The Media’s Fake Tech Incompetence

Some thoughts on why journalists pretend Mastodon is impenetrable.

Very nearly every article about Mastodon in a mainstream journalistic publication takes pains to tell you that using it is nightmarishly complicated, the social media equivalent of emacs.

The takeaway from all these explainers and think pieces, if you’re a regular reader of the commentariat, is that Mastodon isn’t for you, but is instead the exclusive domain of computer science PhDs and 14 year old phone phreaks. And from that we should all conclude that Mastodon — and the Fediverse, and the open web in general — can never be a viable alternative to proprietary and closed social media platforms, at least not at any kind of scale. Better to just stick it out at Twitter, or switch to some other centralized service.

The common response, from those of us happily using Mastodon without having computer science PhDs or ever having broken into a telephone switching computer, is that it’s no more difficult than signing up for email, and everyone has and uses email.

That’s true, of course, and will become even more true when bigger players, such as Mozilla, set up their own Mastodon servers, giving a trustworthy, robust, and easy onramp to the distributed network.