So What? Getting started with Mastodon

Well, hey howdy, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. Howdy fellas. Hello.

Uh today we are talking about getting started with Mastodon, the social platform, not the metal band, or the animal. Uh we're to talk about what it is, first of all. I only knew I only knew it was a thing a couple weeks ago, so I am the perfect target audience for today's show. Uh, we're gonna talk about um how it works, how to get started, how to sign up, um, and considerations for brands versus individuals. Um, so given that it is not an animal or a metal band, which it they are, but not in this context.

We're not talking about those today. Uh, Chris, what is Mastodon as a social platform? Mastodon is what is called a decentralized social network. It looks, feels, and operates pretty much like Twitter at first. Um, the a couple of uh uh surface differences instead of 280 characters, you can you're up to five hundred.

The individual posts instead of calling them tweets are called toots. Uh you can not a fan. You're losing me already. But what makes it different is that it is decentralized. It is a federated social network.

Here's what that means. Most of the time with our social networks that we use today, they are centralized. You go to Facebook.com, Twitter.com, LinkedIn.com. And yes, underneath this hood, there's very, very complex IT architecture. But from the end user perspective, you just go to this place, you sign in, and you talk to people.

That central control means that when a social network company uh changes things up, you don't really get a choice, right? Um, you know, Twitter just underwent a change of management, and there's been some pretty dramatic, uh not necessarily positive changes. We don't have control over that. A decentralized federated social network is one in which individual entities essentially put up their own servers and they all talk to each other. The the model that people understand uh without question is the original the OG federated social network, email.

Every company has its email servers. You know, there are big email providers like Gmail and Hotmail, there's small ones like the one at your company. Um if you're a real nerd like uh a lot of us are were in the 90s, you maybe even set up your own email server at one point. I remember when I joined my first startup, uh, I was responsible for the administration of the email server itself. You control your email server, you control the policies on it, but of course, because of the nature of the the protocols involved SMTP, pop, and iMAP, your email server can talk to any email server around the world.

And as long as you know you're not a spammer, uh, those those servers connect, and you can your emails seamlessly go from you know your Gmail account to your trust insights account to your your hotmail account and so on and so forth. That's one aspect. The second aspect is because it is federated and server based, every Mastodon instance or server is its own little collective in addition to speaking to the federation. So what happens on your server if you on the server you're on has its own policies. For example, uh, we've talked in the past on this epit show about things like Discord.

Discord is uh semi-federated, right? Your Discord server or your Slack group, like the analytics for marketer Slack that we run has its own policies, its own culture, its own community, its own rules. And with Mastodon, when you s if you set up, if you choose to set up your own server, you can also set those rules and say, hey, here's the things that we don't allow on this server. You can't control what happens to the rest of the federation, just like you can't tell people what they can and can't email on their own uh servers. But in within your company, if you have an email server in your company, you can say, hey, you can't email certain things, right?

You can't do uh have attachments over a certain size. When I worked in financial services, you absolutely could not email customer information, right? You know, there was actually we're we're programs on the server that look for things like hey, that looks like a credit card number, I'm not even gonna send this message. And so that's what Mastodon is. It is a social network that has global reach, but also local communities that are server-based.

And when you when you start using it, you find a place that looks good, or if you're super nerdy, you start your own. Okay. I'm gonna pause there and sort of repeat back what I think I'm hearing. So I understand the example of email, other companies having it, but in terms of a social network, I don't think people consider email a social network. I understand the example though.

So would it be in some ways akin to you have your own Slack instance? And if you're working with a client, for example, who has their own Slack instance, you can create a connected instance where you invite those guests into yours and vice versa, but you never really leave your instance of Slack. Exactly right. Okay. That I can that I can understand.

That makes sense. And so if you are a Slack user, then that would be a great example. If you're not a Slack user, then you know, if you think about what AOL uh chat rooms, for example, you have separate chat rooms, like one for people who love puppies, one for people who love popcorn, and one for people who love movies, and then you sort of spin off a almost like the uh the Venn diagram of the people who love puppies and movies bringing those two places together. Um that's a very basic, very over simplistic example. But basically, it's it sounds like you know, there's a lot of opportunity if you want to get involved.

Now, why is everybody talking about Mastodon right now? Everyone's talking about Mastodon for a couple of reasons. One, it's decentralized nature means that it is immune to having a change of management, right? It is a is a project. Um on your own Mastodon server could say, okay, Katie, we're not allowing any guys to join us.

It's a women's only server. And that would be okay. That would be okay. Um, you know, women in analytics, the organization that you volunteer with might seriously want to consider that. And so what we see on screen here, this is Mastodon's interface.

This is Mastodon.social, which is the original home server. And you can see on the right-hand side, there's a couple different menus. There's the explore menu, which is sort of home base. There's the local menu, which is the stuff that's happening only on this server within this community, and then there's the federated uh base, which they don't have uh currently set up right now, where you can see what's happening throughout the Mastodon Federation. And so your server, you get to determine the rules.

If you say, you know what, cat owners are forbidden from joining the server, you can do that. That is that is within your rights. If you say, um, you know, I want to be people of a specific gender or specific political orientation. Again, these are private instances, and you may choose to do with them what you will. So a lot of people who are talking about um things like censorship and other social networks, Mastodon very much is an answer to that, where you can say, Yeah, spin up your own instance, you do with however you want, and you can join uh your server can we'll talk to the federation.

But if people want to have commute uh conversations and stuff stuff just in their community, they can, and they and they can you know embrace whatever points of view uh that they want. The second thing that's true that's interesting about Mastodon is again, it's like email there is no email company like there is a Facebook company so as long as servers exist and are federated to each other no one can shut it down no one can censor it and no one can can you know assign arbitrary rules that means that you know for people who are interested in having something that maybe they own or maybe that they run they can you know we were we've been talking internally about um having trust insights run its own mastodon instance if we wanted to we'd stand up that server run it and then the people who are on our server with us would have access to the social network in perpetuity whether or not other servers come and go within the federation again it's like email you know companies come and go servers come and go but email stays in existence. All right John and I are going to talk amongst ourselves for a second. All right John how are you feeling about all of this? Like is is Mastodon something that you think you're gonna sign up for and use.

I know that you've been exploring it a bit and obviously you've been following what's been happening on other social platforms such as Twitter and now uh Facebook slash meta just did all their layoffs and all sorts so what I want to hear your thoughts on all of this. Yeah it's funny Mastodon had has been on my radar for a long time there's a guy I follow Ethan Zuckerman who um is now out of UMass and he studies basically media and the role of the internet in government and society. And so he's followed this forever. And his big thing was this idea of federating, was is the fact that he has a server set up for his team, and then they federate a bunch of stuff. So if you want to like spend, you know, once a week tweaking your social network so you only see exactly what you want to see, you can totally do that with this this setup.

Um but it's really kind of been a you know super geeky social media thing for three or four years now. It's been pretty in fact, but I got going on five or six years at least. And there's never been really much impetus for people to like, hey, go do a lot more work over here. But now with you know, Twitter being on fire this week, suddenly everybody wants to go here. And it's been amazing to see, like, as soon as I got into MasterDon, the first post was like, this place was awesome two weeks ago, now it sucks.

All the Twitter people are here. I hate this. I'm leaving. And and they're totally right, too, because you two it's kind of like they had this awesome book club, and now suddenly the bar let out and there's like 500 people banging on your door today. And that is a really great example.

Yeah, yeah, you could totally see like everybody's pissed. Because they were even joking there, like in MasterDone, it's a joke. Like if you get shared like six or seven times, you've gone viral, you know. Like that that's a big deal if something gets passed around like three or four times. And yeah, so it it so yeah, like all that to get to I don't I don't see any reason for me to kind of jump over here yet.

I didn't see any servers, and this is inter this is it's the Discord problem that we've had, right? Like we talk about Discord and there's so much going on in Discord, but then you look at the server list and you're like, Well, there's nothing that I'm like, oh my god, I have to talk to these people because they're talking about the stuff I want to hear about. And it was interesting. I put in I searched for marketing on the server list and got zero hits. There was absolutely nothing.

So um, yeah, that's kind of funny. You know, of course, some would say that's an opportunity. I could set up the first marketing server, which would then obviously be completely like the neighborhood would be torched and burned, you know, within 30 minutes. Um, but you know, if if we could make it past the first week and still live, you know, there may be somewhere to go with it. So it's it's cool.

There's a lot of interesting stuff. I'm kind of interested in the federated side of it and how that works. I mean, so I imagine your client is just saying, hey, it's okay for you to go get messages over on this place, but kind of what kind of algorithm happens there as far as like what federated stuff gets shown versus the local stuff, you know, is the local stuff always priority, and there's a lot of questions, you know, on that side of it. Um so yeah, that's kind of where I'm at today. It's it's interesting because I think, you know, uh a lot of our audience are, you know, marketers and data scientists, and I think that they're always trying to understand how does this impact me?

What do I need to think about? Do I need to be here? It's a social platform, therefore someone's gonna ask me, are we on it? What are we doing? How are we mining the data?

And from everything I'm hearing from both of you, it sounds like a lot like Reddit, this is not the place to be doing that. Like, don't sign up just to start to like, you know, pitch your brand or you know, advertise. Like this is not what this is for. Like proceed with like you need to understand the culture of it first. Yeah, there's an interesting point with that though.

There is a major difference in that Reddit is totally tech bros. Like, you know, people will make fun of Santa Claus and you know, like rag on everybody. There is a lot of stuff in Mastodon that gay and trans community was involved in a lot of the earliest development of it and privacy and the ability to, you know, that that was another thing they're complaining about. Like somebody shared a Mastodon thing over on Twitter, and they're like, they didn't even ask me. Who shares without asking?

I'm like, dude, you have to start spending no time on Twitter because that's all Twitter is people sharing without asking. Um, but it is really interesting how it's almost two polar opposites, but they basically come back to the same place of just what you said. Like, yeah, dude, you guys are screwing up our culture, like we don't want you here. The um the other big thing, Katie, that you mentioned just now is that's really important and different about Mastodon, because of its nature, there's no advertising. There isn't even an opportunity for marketers to advertise because again, it's just network of servers.

Like, you can't run email ads on somebody else's email server. It's it's you can send them spam, but they don't have to accept it, they can just bounce it right out. And the same is true of uh Mastodon. In your server, you have complete control over what comes in and what goes out. And so, well, so there's no like promote button, there's no advertise button, but that doesn't stop people from organically saying, hey, check out my cool new thing, which it sounds like if they're doing that in your server, you can bounce them.

However, if they have set up a server specifically to promote their stuff, they can do that, but nobody has to sign up and listen to it. Exactly. And as a server admin, one of the things you can do is you can say, I want to feature certain hashtags on my server, I want to feature certain profiles. So if we were to set up a trust insights uh server, for example, I would put all three of our profiles. It's like, hey, Pate, you know, these are these are the people who are or are guard running this this walled garden.

Um, you know, here are the pinned posts and stuff. So you can uh you have a lot of control in your corner of the neighborhood. So from a brand and marketing perspective, the big public servers, yeah, you're not gonna you're not gonna be able to market to them there. And if you disbehave, you're just gonna get the boot. Um, the opportunity is the same as um Slack and Discord and Telegram, etc.

When you run your own server, it's your community. You set the rules, you decide what you know can and can't happen when you're looking at analytics for marketers. Like we have a dedicated uh space for people to promote their stuff, and uh otherwise we say no, no spamming, right? Uh if you're spamming, we're banning. Um, and so the same is true for a masculine instance.

Your server, your it's your living room, your rules. So it sounds like it's a lot like just you're finding just yet another platform to create your own community to bring people together, like-minded, um, and just sort of have those conversations here instead of on Twitter, instead of on Discord, instead of on Slack, instead of in Reddit. Like, this is just yet another place where you could do that if you so felt like doing so. But in terms of sort of the play for marketing, it's probably unless you're looking to bring like a customer community together or audience that you know, of your stuff, there's not really a big play for marketers, it's more of just like a personal and professional place to network or just to connect with people or talk with people versus go in with a hard sell. Exactly, which is one of the biggest problems that marketing is going to be is facing right now.

Um, our audience is fragmenting everywhere as as more central hubs break, like Twitter or Facebook or whatever, people scatter to the winds, they flow into Discord, they flow into Mastodon. They're increasingly flowing into places we can't control, we can't see, we can't advertise. And so the primary imperative for marketing is you've got to have your own community. You have to have some place where where like-minded people that like you can gather. And if you don't, you will be at a substantial disadvantage because you can't go chase these people down.

There's no way to do it. There's no way to advertise to them. You your best bet is you know, at that point is extremely expensive, broad advertising. Um, but the audience is slipping the publicly accessible audience is slipping away. It's one of the things that has come out in in both Facebook stuff and and Twitter stuff this week is and I saw this last week in uh uh Google's earnings calls, ad revenue is down everywhere by a big amount.

Advertisers are like, nope, um, part of it's economic, but part of it is also people are leaving. People are going to private places where they can be among the people that they care about and they like and not spending time in the central public clubs. We were just having a conversation on analytics for marketers uh you know in one of the threads about how social media, public social media for people's like, yeah, I'm I'm not there anymore. I'm I'm here. Um, if you want to join that conversation, you can do so uh for free.

Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. You will find myself and John and Chris wreaking havoc on a daily basis, but having conversations in a private community. It's private in the sense that you can't access it publicly, but it's free to join. You don't need to subscribe to anything, you don't need to pay us to join. We want as many people who want to be there and engage.

And it sounds like again, I'm just I I keep making this comparison, but I'm Mastodon is brand new to me. It sounds like it could be very similar in nature, of it's a place to start a community or a place to join a community similar to a Discord. Very similar. And and what makes it different than that is that semi-public nature, the federation, right? So if you post um hashtags are important on Twitter and Instagram, they are essential on Mastodon.

If you want, because the only way you can search across the federation is by things like hashtags. Um there's a couple of obvious things here. You will notice uh in the in Mastodon, like here we have this person can see their handle at Thomas Fuchs. Um, that is a local user. The one below two below it, uh, at EU commission at social network.europa.eu, that is a federated user.

So in this particular server, they've chosen to bring in select uh content from other servers that are visible to its users. Uh in this case is the European Commission. And so a full Mastodon handle looks like that. It's your at sign, your handle, and then the server that you are on. So it for us, it would be like at Katie Robert at trustinsights.social would be your Mastodon handle if we created our own server.

And then when you're on Mastodon in our server instance locally, you would just be at Katie Robert. But then if somebody from an uh outside of our server in the federation wanted to interact with you or tag you, they would do at Katie Robert at TrustInsights.social. Which totally rolls right off the thumb. It's like email addresses with an extra at handle in front of it. Oh yeah.

Yeah, that is the user experience is a little bit wonky as you get set up because you can't create an account until you pick a server. You know, you have to figure out okay, where am I gonna what's gonna be my home base and at which point you can pick your name? But that doesn't mean that somebody else can't pick a different server and take your name. You know, you you can you can have multiple of the same name, and then again, because of the federated nature, it could actually look like it's you, but it's just coming from a different server, right? Which is an important point that brands might want to consider is by setting up a brand server, you can say, like, yeah, this is our official handle, you know, at target at target.social, like that is the the only official instance that you know, any anyone else's imposter.

So it sounds like considerations for brands and individuals, even if you don't plan to use Mastodon right away, it's like anything else. Just go ahead and grab your handle so that nobody else can grab it, and then you can figure out if it makes sense for you to do something with it. But let's talk a little bit about the UX. So obviously, like this is, you know, Chris, you've already signed up or signed in. Like, what am I am I looking at just here's what's publicly available, and I haven't signed in yet?

Like, walk me through. I'm brand new to Mastodon, I don't even have my username. Like, where do I start? The first place you would start would be the create account. And this is where there's kind of a problem right now.

And in fact, you'll see this in the Mastodon uh in the news tab. Um, the problem is that Twitter users have caused a Mastodon meltdown. I go here to create an account and says, hey, we're full. We're full. Find another server.

Okay, cool. Let's find another server. Where do I find how do I find a server? Okay. Do I want public organization, private individual?

Do I want servers that have manual review or instant access? So let's go just choose instant access, right? And so these are the servers that are listed in the directory that are currently accepting new users, right? So it's like trying to find a new doctor. Exactly.

Network 1.3 million active users up 268%. Right. And you can see these are different, you know, tech hub.social, the hub primarily for passionate technologists, but everyone is welcome. This one is uh free open community for Wales and the Welsh, right? So if that's your community, uh that would be there.

Uh climate justice. Uh and you can sign up to you can create it in multiple accounts if you want to. Uh that uh that can you know get pretty uh thorny after a while. Um, and then if again if you're gonna if you're a brand, you might want to set up you know Walmart.social Mastodon server that you're that you could then list, you know, the official Mastodon server of Walmart Corporation. Come on in.

Deals every Wednesday. Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna stop you again because I feel like now I've gotten lost again. So let's say I'm brand new to this. It's do I create one single username and password, or do I need because each of these says create account, and that to me says I would need to be Katie Robert at toot.wales, Katie Robert at Mindly.social, Katie Robert at climatejustice.social.

You pick a home server where you want to you want you want to live. Okay, so I would pick one, but then I could visit other servers. Like I could be Katie Robert at toot.wales and then Katie Robert at toot.wales visiting Mindly.social. That's right. Okay.

Every server has its own URL. Like you know, Mastodon.online is is its own server. You can see that. So like in the in when we were looking at the initial uh timeline of toots, if you've got that at you know social network.europa.eu, that's somebody else's server. So you could that's another way to find uh all these different servers, but you have your home base, and then you can like email, you know, you can explore other places, but you have your home base.

I see. It I can see why you know everyone broke Mastodon. Um because it I mean I can see it, it looks like it wasn't set up to handle this many users. That wasn't the purpose. Right.

And here's the thing on the back end, many of these servers are really nothing more than just literal servers, right? It's and so as you add users, as those users do stuff, like add, you know, upload animated gifts and stuff, that consumes resources. Um, you know, a server can help only handle so much load. Part of it being decentralized means that there isn't one place that has to maintain this huge IT infrastructure, but part of it being decentralized means that every server has to uh essentially uh run itself, and there are hosting companies um there's uh that are starting to pop up though. There's one uh master host.

They're like, hey, we're closed. We can't afford you know we can't spin up any new instances. So there's a lot of of scaling that the community is not having not ready to do yet. And the process for setting up a server is a little technical. Yeah you were you were sharing that with me earlier.

And I think I commented something like if you're struggling with it, then us, you know, average folks who don't have superhuman technical powers, you know, are definitely not going to be able to figure it out. But John, have you have you only joined or did you also set up a server? Oh yeah no I did not want to get up involved in setting up a server. Like that just seems like an absolute headache. Because I've seen many posts in many of the um different on the other servers saying like don't upload videos here you're gonna kill us you know like we can't take this but I would be interested so Chris when you set one up is it you know can you just get a Docker container then download one that's pre-built or do you have to set up a server and then install a bunch of stuff and make it work I mean is it like so here's the general process first you need a domain name.

I went out and out and bought trust insights.social um you then need to uh put some kind of protections in front of it so we're uh big fans of Cloudflare so I've uh put up Cloudflare you have to connect to an email service for the notifications so I've plugged our Amazon uh simple email stuff into Cloudflare so that the that Amazon's doing the email delivery because otherwise you know I have to set up my mail server, which is not fun. And then we need the wait. So I'm sorry, you're going through this pretty quickly. So first and foremost, I need to buy a URL. If you want to run your own server, that's correct.

So that's obviously very different from setting up your own Discord server. You don't need to buy a URL for that. That's correct. Okay. So I bought my URL, I put protections on it, which is Cloudflare.

And then I have to hook up an email hosting service. Yes. And I can't. Okay. Wow.

Okay. So choices are things like SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES. We already have an Amazon SES account. So I just reused that. Right.

Okay. We're at like pane level eight already of like setting stuff up. You're basically you're building the only thing you haven't done is like buy eight graphics cards and put them in your crate in the server location. So it's funny you mentioned that. I can see why a large global brand like a target, for example, they would have the resources to set up their own server and it would be in their best interest to do so.

But you know, a company like Trust Insights, where you're looking at all of us, maybe not the best use of our time. So then the next step is the actual server, right? So you need to get a server. So this is uh I I could stood up a server on Linode. Uh full disclosure, they are a client of our company.

Um, I bought the server, which is 10 bucks a month. Um, you know, chose the the right number of uh cores and stuff like that, and now and and that takes you to the process where you log into a command line and you start building the server. Now, John, to your point, it is a Docker container, so you need to install Docker on the server. Um, and then you start configuring uh you once you've got Docker installed, then you bring down a Mastodon image from the Mastodon uh social, and at that point you start building all the components to it in the container then uh turn the container on uh and then you verify that the web interface is working um this this next step uh we're already 30 minutes into the show so we're not gonna do this today this next step takes about if you're proficient with the command line and Linux and server configuration takes about 45 minutes if you're not proficient it takes about three years. Oh my god dude that's so I would be on the three year track.

Yes. So there's like this huge INI file that you have to like go through and like tweak all these things to oh no it's much worse than that there's actually uh five or six different ones scattered throughout the server that you need to configure because you have to configure Mastodon itself and Nginx and your internal firewall um and then you have to uh you're if you're if you're going to run email locally you have to configure your SMTP server which is typically PostFix. There's a database server you have to install which is PostgreSQL and then there's um uh file handling system called Redis that you have to install as well. Okay. So I didn't get any of that but what I did take away was if you are a company considering standing up your own server on Mastodon I would recommend you really really really stop and think about the use case for why your company needs its own because I do know servers and I know that servers are never just like a one and done there's a whole maintenance involved with servers there's a lot that can go wrong with servers.

And so making sure you're really prepared to make to stand it up, own it, maintain it. And then you also need, you know, once you're actually have the community, someone needs to, you know, moderate and manage that community just like any other community. It's not a small undertaking. It's not like signing up for a Twitter handle and then just, you know, posting a couple of things here and there. So I mean, Chris, this is for someone like me who doesn't do all of this, the server, like this is overwhelming.

Yes. I would say if you are a company that already has a data center and you already have IT folks that administer like your own internal email server and stuff, then this is just another box in the room. Sure. If you are a company that, you know, like that I'm thinking of like our friend Genie Dietrich at Spin Sux, where everything is outsourced and stuff like that, and you don't have an IT team, this is it, this is something you're going to outsource too. Um, I I if the growth of Mastodon continues, if it becomes more accepted, if the general population starts to use it more, um, I would definitely foresee agencies, you know, standing up to specialize in it.

Um, to uh, you know, the same way that there are people who now specialize in Discord and you know community management and Slack. Um these are all specializations. I would I would not advise that you try this on your own unless you enjoy it, right? So the I enjoy this stuff, so I'm totally fine with with monkeying around with it. I would do this in my free time uh anyway.

Um if you don't enjoy server administration or it's just not your skill set, this is a bad idea because one of the challenges is this is a publicly accessible server. And if you're not good at server administration and things like IT security, this is a disaster waiting to happen because you will have personally identifiable information on a server that is legally yours to under your control. I want to just repeat that because that's a really important point. This is a publicly accessible server. And if you are standing up a publicly accessible server and do not have everything secured and locked down, you then run the risk of sharing personally identifiable information, whether you meant to or not, which can get you into a lot of legal trouble.

So definitely that goes back to if you are considering standing up your own Mastodon server, I would really challenge you to understand the use cases to why you need your own. Now, with that, so Chris, the flip side of that is as a user, do I need what kind of due diligence do I need to do before joining a server to know that my information is protected? The big question is who runs it. Right. So here's the thing.

All social networks. When you are on a social network of any kind, you're uploading data to it, typings, you know, taking photos of yourself, selfies of your food and stuff. There are real people, other human beings on the other end of that in the server room, in the databases, in the data stores and stuff like that, that can see your stuff, right? Um, we sort of just kind of blindly trust and we've seen the consequences of it. Uh, you know, trust Facebook to use our data appropriately.

Um when you have something like an email server, like I used to, when I used to work in a bank, I was the thought police, um, and I had to read other people's email all day long to make sure they weren't sharing stuff that you know that was inappropriate. There's a whole quarantine section, and it was implied, um, because IT policies were still fairly new back then, that you did not have an expectation of privacy um at work. So if Trust Insight sets up a Mastodon server, guess who can see what's on it? The people running it, right? So a big consideration as a user is who's running this thing, and if I have private conversations, do I want those people to be able to see them?

Right. No, and that's a that's a big deal. Um, I used to work for a company um similar in time in sort of the time frame, like IT policies were new. Um, and the person who is responsible for policing the emails abused that power a lot and would mention personal things to the women in the office of hey, so how's that? You know, how was that first date or something?

Which is a really icky example, but it's a very real example. So if you are a new user who is not setting up your own server, who is joining someone else's server, do a little bit of research as to who these people are, and would you be comfortable with them knowing your innermost secrets? And do you need to set up your own personal boundaries to say this is as much as I'm willing to share? And then I need to restrain myself and not go ahead and have those conversations online. Yep.

And that applies for all social networks, right? Yes. There are some things you probably just shouldn't talk about. Um but I would expect communities, for example, like we mentioned, women in analytics, women in data science, I think there would be a strong benefit to them setting up their own servers because they can they have that existing circle of trust already with their community and say, okay, this is we are certifying this is a safe place. We already have to obey this pile of regulations this high.

So your account is safe here. And because you need like any social network, you need contact information to sign up for an account. Again, for the larger brands that have the resources to do this right, if you put it in the policies and you obtain consent, guess what? It's another marketing channel where that is yours to own that you can reach out to people and say, you know, you could direct message your entire server and say, hey, you know, uh sale on pumpkin spice uh stuff this week at Walmart. And it's your server, you can do that.

Right. Sean, what are you thinking about all this? Yeah, I'm gonna wait until WP Engine is like, hey, $29 a month for your own Mastodon server. Just click here, and that's what I'm looking to do. I'm definitely not going to be like building an entire server that the world can hammer on.

And yeah, that's just like way too much headache. And that is an interesting point though, of like especially women in analytics, you know, if they had their own server, there is something to be said for that. That like, okay, this is run by the women in analytics team, so you can be pretty much assured of privacy and that your data is going to be handled responsibly. That's a lot better than like signing up on TikTok where all of China is watching you every single minute of every single day. It's true.

And and this re-emphasizes the importance of brand and the importance of how trusted your brand is. It's costing us literal actual dollars to run this thing. But we certify that it is safe for you to do so. And I could see again, for anybody that's already got a community of some kind. You could provide this as an extra service to your community.

And that of course, if people start using it and such, then you have yet another way to reinforce the loyalty of your community. So it sounds like the big takeaways um, you know, for okay, so there's a few different audiences. One, if you are just an individual, it might make sense for you to secure your name and your handle, but you can sort of take your time figuring out, you know, how you want to, you know, join it, what communities, if you're a large brand, it probably also makes sense to secure your name and your handle. Um, but just sort of randomly signing up for it, it uh it's probably not a good use of your time. Like I personally, I'm not gonna race to go sign up for anything because I'm still in that due diligence phase of what would be my goal of being there.

Do I have the time to spend there? You know, what do I want to get out of it for me personally? Um, you know, I just I feel like people there's a lot of panic around what's happening with Twitter. I totally get that. I respect that.

That doesn't necessarily mean go sign up for Mastodon because it's the it's the next right thing. Explore it, understand your reasons for being there, understand the reasons for your brand being there, you know, and then sort of proceed, you know, with all the advice we're trying to give, especially around setting up your own server. If it is not your skill set, find someone whose skill set it is, period. And I'm gonna keep setting up our server because I, as a data person, am fascinated to see what data we get from the federation. Can it be archived?

Can it be analyzed? Because again, that's kind of what we do. We is is analytics of data and and understanding what's what's possible. Um, because again, if there's a way to bring in that data from the rest of the federation, boy, that would be you know, there's so many issues right now with services like Twitter and say, like, you can only get the last seven days worth of tweets and stuff on something, and you have to pay a gazillion dollars to them for the unrestricted data feed. If it's like um blockchain systems where you know, if you tie into the public blockchain, you get a copy of the whole thing.

If I tie into this and get a copy of the entire federated network or the portions that I care about, that could be super helpful. That could be super helpful for doing influencer identification, network mapping, topic analysis. Um even if we never actually operate the server publicly, I would still be very curious to see um what data is available. John, what are your takeaways? Yeah, there is some interesting uh things on that front as far as what do you get if you're in the federation.

Can you know how much stuff can you peel out of there and scrape that could have some real interesting opportunities? Um, but other yeah, I'm gonna sit back and wait. My big thing, uh, I see a lot of good stuff going on on LinkedIn. I think this is a great opportunity to transfer to more of a, you know, just keep it all business, and hopefully people will get more traffic over there because that drives a lot of action for us on a bunch of fronts. So uh that's where I'm gonna be heading to.

And I uh I don't know, I'll I can freely admit here I coughed up my eight bucks. I bought a blue check. I'm not afraid to, you know, try this for a couple months and see what happens. And uh, you know, I might as well have a front row seat for the fire and explosion to see if I'm happy. Well, there is more than one John Wall in the world, so I totally get it.

You need to be the first and the only. Exactly. Lock it down in a way. The good news is John's career is pretty much winded up, so I've finally uh managed to survive. Hey, I'm still working on it, and and my uh doppelgang is dead.

Oh, it's been dead. Reservoir dogs is still a thing. Like there's still posts that come up about Christopher Penn, but yeah, for the most part, there's no new news at least. I'm the only me, and you guys are grateful for that. You're unique.

Unique and special, just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. Uh, I think that's a good place to pause for today. All right. Thanks everyone.

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