity to do this.
And on February 10, Cloudflare, a company who makes its money securing big websites from cyberattacks and downtime, launched Widlebeest. It lets you quickly spin up a Mastodon server that supports ActivityPub and other Fediverse APIs, with the ability to publish, edit, boost, and delete posts. And of course the server will sit behind Cloudflare’s security from denial of service and other attacks. You still needed some tech chops, but it made it a lot easier for someone to get a server up and going and not worry as much about the maintenance and security.
And Fast Company had another point. Maybe Mastodon isn’t following the Twitter alternative pattern at all. Maybe it’s following the Twitter pattern.
In April 2009, two years after launch, Nielsen noted that only 40% of Twitter users still used the service. In February 2011, Forbes noted Twitter’s user base had dropped by 5 million. Even as recent as 2014, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 36% of people who joined Twitter said they never used it.
And yet, Twitter, even after all of the outrage– is still going.
Mastodon may or may not be a replacement for Twitter. But it may very well be a new platform in the mix, and possibly could become something totally new and unexpected.
In other words, I hope you Know A little More, about Mastodon.