(2017-08-18) Zuckerman Mastodon Is Big In Japan The Reason Why Is Uncomfortable

Ethan Zuckerman: Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable

Recent news about CloudFlare’s decision to stop providing services to the Daily Stormer has me thinking about decentralized publishing, one possible response to intermediary Censorship. As it turns out, it’s an interesting time to catch up on Mastodon, which has grown in a fascinating, and somewhat troubling, way.

Mastodon is different. It’s an open source software package that allows anyone with an internet-connected computer to set up an “instance”. The server administrator is responsible for setting and enforcing rules on her instance, and those rules can vary — sharply — from instance to instance.

To have that ability to share messages with users of other servers, Mastodon has to support “federation”.

we’ve got to talk about lolicon.

Mastodon is mostly a Japanese phenomenon. The two largest Mastodon instances — pawoo.net and mstdn.jp — have over 100,000 users each, significantly more than mastodon.social, the “mothership” site that Rochko himself administers. Three of the top five Mastodon instances are based in Japan, and the Mastodon monitoring project estimates that 61% of the network’s users are Japanese.

In the US, we have a strong taboo about sexualized imagery of children.

In Japan, there’s a distinction between 児童ポルノ — child pornography — and ロリコン — “lolicon”, short for “Lolita complex”.

Matthew Scala writes, “If you like ロリコン then you’re a nerd, but that’s not a big deal. It is legal and popular and sold in bookstores everywhere. I cannot emphasize enough that ロリコン is not only legal but really acceptable in Japan 2017-04-17-SkalaMastodonWtfTimeline

You can still find lolicon on Twitter, but the service has evidently been quite aggressive in removing this sort of imagery.

Japanese users had been looking for a Twitter-like platform where they could share lolicon writing and imagery for some time. They’d used earlier, less-user friendly decentralized social networks, and when Mastodon came around, they flocked to it.

And then Pixiv entered the picture. Pixiv is an enormously popular image archive site in Japan, aimed at artists who create their own drawings — it might be analogous to DeviantArt in the US, but focused on drawings, not photography. Lolicon is wildly popular on Pixiv

In April 2017, Pixiv began hosting a Mastodon instance — Pawoo.net — that quickly became the most popular Mastodon server in the world

In response to the growth of pawoo.net, a number of large, predominantly North American/European Mastodon servers stopped federating posts from the Japanese site

This is a hot topic at the moment. In the wake of Neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, many internet intermediaries — companies and entities that provide services necessary to find, publish and protect online content — have chosen to stop providing services to white nationalist organizations.

The point of decentralized publishing is not censorship resistance — decentralization provides a little resilience to intermediary censorship, but not a lot. Instead, decentralization is important because it allows a community to run under its own rules

One of the challenges for Mastodon is to demonstrate that there are reasons beyond lolicon to run a community under your own rules

Fortunately, there are communities that would greatly benefit from Mastodon: people who’ve grown sick of sexism and harassment on Twitter, but still want the brief, lightweight interaction the site is so good at providing. One of the mysteries of Mastodon is that while many instances were started precisely to provide these alternative spaces, they’ve not grown nearly as fast as those providing space for a subculture banned from Twitter.

you’re unable to share content on the sites you’re used to using — Twitter, in this case — you may be more willing to adopt a new tool, even if its interface is initially unfamiliar. Second, an additional barrier to adoption for decentralized publishing may be that its first large userbase is a population that cannot use centralized social networks. Any stigma associated with this community may make it harder for users with other interests to adopt these new tools.

Beyond porn, the internet has always provided spaces for content that wasn’t widely acceptable. When it was difficult to find information and LGBTQ lifestyles in rural communities, the internet became a lifeline for queer teens.