I joined Mastodon a few years ago but have only been using it for the last week. What­ev­er one thinks about our nois­i­est bil­lion­aire’s evolv­ing alt-right lean­ings and ganja-fueled impetu­ous­ness, the lever­aged takeover of Twit­ter added a bil­lion dol­lars per year in inter­est pay­ments to its expens­es. I’m skep­ti­cal that any new fea­ture or income source could over­come this new-owner tax.

But using Mastodon has remind­ed me of some of the ear­ly dreams about Twit­ter evolv­ing into a kind of inter­net util­i­ty, acces­si­ble and remixed by var­i­ous oth­er user-facing apps. It start­ed this way: the offi­cial Twit­ter app start­ed as an inde­pen­dent app called Tweet­ie and ear­ly on, any app could access the Twit­ter feed.

As a util­i­ty mod­el, you could post and auto-post all sorts of raw infor­ma­tion to the Twit­ter feed. For exam­ple, loca­tion check-ins on Foursquare or song lis­tens on Last​.fm. This would be too much infor­ma­tion for some­one to scroll through, of course (in all this there would also be apps that would fil­ter out all this fire­hose infor­ma­tion and just dis­play con­ver­sa­tions). But cus­tom apps had all sorts of potentials.

For exam­ple, you could have an app that fol­lows the check-in Tweets. As an open sys­tem, it would pull in from not just Foursquare but any geography-based ser­vice that dumped its info into the Twit­ter fire­hose. Say you’re vis­it­ing an unfa­mil­iar city, you could open the spe­cial­ized app, click a tab for “restau­rants” and get a list of near­by eater­ies that peo­ple on your social graph like.

Or music: anoth­er app could find songs that your friends are lis­ten­ing to. They might have all sorts of tastes but you could cat­a­log gen­res and tell your app to cre­ate a spe­cif­ic mix — say 20% oldies, 50% indie rock, 20% jazz, and 10% con­tem­po­rary hits. Mul­ti­ple apps could be access­ing and mix­ing this data and because of the open­ness of sys­tems — any log­ging sys­tem, an open Twit­ter, any music mix­er — there would be no built-in monop­oly walled gardens.

This is not how Twit­ter evolved. The com­pa­ny want­ed to make mon­ey out of its unlike­ly 140-character sta­tus updates. It bought one of the pop­u­lar Twit­ter clients, added ads to then, then kneecapped the api’s for rival apps so that they did­n’t work as well no mat­ter how clever their design­ers were.

Mastodon is meant to be decen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted. There are innu­mer­able servers. There’s no obvi­ous way to monop­o­lize things because angry users could just all migrate to anoth­er serv­er. If Mastodon takes off, I’m sure there will be swarms of wannabe young Musks try­ing to fig­ure out how to close it off and siphon off adver­tis­ing dol­lars. But it will be hard. If the ser­vice could get crit­i­cal mass it’s pos­si­ble it could pro­vide a wide ecosys­tem of inter­est­ing services.

And oh yes, I’m at https://​mastodon​.social/​@​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​e​l​ley