Back in 2017 I wrote a short column for Wired about “antiviral” design.

I’d recently been using some fun, experimental web services, like Rob Beschizza’s txt.fyi. These sites all allowed you to post stuff online, much as Facebook or Twitter did. But they had no social mechanisms for promoting posts: No “like” buttons, no share buttons, no feed showing which posts were the most popular. Txt.fyi even had a no-robots tag on each post, telling search engines not to index them. The only way someone would see what you’d posted on txt.fyi is if you somehow actively shared the URL with them.

The reason for these curious, un-Twitter-like features?

As Beschizza told me, it was encourage people to communicate and be creative — without constantly thinking about “will I get a huge audience for this”? Beschizza (and the other folks making these similarly antiviral sites) all believed that the design of the big social sites had deformed people’s behavior. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook etc. had coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace. It created a world of people incessantly making posts designed to be operatically theatrical, or to enrage — or to elicit some sort of high-voltage reaction.

As Beschizza said …

“I wanted something where people could publish their thoughts without any false game of social manipulation, one-upmanship, and favor-trading.”

It was, as I called it, “antiviral design”.

I’ve been thinking more and more about how this applies to Mastodon.

I’ve been using Mastodon on and off for several years now. But the influx of newcomers has me using it a lot recently, so I’m noticing more and more how people behave on that network — or, more importantly, how they’re encouraged to behave.

And I’ve realized that Mastodon is a superb example of antiviral design.

It was engineered specifically to create friction — to slow things down a bit. This is a big part of why it behaves so differently from mainstream social networks.

Consider Twitter, as a counterpoint. Over the years, Twitter’s management has increasingly designed the site for one central purpose: To focus the joint attention of millions of users on a particular tweet/joke/meme/person that is blowing up right this very second. Its features are nearly always organized around creating viral surges and momentary happenings — sudden rogue waves of culture that users (many of them, anyway) find thrilling to surf.

These surges might last a few seconds, minutes, hours or days. But they typically evaporate quickly, because the design is also focused on producing a new massive moment of joint attention to replace the existing one. That feeling of “wow, I’m talking about the same thing that tons of other people are also talking about”? That’s the emotional core to contemporary Twitter’s design. Virality is its beating heart.

It is so central to Twitter that, I’d argue, there’s a large cohort of Twitter users who regard “finding and participating in viral waves” as the purpose of social media. Like, that is social media. Without those waves of joint attention, what’s the fun? Why would you do it?

And this is why they often find Mastodon disorienting and underwhelming. Because not only does Mastodon discourage those viral waves — it many ways it actively tries to suppress them.

For example, Mastodon has no analogue of Twitter’s “quote-tweet” option. On Mastodon, you can retweet a post (they call it “boosting”). But you can’t append your own comment while boosting. You can’t quote-tweet.

Whyever not? Because Mastodon’s original designer (and the community of early users) worried that quote-tweeting on Twitter had too often encouraged a lot of “would you look at this bullshit?” posts. And that early Mastodon community didn’t much like those dynamics.

If a short-form social network doesn’t have quote-tweets, it gently inhibits viral waves. Individual utterances are just somewhat less likely to suddenly go all hockey-stick. It’s “antiviral” design.

Another big, big difference with Mastodon is that it has no algorithmic ranking of posts by popularity, virality, or content. Twitter’s algorithm creates a rich-get-richer effect: Once a tweet goes slightly viral, the algorithm picks up on that, pushes it more prominently into users’ feeds, and bingo: It’s a rogue wave.

On Mastodon, in contrast, posts arrive in reverse chronological order. That’s it. If you’re not looking at your feed when a post slides by? You’ll miss it.

Again, that’s a deeply antiviral design choice.

Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.

For example, Mastodon does not let you do a full-text search across all posts. You can search for the names of users, and for hashtags. But if you wanted to see all the posts where people are talking about “cross stitch patterns”? Nope. You can’t do that. As the Mastodon documents note …

Mastodon supports full-text search when ElasticSearch is available. Mastodon’s full-text search allows logged in users to find results from their own toots, their favourites, and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database.

This is remarkably different from Twitter, where searching for “[SUBJECT XYZ]” is an extremely common activity. On Mastodon, the absence makes it a lot harder to discover who’s talking about what. When you first arrive, it can feel totally frustrating. “How’m I supposed to find stuff?”

But again, longtime Mastodon users prefer it that way. They like the fact that it’s harder to find their posts. This is in part because Mastodon’s earliest communities included many subaltern groups who wanted to avoid the dogpiling harassment they’d received on major social networks — and understood that well-engineered friction would help.

Consider a recent story: A couple of Mastodon users recently decided to launch an external search engine that would crawl Mastodon posts, index them, and make them searchable. They included a way for servers to opt out.

But many longtime users of Mastodon hated the idea, and revolted. They absolutely did not want a new mechanism to make posts more easily discoverable. They started posting so much — and so negatively — about the search engine that within hours, the engine’s creators voluntarily shut it down. Ernie Smith has a great Twitter thread about this …

In other words, the community of early users were super serious about consent. They don’t like their utterances circulating in ways they don’t like. You could say, “well, tough; you’re posting stuff in public, right?” But since this is Mastodon, users have powerful tools for responding to actions they don’t like. If the folks on server A don’t like the behavior of people on server B, they can “defederate” from server B; everyone on server B can no longer see what folks on A are doing, and vice versa. (“Defederating”is another deep part of Mastodon’s design that is, ultimately, powerfully antiviral.)

The people making the search engine were good-faith members of Mastodon, and good-faith members don’t want to get defederated from everyone else. So they backed down.

Coming from the world of Twitter, where velocity and flocking behavior are common (and enjoyed by many people) it can seem weird to encounter a culture that finds friction useful and productive; a feature, and not a bug.

This is part of why Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.

And I’m not saying Mastodon’s antivirality is always superior to Twitter’s way of doing business, or that you ought to prefer it! You may find it completely antithetical to how you like to behave online.

One can also argue that Twitter-style viral surges of attention are frequently a force for good, and ought to be encouraged. After all, viral surges have brought crucial social and civic issues to mainstream attention. Indeed, as I noted in that Wired piece from 2017 …

… there are healthy, nontoxic reasons we’re interested in what’s popular online: Some great social good (like Black Lives Matter) has relied on the viral spread of online posts.

The same goes for #metoo. Viral surges, accelerated by quote-tweeting and ranking systems, have often been very powerful ways for groups and causes — particularly ones so often ignored by mass media — to break into wide attention. It might be harder to do that on Mastodon.

It’s also possible that Mastodon’s antiviral qualities could inhibit how many people want to use it. There are many folks who enjoy the vertiginous thrills of Twitter’s wild, ever-shifting “you gotta see this” be-ins. These people take one glance at Mastodon and it seems … boring, confusing. What should I be looking at? Who are the crucial must-follows? Twitter caters attentively to folks who want these questions answered. Mastodon really doesn’t. It doesn’t think those questions should be answered.

This has created occasional culture clashes between longstanding Mastodon users and some Twitter émigrés — the latter of whom have shown up and, well, tried to use Mastodon they way they’ve always used Twitter : Cheerily promoting themselves, chasing likes, posting hot takes, talking a lot about partisan politics. (That latter one is interesting: Many Mastodon servers have a tacit rule that when you post about party politics, you do it using Mastodon’s little “content warning” feature. One can only see the content of the post if you click on it. The idea was that many/most Mastodon users explicitly don’t want their feeds adrown in party-politics discussions, so this is a compromise. The newcomers from Twitter generally found this baffling or annoying.)

As Hugh Rundle notes …

It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there’s been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day.

I don’t really know how this will all shake out.

It’s possible the influx of newcomers will drift away. They’ll discover that, on some level, they don’t really like the antiviral design and culture of Mastodon; they prefer the buzzy surges of Twitter, its Coney Island of the attention-span.

Or maybe they’ll stay, and change Mastodon’s culture. They’ll gradually inject more viral behavior into the mix. That could even happen at the level of the code; there’s nothing stopping an individual server from implementing its own system to rank posts in the main feeds by popularity. Granted, no server has the power to force other servers to rank posts by popularity. But by its mere example, it could sort of persuade others to do so.

What’s more, third-party companies may well set up search engines and ranking systems for “what’s hot” on Mastodon; if they’re just regular web sites, Mastodon servers won’t be able to block them off. If some CEO isn’t an active participant on Mastodon, they won’t care about being walled off by existing users. And maybe a third-party site like that would become a popular destination for many Mastodon users: Huh, I wonder what posts are blowing up right now?

Social systems have a way of evolving in unpredictable ways. Either way it goes, the next phase of Mastodon will be interesting.

(BTW, I’m @[email protected] … if you’re on Mastodon, connect up and say hello so I can follow you back!)