Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first phone call was short: “Mister Watson, come here. I want to see you,” he said.
That call would have been pretty useless if there wasn’t a Mr. Watson to answer. But of course there was – Thomas Watson, lab assistant, was there on the other end of the line.
Communication networks, however innovative, need people to make them work. The more people using them, the better. There’s a term for this: network effect, where the value of a communication system grows as more people use it.
This is part of the reason why, even after scandal after scandal, folks have stuck with corporate social media systems, such as Facebook or X. There are a lot of people, including Canadians, still using them, in spite of their myriad problems: surveillance, their domination by the USA, their terrible moderation policies, or their mocking of or refusal to carry Canadian news.
Fortunately, there’s a way out of US-based corporate social media. Many Canadians are using new, federated social media. Systems like Mastodon are popping up all over Canada, from British Columbia to the Maritimes, from Toronto to the Northwest Territories.
Mastodon is unlike US-dominated social media – it can be run by communities, for communities. In fact, there’s not just one Mastodon, but thousands of them. There’s Qlub.social, aimed at Francophone Canadians. There are local Mastodon sites, like Niagara.social or the Atlantic coast’s Oceanplayground.social. There are also Canada-wide Mastodon installations, like Cosocial.ca and Mstdn.ca.
There are tens of thousands of Canadians – politicians, journalists, artists, and everyday people – on Mastodon right now. And even if they are on different installations of Mastodon, they can all connect with one another across Canada, and with people around the world.
But tens of thousands of Canadians isn’t a lot in a country of 40 million. And maybe that’s the problem. The network effect for Canadian Mastodon is not as strong as that of X’s or Facebook’s.
You gotta start somewhere, though.
Mr. Watson picked up the call from Bell in 1876. It would take another 50 years before the telephone really caught on. People slowly adopted it, and as they did, their friends, family members, and professional colleagues did, too. As each one did, the value of the network grew.
The situation Canadians face, where the very existence of the country is under threat and where US-based tech firms are contributing to the desire to dominate, calls for us to move a bit faster than a generation. Every Canadian who signs up for a Mastodon instance (or other non-American social media) contributes to the Canadian network effect. More people joining – more journalists, more members of parliament, more artists – means the network effect keeps building.
In other words: pick up the phone, Canadians.
Robert W. Gehl, York University. @rwg@aoir.social
(No part of this was written with generative AI)