There are two problems that are coming for Mastodon of which apparently an awful lot of people are unaware. These problems are coming for Mastodon not because of anything specific to Mastodon: they come to all growing social media platforms. But for some reason most people haven't noticed them, per se.

The first problem is that scale has social effects. Most technical people know that scale has technological effects. Same thing's true on the social side, too.

For instance, consider the questions "How likely, statistically speaking, are you to run into your boss on this social media platform?" and "How likely, statistically speaking, are you to run into your mother on the social media platform?" While obviously there is wide individual variation based on personal circumstances, in general the answer to those questions is going to be a function of how widespread adoption is in one's communities.

Thing is, people behave differently on a social media platform when they think they might run into their boss there. People behave differently when they think they might run into their mother.

And it's not just bosses and mothers, right? I just use those as obvious examples that have a lot of emotional charge. People also behave differently depending on whether or not they think their next-door neighbors will be there (q.v. Nextdoor.com).

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How people behave on a social media platform turns out to be a function of whom they expect to run into – and whom they actually run into! – on that social media platform. And that turns out to be a function of how penetrant adoption is in their communities.

And a problem here is that so many assume that the behavior of users of a given social media platform is wholly attributable to the features and affordances of that social media platform!

It's very easy to mistake what are effects of being a niche or up-and- coming platform for something the platform is getting right in its design.

The example I gave about people behaving differently depending on what the likelihood is they estimate of running into certain other parties in their lives is not the only example of how scale affects how people engage with a social media platform. There are others that I know about, and probably lots I don't.

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For instance, tech people are probably aware of the phenomenon that virus writers are generally more attracted to writing viruses for platforms that have more users. This is one of the main reasons that there are (and have always been) fewer viruses written against the macOS than Windows.

You've probably never thought of it this way – mad props to the article and Omni I read a long time ago that brought this to my attention – but writing a virus is a kind of *griefing*. Like in a game. It's about fucking up other people's shit for kicks and giggles, if not for profit, and doing so at scale.

Well, griefers – people who are motivated by enjoying griefing as a pastime – are going to be more drawn to bigger platforms with more people to fuck with.

Deliberate malicious obnoxiousness and trolling varies not *linearly* with population size, but *geometrically* or worse.

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Or put another way, a social media platform can avoid a certain amount of social griefing just by being small, and therefore not worth the time of griefers who are looking for bigger fish to fry. As that platform grows, it loses that protection.

So you can't tell, not for sure, how good a platform's systems are for managing that kind of griefing until it gets big enough to really start attracting griefing at scale.

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So that's one problem: there are simply social size effects, that affect how people behave on a social media platform, so as the platform grows in adoption, how people behave on it will change. Usually not in ways that are thought of as for the better, because being a niche platform can avoid various social problems that can no longer be avoided as it grows.

The other problem I think is even more fascinating.

When a social media platform is founded, there are filter effects on who is on that platform. But as a social media platform grows, those filters – some of them – fall away.

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When I talk about filters, I mean things like the following famous examples:

* When Facebook was founded, it was only for students at universities; one could only sign up for it with a college email address. Consequently, Facebook's early userbase was almost entirely college students – with all that implies for socioeconomic class.

* When G+ was founded, it was initially opened to Google employees, and used an invite code system for rollout, such that overwhelmingly its early users were people in the same social worlds as Googlers.

* In the heyday of USENET, the vast majority of internet users, at all, were college students who are majoring in technical topics.

These social spaces, consequently, inherited (in the object oriented sense) the social norms of the demographics that initially populated them.

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Regardless of the specifics of what different platforms' initial userbases are, one of the fascinating consequence of having such filters is a higher level of social homogeneity.

I know it doesn't seem like a very high level of social homogeneity when you're in it. "What are you talking about, lady?! We have both emacs users AND vi users!"

But in a way that is largely invisible at the time to the people in it, they're in a kind of cultural bubble. They don't realize that a certain amount of social interaction is being lubricated by a common set of assumptions about how people behave and how people *should* behave.

Now they may not like those assumptions very much, they may not be very nice assumptions or ones they find are very agreeable. But they're *known*. Even if unconsciously or inchoately. And that turns out to count for a lot, in terms of reducing conflict or making it manageable.

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But, of course, as a social media platform grows, those filters change or fall away.

Facebook expanded enrollment to high school students, then dropped the requirement of an educational affiliation all together.

AOL, which at the time was mailing physical install media to every mailing address in the United States, unsolicited, repeatedly, plugged itself into USENET and opened the floodgates in an event that is referred to as the September That Never Ended.

(For those of you who don't know, that term refers to the fact that previously, large numbers of clueless users who didn't know how to operate USENET only showed up at the beginning of the American academic year. AOL not being tied to the academic calendar and having large numbers of new users every day, effectively swamped the capacity of USENET culture to assimilate new members by sending a September's worth of cluelessness every month forever thereafter.)

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Additionally, as a social media platform becomes more popular, it becomes more worth the effort to get over the speed bumps that discourage adoption.

We've already seen this with regards to Mastodon. Where previously an awful lot of people couldn't be bothered to figure out this whole federation picking a server thing to set up an account in the first place, of late it is seemed much more worth the effort of sorting that out, not just because Twitter sucks and it's users are looking for an alternative, but because Mastodon has become more and more attractive the more and more people use it.

So people who once might have been discouraged from being Mastodon users are no longer discouraged, and that itself is the reduction of a filter. Mastodon is no longer filtering quite so much for people who are unintimidated by new technologies.

Now you might think that's a good thing, you might think that's a bad thing: I'm just pointing out it IS a thing.

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Over time, as a social media platform becomes more and more popular, its membership starts reflecting more and more accurately the full diversity of individuals in a geographic area or linguistic group.

That may be a lovely thing in terms of principles, but it comes with very real challenges – challenges that, frankly, most people are caught entirely by surprise by, and are not really equipped to think about how to deal with.

Most people live in social bubbles to an extent that is hard to overstate. Our societies allow a high degree of autonomy in deciding with whom to affiliate, so we are to various degrees afforded the opportunity to just not deal with people that are too unpleasant for us to deal with. That can include people of cultures we don't particularly like, but it also includes people who are just personally unpleasant.

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Many years ago, at the very beginning of my training to become a therapist, I was having a conversation with a friend (not a therapist) about the challenges of personal security for therapists.

She said, of some example I gave of a threat to therapist safety, "But surely no reasonable person would ever do that!"

"I'm pretty sure," I replied, "the population of people with whom therapists work is not limited only to people who are *reasonable*."

I think of that conversation often when discussing social media. Many of the people who wind up in positions to decide how social media platforms operate and how to try and handle the social problems on them are nice, middle class, college educated, white collar folks whose general attitude to various social challenges is "But surely no reasonable person would ever do that!"

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As a social media platform grows, and its user base becomes more and more reflective of the underlying society it is serving, it will have more and more users on it who behave in ways that the initial culture will not consider "reasonable".

This is the necessary consequence of having less social homogeneity.

Some of that will be because of simple culture clash, where new users come from other cultures with other social expectations and norms. But some of that will be because older users weren't aware they were relying on the niche nature of the platform to just *avoid* antisocial or poorly socialized people, and don't really have a plan for what to do about them when they show up in ever greater numbers, except to leave, only now they *can't* leave, not with impunity, because they're invested in the platform.

So the conflict level goes up dramatically.

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As a side note, one of the additional consequences of this phenomenon – where a growing social media platform starts having a shifting demographic that is more and more culturally and behaviorally diverse, and starts reflecting more and more accurately the underlying diversity of the society it serves, and consequently has more and more expressed conflict – is that a rift opens up between the general mass of users, on the one hand, and the parties that are responsible for the governance of the social media platform, on the other.

This is where things go really sour.

That's because the established users and everyone in a governance position – from a platform's moderators to its software developers to its corporate owners or instance operators – wind up having radically different perspectives, because they are quite literally witnesses to different things.

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The established users, who are still within their own social bubbles, have an experience that feels to them like, "OMG, where did all these jerks come from? The people responsible for running this place should do something to fix it – things were fine here the other day, they need to just make things like they used to be. How hard could it be?" They are only aware of the problems that they encounter personally, or are reported to them socially by other users or through news media coverage of their platform.

But the parties responsible for governance get the fire hose turned on them: they get to hear ALL the complaints. They get an eagle's eye view of the breadth and diversity and extent of problems.

Where individual users see one problem, and don't think it's particularly difficult to solve, the governance parties see a huge number of problems, all at once, such that even if they were easy to solve, it would still be overwhelming just from numbers.

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