Explosive growth Mastodon brings technical and legal problems
The Twitter alternative Mastodon has been doing well since Musk haters switched to the platform. But with the much larger number of users, the technical and legal problems are also increasing. Will Mastodon survive this growth spurt?
Mastodon: thousands of communicating servers
Mastodon has a different structure than Twitter. Where Twitter consists of a single central database where all Twitter accounts are hosted, Mastodon consists of a large number of separate servers that use the same system. This collection is called the fediverse. In terms of structure, it is somewhat similar to the internet.
If you have a little knowledge of web hosting, you can easily set up your own Mastodon server. And several thousand people have already done so. For example, there is the server for Dutch people mastodon.nl, a Mastodon server for tech enthusiasts, and you for freedom of expression, one for LGBT activists and countless others. Also the languishing social networks of Trump (TruthSocial) and other conservatives (Gab) are in fact disconnected Mastodon servers from the rest.
The more servers, the more load on the network
It all sounds very nice and it’s actually going pretty well. Especially when you consider that it is in fact a hobby project that got out of hand and that it all stays in the air thanks to donations. But the larger the network becomes, the more technical problems can occur. They need the different servers to communicate with each other. And the more servers there are, the more difficult it becomes to keep everything up-to-date for everyone. With 2 million users, like now, things are going reasonably well. What if that becomes 200 million?
Laws and rules
The Internet takes place all over the world and connects countries with completely different legal systems. In Norway, for example, it is a criminal offense to speak derogatorily about transsexuals, while in Hungary it is forbidden to confront children with this. And think about things like copyright. In some countries such as Micronesia, copyright does not even exist, while in the United States the rules are very strict.
As long as the server is located in a certain country, and so are the users, there is little to worry about. Then the server simply falls under the laws and regulations of the country. But what if users from abroad violate the rules? Or if a response is made on a federated server from abroad that is not punishable in that country, but is punishable in a country where the server is located? These problems will have to be solved if Mastodon becomes more than a hobby project. The latter is still exciting.
