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Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
The new social software is subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter.
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.
“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…
