Unpacking Mastodon
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 November 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, over a million people (including Kai and Kimberly) have joined Mastodon, a decentralized social media network.
On the show today, Robert Gehl, professor of communications and media studies at York University in Toronto, explains the ins and outs of Mastodon and decentralized social media and what it means for our public discourse.
In the News Fix, we’ll talk about why mortgage rates are so darn high (it’s not all because of rising interest rates) and the future of self-driving cars — don’t plan to take your hands off the wheel anytime soon.
Later, we’ll hear from a listener about what it takes to run for a local school board in Wisconsin. Plus, the eBay hack you didn’t know you needed.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
-
- “What Is Mastodon and Why Are People Leaving Twitter for It?” from The New York Times
-
- Kai’s Mastodon handle: @kairyssdal@mastodon.world
-
- Kimberly’s Mastodon handle: @kimberlyadams@mastodon.online
-
- “What Riding in a Self-Driving Tesla Tells Us About the Future of Autonomy” from The New York Times
-
- “Mortgage Rates Are High Because Nobody Is Buying Mortgages” from The Wall Street Journal
We want to hear from you. If you’ve joined Mastodon or are staying with Twitter, let us know how it’s going. We’re at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Kyle Rizdal, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday. That means one topic. Today, it's mastered |
| 0:17.5 | down the decentralized social media platform. We'll talk about what that means. |
| 0:21.0 | There are a lot of people, some, anyway, not a small number, but a lot of people. |
| 0:26.4 | Have flooded through in the wake of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, something like a million people |
| 0:31.2 | have joined since the end of October, including his atoms and myself. That is triple |
| 0:35.6 | the number of active accounts from just a couple of weeks earlier. Shockingly enough. |
| 0:40.0 | Yeah. And as we have talked about, signing up is not exactly super intuitive. We had trouble finding |
| 0:48.0 | each other at first, and then I had trouble finding Amy Scott. And we've had lots of you sending |
| 0:53.4 | in questions about privacy and moderation, or even just where to begin. So today, we're going |
| 0:59.6 | to talk about how it works, whether decentralized social media is the future. And what all this means |
| 1:07.2 | given our, for our public discourse, given Twitter's influence on news and events around the globe. |
| 1:13.0 | So we have gotten, as I have it, an expert to make a smarts on this. Robert Gale's professor |
| 1:18.3 | of communications and media studies at York University up in Toronto, Canada. First of all, |
| 1:22.8 | welcome to the pods. Good to have you on. Ah, thanks for having me. So could you just briefly |
| 1:28.1 | explain to us what mastodon is? Yeah. Of course. Mastodon's free and open source software that |
| 1:36.3 | I could take, and you could take a week and install on our own computers. And let's say I install |
| 1:40.6 | it on my computer, that software lets me do Twitter like things. You know, I can make little posts and |
| 1:47.2 | share images and follow people. And obviously that would just be by myself. So let's say I invited |
| 1:55.3 | some friends to join my server. They sign up and we're sharing things with each other. |
| 2:00.8 | But the thing that's really cool about mastodon is that it speaks a particular software protocol |
| 2:05.9 | that allows it to connect to other servers. So my little server with my friends or colleagues can |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marketplace, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Marketplace and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.