The mastodon effect: meta discussion

Yesterday¹ I did something that I don't know how to qualify. At the beginning I was just playing a silly thing where I registered a new domain on a dynamic domain service. I set up Apache on my home server to answer this domain with a single 211 bytes index.html file, and wrote a toot with a link to that site. What I wanted to see is the mastodon effect, which is similar to the slashdot effect, but supposedly more automatic. The idea is that your followers' Fediverse servers would try to obtain a preview of the page to present the users. And because they might boost that toot to their followers, you can easily either get DDOS'ed by this, or get a huge bill for network traffic.

But for reasons that will be apparent soon, this post is going to be meta. What happened with the toot? Many things.

It has been more than 48 hours¹ since I posted the link and I have more than 2.4k boosts. It's definitely way, way more than I expected. My now second most popular toot² was about an antipodes map³, and it had 200 boosts or so. A couple of months ago, there was this European petition about taxing the rich. That petition needed a million signatures all over Europe. I tried to boost and write about it a lot, but I didn't get much traction, my toots about it only got 6 boosts. Those toots, in contrast to the experiment or the antipodes, were the ones that to me were more important to be spread. And yet, what gets more around from me are amusing toots.

And that is something I have been thinking about for a while. The people that I follow who have lots of followers, boosts and replies are mostly people that are mostly focused on one or maybe two main topics. My feed is all over the place: development, replacing cars with ebikes, 15m cities, things that amuse me, science, (astro)photography, languages, maps, history and god knows what else. And I came to the conclusion that I will never try to focus on one or two topics, that I want to keep my feed like that and that's fine, just don't get down if your interactions are more limited. If I want something more I will have to find it elsewhere (and my psychologist agrees :)

The second thing I want to talk about is that the toot has 418 likes. That's really interesting. I don't know why people liked the post, the post itself, maybe because I explained a little bit the idea behind the post, and of course that's why it has been boosted a lot, but why likes? I have expressed sometimes how I use replying, boosting, liking, and bookmarking myself. Replying means I think I have something to add or ask, or maybe just a joke, which I do often. Boosting is for things that are really, really interesting, things I want to spread, and that I probably don't know how to write about or have the time to do it about myself. Bookmarking is for either reading later (which most of the time never happens), save something on the phone to reply in the computer or vice versa (the phone is awkward to type in, but it has a camera); or I really want to keep it as reference.

To me likes mean two things. The first one is, of course, I like what you did that I don't consider that important enough to boost it, I just want to encourage you to do more of that. For instance, I like when people say that they have added some stuff into OpenStreetMap, made a little better something we all can enjoy, use and contribute. Sometimes I boost, but most of the time I just like, because I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here. Finally, I might like instead of saying 'Thanks'.

Third thing was that 56 people¹ followed me after the experiment toot. Getting extra 20% of followers in 48h feels weird. I don't know why people follow me, but this is definitely unexpected. I did not expect people to follow me just because I am doing this experiment; maybe they just saw something else in my feed and decided to follow :shrug:.

Fourth thing that this experiment did was to break my notifications. I mentioned that I use Phanpy, which luckily does not really send any notifications, it just adds a dot to the bell icon, so there has been no real intrusion in my life, but it means that now that dot by the bell is not useful for me anymore⁴ :) It just sits there because people keep boosting it. I have Phanpy configured such that I have four columns: Notifications, my home screen, the local feed for my server, and bookmarks (see above). I can see when notifications are arriving in that left column, but the icon doesn't work anymore. I also use Phanpy on my mobile phone (no, no dedicated app, I don't consider Mastodon a critical enough service to require my attention when something happens), where I only have one column and the bell icon is completely useless there⁴. I'm not sure if other Mastodon clients have this feature, but Phanpy has the option to only show notifications that have mentions, meaning replies. Phanpy also has had grouping notifications such as boosts and likes into a single element for a long time. I think newer Mastodon versions have this too. These three features have allowed me to keep effectively using this Mastodon account in these last two⁵ days.

Finally, people started commenting about it. Someone wondered if this was GDPR compliant. I am no GDPR expert. I know that it's all about what do you do with personal information. I don't have much personal information from the people that have boosted the toot. I could maybe ask the Mastodon API, but this is not the reason for the experiment. See the last paragraph for more details. The only thing I have is the Apache log, which indicates, among other things, the IP of the client and the user agent. The latter I will use to distinguish Fediverse services from actual people following the link. Then in 15 or few more days logrotate will rotate these logfiles out of existence. There is no permanent storage whatsoever, this is just a home server basic setup, nothing fancy. There is not even a log aggregator or nothing that I can use to massage log lines apart from what I already explained.

People started asking about the results. Sorry people, you will ave to be patient with me. I didn't expect to write this, but now that I am doing it I think it's more important that the raw numbers. They say that they have bookmarked the post so they can come back later and see what happened. What I usually do in these cases is to edit the original post so anybody who has interacted with the tooth will get a notification. But that is fine when it's just a few boosts and likes. Notifying more than 2.4k people where only a handful has expressed interest on the outcome of it sounds like too much. So I will do exactly what they suggest, just reply my own toot with the link to this post, and later another with the future technical post.

One person started by sending a private message telling another person who had evidently boosted the toot, telling them in Dutch that it was probably a scam and suggesting them to unboost the tooth. I answered them that this is no scam, that it is just an idiot trying to do an experiment that went out of hand. And they told me the experiment has been done a million times, which they're totally right, and that I am "profiting from friendly people who risk getting muted or blocked because I don't want to be bothered by experiments in my timeline". My answer to that was, literally, "I would have to think about this" and this is what spurred this post. I mean, I already did some meta commentary before where I talked about how things that I felt really important and pressing got mostly ignored while silly stuff like antipodes or a stupid experiment got more attention.

I can understand the part of where something amusing gets a lot of attention. I understand people that are using Mastodon to amuse themselves, mostly because I do that too. But "profiting from friendly people", I never thought it that way. I mean, maybe this person is an idiot, but I try to think when my actions have unintended consequences. And despite the tone, it made me think, which is good. "Profiting", I kind of am, because I'm asking for a favor from people I don't know. But I didn't force anybody to do what they did. Yes, initially the toot did not explain what it was for, but I edited it not even 15 minutes later mentioning what it was for, and I think that's when it really took off. People have been genuinely boosting this on their own accord. I have no leverage to force anybody to do it; if they do it, they do it because they want. And if that makes this person mute or block people because of that, it's on them. But it took me the whole day to figure this out.

Another person said several things. One was, the domain name suggest that I'm trying to DDoS Mastodon. Yeah, the name was very poorly chosen. It was a puny name in the sense that I just replaced the "do" in Mastodon with "DDoS", and becomes something like "mastodohsn't", which completely smashes the meaning of everything. It's a crappy domain name, I agree. He mentions not visiting ddns.net domains. I didn't think about that. I had had a dynamic domain between 2003 and 2012 for my home server. Back then it was the easiest way to get a domain name. Now I use one that my ISP provides me. But for this experiment I set up a completely different domain name, mostly because I didn't want to have my personal domain name posted publicly. So far I have maintained a very low profile about it. Definitely I have never posted a link to my home server on Mastodon. He mentions that chain letters are already being extensively researched. This is not what I'm doing. I'm interested on how much impact posting a link on the Fediverse has on web servers. "Either you have criminal intent or you are not a scientific researcher". I am not a scientific researcher, but I am not a criminal either. He mentions Sami Kamkar. Sami Kamkar created and released in 2005 the fastest-spreading videos of all time, the MySpace Warms Sami, and was subsequently raided by the United States Secret Service under the Patriot Act. My answer to him was it's a very poorly devised project that went out of hand, which is a very honest and accurate answer. I am definitely very far from being anything similar to Sami Kamkar. Again, I'm just going to peruse some logs. I'm going to try to figure out how to monitor those logs. And that's all. There is no other hidden agenda. There is no other interest. This is my home server. The logs were not going to be retained for any long period of time.

So, in conclusion, to whoever has boosted this, thank you. This is what I asked you to do and this is what you did, good job :) To whoever liked it, thank you too, I guess. To whoever has followed me because of that toot, welcome to a random guy's eclectic feed, I hope you stay. To those who have sent me messages because of the experiment or the toot or some other technical stuff, thank you for being so interested. Thank you to those who made me doubt myself, because it's one of the ways I grow, by double checking myself and deciding whether what I did was right or wrong and I should apologize.

And I think that's it. I hope to write the analysis soon. Right now I have around one hits per minute, so probably for tomorrow night when I will have the time to sit down and do stuff on this.