Note: this is a comprehensive guide that addresses a lot of different topics. We hope to answer many questions that newcomers have asked before. This guide gets into the meat and potatoes of what all this stuff is, how stuff works, and how to use it to your benefit.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve just signed up for Mastodon. Or, perhaps you’re thinking about trying it out, or have at least heard other people mention it. There are many guides out there about this topic already, but I think this one has something to offer.

I’d like to believe that I’m qualified to talk about this stuff. I’ve been in this space for nearly 15 years now. After starting on one of the oldest federated social networks, I also helped with managing the Diaspora project. I’ve been here since almost the beginning.

This guide exists as a run-down of how to join in, make friends, and have fun in a new space.

Table of Contents

• What the heck is Mastodon?
• What’s the fediverse?
• Getting Started
  
  • What platform should I use?
  • How do I join this thing?
    
    • 
      
      • Checking Instance Details
      • Getting Verified

      
      

    
    

  • Got Any Usage Tips?
    
    • Simple Mode vs Advanced Mode

    
    

  • Accessibility Features
    
    • Media Captioning

    
    

  
  

• Into the Network
  
  • How do the feeds work?
    
    • Home Feed
    • Local Feed
    • Federated Feed
    • Public Feed

    
    

  • How do Privacy Settings Work?
    
    • Public
    • Unlisted
    • Followers Only
    • Mentioned People Only

    
    

  • How do I find people?
    
    • 1. Find Your Mutuals
    • 2. Follow tags and post frequently
    • 3. Explore the network!

    
    

  • How do I interact with people and their stuff on other servers?
    
    • The User Handle
    • The Search Bar
    • Handy Browser Extensions

    
    

  • How do I keep track of who is who?
    
    • Notes
    • Lists

    
    

  
  

• Apps and Frontends
  
  • Mobile Apps (Android and iOS)
  • Web Frontends

  
  

• Dealing with Unwanted Posts, Conflict, and Trolls
  
  • Filtering Your Feed
    
    • Muting vs Blocking
      
      • Muting
      • Blocking
      • Undoing Blocks and Mutes

      
      

    • Reporting Bad Actors
    • Blocking a Domain
    • #Fediblock

    
    

  • Moving to a New Server
    
    • 
      
      • Move from a Different Account
      • Move to a Different Account

      
      

    
    

  
  

What the heck is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a social media platform for microblogging, kind of similar to Twitter. There are three very important key differences:

1. It’s open source, meaning that you can see the source code, make modifications, and run it yourself.
2. It’s federated – people on one server can talk to people on another. In practice, it acts as if two separate parts of the internet can come together as one space to talk.
3. It’s more personal – Mastodon doesn’t really use algorithms to promote influencers, and doesn’t really reflect popular statuses or encourage number-chasing. Instead, Mastodon tends to focus more on personal authenticity, where you can openly express yourself.

But now, it’s time to address the elephant in the room (I’m sorry). What you’ve probably heard people call “The Mastodon Network” is actually a much bigger, crazier thing called the Fediverse.

What’s the fediverse?

Wikipedia describes the fediverse as “an ensemble of different platforms that all communicate using a common protocol.” The most popular protocol is a W3C Standard called ActivityPub, which is what Mastodon and many other platforms use. The network is largely composed of open source projects, running across many different servers, using open communication protocols. No individual institution can own all of the fediverse, and there’s no central authority controlling it.

The fediverse started around early 2008 / 2009 with a platform called StatusNet. Some of you may be familiar with Identi.ca, a popular hub for open source nerds to tweet about their interests. A lot of changes have come since then.

“The Many Branches of the Fediverse“ by Per Axbom, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International

The biggest thing to know about the fediverse in 2023 is that it’s massive. There are analogues to almost every kind of corporate social platform imaginable. The crazy part is that you can follow accounts on any of the following projects directly from Mastodon:

• Microblogging: Misskey, Pleroma, Bonfire
• Macroblogging: Friendica, Smithereen
• Image-Sharing: Pixelfed
• Meetups: Mobilizon
• Video: PeerTube
• Podcasting: CastoPod, Funkwhale
• LiveStreaming: OwnCast, PeerTube
• Music: Funkwhale, Reel2Bits
• Book Reviews: Bookwyrm, Inventaire
• Blogging: WriteFreely, WordPress (with some plugins)

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s an estimated 124+ platforms in various states of development, most of which can interoperate with one another. For many, the common denominator is basic compatibility with Mastodon.

A PeerTube video, shown on both PeerTube’s side as well as Mastodon.

What does this mean in practice? The common barriers you’re familiar with on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook don’t exist here. Why can’t you like an Instagram post from Twitter, or send a Myspace message to someone on Facebook? The people running these sites have a monetary interest in keeping you in, and other networks out.

Getting Started

What platform should I use?

My recommendation if you’re just starting out: try Mastodon first. Mastodon sets a pretty good standard of expectations when using the network for the first time. Most platforms on the network strive for compatability with Mastodon, giving you the benefit to try things out.

Honestly, starting with Mastodon and shifting to something else is pretty common for people on the network. Many platforms implement Mastodon’s own client API, meaning dozens of Mastodon apps can be used elsewhere.

How do I join this thing?

A lot of people say that finding a place to initially sign up is the hardest part of the process. You can always move to a new server, if it feels better than your current one. We’ll get into that a bit later.

Example of the Mastodon Instance picker in action

For better or worse, Mastodon’s own instance picker is pretty decent, and gives you a lot of variety. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter where you end up. You can still demonstrate your whole yourself, even if you hang out on a themed server. It’s not difficult to start out on a place like mastodon.social or mastodon.online, and then migrate to somewhere more interesting.

Checking Instance Details

Before signing up to your server of choice, take a good look on that instance’s About page. Server details can always be found by clicking the “Learn More” button. You can see an example at: mastodon.gamedev.place/about

The About page of Mastodon Gamedev Place,

A well-moderated instance will have fleshed-out details describing the server, its community rules, and how it acts towards particular problem-child servers.

The Moderated Servers section is of particular note, because it lists what policies other servers are treated by. Generally, these are problem-child instances whose own rules don’t align with this servers. there are two statuses: Limited, and Suspended. If a server is Limited, you can still follow accounts, they just won’t show up on the Federated timeline. If a server is Suspended, federation with them will not work at all.

Getting Verified

The first thing to do after signing up is to get verified. Verification works a little bit differently than on Twitter. Instead of having a company verify who you are, the main way to prove your identity is through your website.

By default, Mastodon provides four custom metadata fields for an account. These can contain information of any type, but most often denote accounts on other websites. There’s also an HTML snippet that links back to your profile. Mine looks like this:
<a rel="me" href="https://social.treehouse.systems/@deadsuperhero">Mastodon</a>
Basically, it’s a normal HTML link to my profile, but it uses a property called rel=me. In a nutshell: putting this link on a webpage and pointing one of your account fields at the page will cause Mastodon to validate the link. It sees that rel=me and says “Oh yeah, this person’s profile really did make this page, because the link exists there.”

Validating identity through a personal website or other accounts is a great way to say “here’s my proof, I am who I say I am” in a large federated network.

Got Any Usage Tips?

Simple Mode vs Advanced Mode

One other thing you ought to decide early on is what mode you want Mastodon’s interface to take. Mastodon ships with two of them: Simple, and Advanced. Here’s what they look like, for sake of comparison:

Your feed in Simple Mode

Simple Mode is relatively Twitter-like, and it works just fine for those who want that experience. You get a singular timeline of everything sorted in a chronological order. The upside is that posts and profiles are bigger, because of a greater amount of space available.

The multi-column insanity of Advanced Mode

Advanced Mode gives you a multi-column view that’s reminiscent of TweetDeck. It’s the original interface that Mastodon shipped when it first launched. Honestly, it’s really good, and I prefer to use the network this way. Being able to see my home feed, notifications, and DM’s in one place is really convenient, and being able to create individual feeds for tags or lists allows you to keep eyeballs on multiple things without having to navigate away.

Accessibility Features

Before we dive into all of the cool stuff that you can do, it’s important to talk about Acessibility Features. Accessibility is a huge part of fediverse culture and a prerequisite for many users with disabilities.

Media Captioning

Captioning your images, audio, and video attachments in Mastodon is a huge part of the culture. Many users on the network rely on screen readers to parse their feeds. Not everyone has the ability to see images, watch videos, or hear audio. You’re doing those people a huge favor by adding alt text to these things prior to posting. To add a description, simply click Edit on any image thumbnail. Type your description, then click Apply.

• A picture, just after attaching it to a post
• Hover the mouse over the thumbnail, and click “Edit”
• A window will pop up with a text field for a detailed description, and you’ll be able to set the focal point for the thumbnail on the right.

There are a few tools at your disposal to make your life easier. One such feature is the “Detect text from picture” option that shows up. It only really works with screenshots that have a lot of text on them. Things like captions on memes don’t work so well – but it can do a fine job of transcribing lengthy notes.

“Detect text from picture” does a great job at transcribing text in images, but only if there aren’t a lot of other visual elements in the image.

After that, the text you entered will go into a special part of the image, and can be read by screen readers.

When you hover over any picture containing a caption, it will show the description. Screen readers can pick this up and read what it says!

Into the Network

Now that you’ve joined Mastodon, it’s time to explain some of the ins-and-outs of the platform. This might seem like a lot at first. Once you get a hang of the basics, it all clicks into place.

How do the feeds work?

Most fediverse platforms, Mastodon included, include four types of main feeds: Home, Local, Federated, and Public. These timelines basically show you different collections of posts based on what your server is aware of.

Various differnt timelines: Home, Local, and Federated

Home Feed

This feed consists of everybody you’re following, along with whatever hashtags you’re subscribed to. It’s generally the “main feed” that you’ll likely use most of the time.

Local Feed

The local feed is your server’s home feed, and shows every public post made by the people hosted on it. You can kind of think of it as your local town square. On large instances, this timeline tends to move very quickly. On smaller instances, it can be a very cozy way to see what’s going on in your community.

Federated Feed

The federated timeline could be considered the firehose of everything your server is currently aware of. Not only does it feature posts by you and the people you follow, it also includes posts made by people that other folks on your server also follow. This feed is generally the most chaotic and random, but can occasionally be great for discovery.

Public Feed

The public feed is a firehose of absolutely every status an instance is aware of, local or federated, that has the Public privacy setting. Public posts are visible to everyone, even people not logged in.

How do Privacy Settings Work?

Mastodon has limited support for privacy scopes on statuses. Other platforms, like Friendica or Hubzilla, have much more robust options that let you choose which of your contacts can see or respond to a specific post. Mastodon instead has something called scopes, and by default, there are four options: Public, Unlisted, Followers Only, and Mentioned People Only.

Public

The Public Scope is the most open and visible option for a post. Public statuses can potentially appear on all timelines, are visible to people on other servers, and can be seen even by people who are logged out.

Unlisted

The Unlisted Scope is much like the Public Scope, except that it only appears on the Home timeline. Unlisted statuses can still be boosted and replied to, and people with a link to the status can still see it. The key distinction is that it doesn’t appear on other timelines.

Followers Only

The Followers Only scope is effectively a private status, with the understanding that only your followers can read or respond to it. Private statuses cannot be boosted, and people outside of your follower group will just see that a status doesn’t exist.

Mentioned People Only

The Mentioned People Only scope is basically the equivalent of a DM. Basically, only the people mentioned in the message body can see or respond to a status with this scope.

How do I find people?

Joining any new network can feel a bit like a catch-22: for you to get the most out of this place, you need to find people and hang out here. But, you need to hang out here in order to find people.

Here are three approaches that work well for me:

1. Find Your Mutuals

I’m going to give you the bad news first: there were a bunch of great tools for figuring out who your mutuals are, but Twitter made a very bad decision about API pricing, and killed most of those apps. Supposedly, FediFinder might still work, but your mileage may very.

All you need to do is take that file you downloaded, and under Profile Settings, go to Import and export -> Import

The basic premise is that tools like FediFinder scan your list of followers and mutuals, and then compare those people’s accounts to Mastodon accounts that they’ve linked to. You can then upload that into an importer tool that lives in your profile settings. Provided the tool you used found some people, Mastodon will then queue a bunch of follow requests on your behalf.

2. Follow tags and post frequently

I dunno, this just seemed like an easy example tag?

One of the recent updates to Mastodon includes the ability for users to subscribe to Hashtags. This pulls a lot of tagged content into your stream from people you don’t follow, to show you a thing you might be interested in. Contrary to Twitter, Mastodon extensively uses hashtags as the main way to add posts to an index and help people search for stuff.

3. Explore the network!

There are a bunch of different ways to do this. At this point, there are community tools like Trunk, which lists a bunch of profiles under different interest categories. There are also specialized lists that are one internet search away, such as Mastodon for Academics, or Mastodon Journalists. These kinds of resources can help professionals rebuild their community graphs and connect with peers.

Prior to these tools existing, I used to rely on the “human crawler” method of discovery:

1. Find a server that looks interesting from the Mastodon Instance Picker. I like to make games as a hobby, so I went with Gamedev Mastodon.
2. Most Mastodon servers offer a User Directory. For example, the instance I looked at has one at: mastodon.gamedev.place/directo…
3. Find an interesting account on there that seems active, and follow them.
4. Check out some of the people they follow, and some of the people who they’re boosting on their timelines.
5. Rinse and Repeat

How do I interact with people and their stuff on other servers?

Some newcomers get kind of confused about dealing with remote stuff, and are quick to classify it as “a clunky experience”. While the experience could definitely be better, there are a few key concepts that, if you learn them earlier on, can kind of help you understand how things are supposed to work.

The User Handle

The first thing to take note of is how usernames on Mastodon work. Each user account has something that looks a bit like an email address. This is called a handle, and it’s a unique identifier for what is called an actor, which is an account capable of federation. Alternatively, I’ve also heard people refer to it as a webfinger address, because the Webfinger technology is used to perform the lookup.

You can always figure out what your handle is by looking at your profile, right under your username.

My webfinger address, for example, is @deadsuperhero@treehouse.systems. Pretty much any profile on the fediverse follows this format of @user@domain.tld. This is helpful to remember: if you’re not sure what the full URL is to an individual account, you can always fall back to the handle.

The Search Bar

Most federated social networks rely on the search bar to pull in remote stuff. I think the primary reasoning is that, technically, you’re performing a lookup, and that counts as performing a type of search. In Mastodon, the search bar looks like this:

So, as an example, let’s throw my webfinger address in the search, and see what comes up.

It’s me!

If we click on that result, we can see a full profile, with any posts that our server knows about.

We can also do the same things with posts that our server doesn’t know about, by using the full post URL instead. Here’s an example for this post I made a while ago:

Okay, so we throw in a URL, and out comes a result! This is really handy for situations where you want to interact with something you saw elsewhere, but your server doesn’t have a copy to interact with.

Handy Browser Extensions

At this point, people have started developing browser extensions to work around some painful UX hurdles. The default experience for Mastodon kind of sucks when it comes to remote content, because other sites don’t really have a mechanism to log you in on their end.

As a workaround, there are extensions such as FediAct and Graze available for both Firefox and Chrome-based browsers. These extensions allow you to like, boost, and reply to statuses on other sites without having to navigate back to your Mastodon instance, and allow you to also follow people in the same way.

There’s also a great browser extension called StreetPass, which can figure out various people’s handles based on what websites you visit. A lot of people use their own websites to verify their identities on Mastodon, so StreetPass is able to pick up that data and put it on a list for you when you visit them.

How do I keep track of who is who?

I won’t lie to you: it’s a big network. A lot of people like to try out different instances and even different platforms at the same time. It can get a little difficult to remember which person’s account goes to which thing. There are two tools that can help with that: Notes, and Lists.

Notes

Every profile provides a Notes section. Only you can see the contents, and they’re simply kept by your account for easy reference.

A note I made for myself, from another account.

Lists

Lists are a less prominent feature in Mastodon, but I sometimes use them to organize fediverse developers and game designers into their own contact groups.

A list featuring Fediverse developers I know.

What’s cool about Lists is that you can use them to basically build a special timeline, and specify whether you’re just seeing top-level statuses, responses between members, or just everything posted by people on the list.

These timelines are really handy. They can help you narrow down the stream of posts to focus on what very specific accounts are talking about. For me, keeping track of Fediverse development is a big deal, so I’m happy to have this.

Apps and Frontends

Mastodon has a lot of apps, and I mean A LOT of apps. It’s very reminiscent of the early days of Twitter, where a zillion different kinds of clients existed, and they all geared for providing different experiences. Mastodon offers a pretty easy-to-understand API for client developers, and it’s so popular that a lot of other fediverse platforms like Pleroma have also implemented it, and can use the same apps.

Mobile Apps (Android and iOS)

There are so many great mobile apps for Mastodon. I can’t overstate how much this changed the game for the fediverse, which only had really terrible apps prior to 2016. Being able to interact with the network easily, without friction, on the go, really made the place more accessible at all hours of the day. I’m not going to name too many apps, but I’ll throw out a few great ones.

Tusky (Android, Free)

Tusky is, for all intents and purposes, one of the best clients on Android. It’s held that title for a long time. The UI is clean, the experience is buttery smooth, and it supports all of the features you would expect from the Web version of Mastodon. It’s great on the go, multi-account, and my go-to app after all these years.

Megalodon (Android, Free)

Megalodon is a fork of the official Mastodon app, but it adds in quite a few features that are missing from the official version: support for the Federated Timeline, post scheduling, and hashtag following are just a few of the many improvements this app brings in over its predecessor.

Ice Cubes (iOS, Free)

Ice Cubes is an exciting new app for iOS that offers a high degree of customization, custom colors, timelines, and more.

Ivory (iOS & Mac, Paid Subscription)

After shutting down work on the legendary Tweetbot, the Tapbots company went ahead and developed and incredible new app for Mastodon called Ivory. It really demonstrates their app design expertise.

Toot! (iOS, $3.99)

Toot! is a unique standout from most of the other ones listed. One really positive upside is how the client approaches complex threads with many replies, where each sub-thread is denoted with a different color.

Web Frontends

Because the Mastodon API is open, and free for anyone to implement, there are also a fair share of alternative web frontends that you can use in the browser, if the default one doesn’t suit you.

Elk

Elk is an incredible project to build a more Twitter-like frontend while making accessibility a top concern of the design process. There’s a public demo on elk.zone you can try out with your account.

Semaphore

Semaphore is a continuation of Nolan Lawson’s excellent Pinafore project, and continues to focus on being lightweight, easy to use, and fast.

Cuckoo Plus

Cuckoo Plus is a clone of the Google+ web interface, and does a pretty convincing job. The only downside is that the client does not currently support Circles, which was a big part of the original Google+ experience.

Brutaldon

True to its name, Brutaldon is a client made with brutalist design tendencies. It’s dead simple, uses no javascript, and even works well in text-based web browsers like Lynx, w3m, and elinks.

Dealing with Unwanted Posts, Conflict, and Trolls

You may have heard some people talking about how Mastodon is so much nicer than Twitter. In some ways, that’s absolutely true: there are massive hobbyist communities, people are all too willing to wear their hearts on their sleeves and be authentic, and people are out there sharing and joking and creating things and having a great time together.

But, the fact remains: this is still the Internet, and there are assholes everywhere. Even on this fabulous new network. In fact, I won’t sugar coat it: some spaces on the network are outright hostile, in that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and fascist. Some people are utterly vile, and hang out in spaces that enable them. Others are just petty, and want to stir up drama. Whatever the case may be, here’s a few tips to ensure that none of those people ruin your day.

Filtering Your Feed

One really great quality-of-life feature that newer releases of Mastodon have is the ability to simply filter out stuff you don’t want to see. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be over-the-top, egregious stuff. For example, maybe you’re just tired of seeing posts about Elon Musk in your feed.

The filters screen. Each filter is capable of accepting multiple keywords or phrases in them.

In your Settings, under the Filters category, you can set comprehensive rules on whether or not to hide stuff. You can choose to either cover qualifying posts with a Content Warning, or opt to take that stuff out of your timeline completely. Each filter can have any variety of keywords in it, pertaining to a subject based on keywords in the post body.

Just some examples, I don’t really filter much.

Muting vs Blocking

Occasionally, you’re going to have people in your mentions (or your timeline) that’s just posting in a way that doesn’t suit you. Maybe they’re just being a bit obnoxious, or maybe they’re posting a marathon of text about something you’d rather not see right now. There are two tools for handling this, based on how things escalate: Blocking and Muting.

Muting

Muting can be considered a soft block that you can set a duration on. This person is still technically following you, and can see your posts. The important thing is that you won’t see anything from them for a while. This method is useful when you think somebody needs to cool down, without cutting off the relationship entirely.

Blocking

Blocking is more encompassing, in that a person won’t be able to see or interact with you. You won’t be able to see them, either. It’s basically a way for each of you to pretend that the other person doesn’t exist.

Undoing Blocks and Mutes

Muted Users, Blocked Users, Blocked Domains
Every now and then, you’ll need to undo a block or a mute. Maybe you clicked the wrong thing, maybe that person made public amends, or maybe that marathon of the show they watch finally ended. The good news is that you can manage these things in your own user menu, on your profile page.

Reporting Bad Actors

Sometimes, an otherwise good instance might suffer from a handful of bullies hanging out on it. This is definitely a possibility when it comes to very large instances, with small moderation teams, that happen to be open for public registration. Their moderation team can’t possibly see everything on their own, but filling out a report can help triage between moderation teams.

Blocking a Domain

Sometimes, the dynamic might be the opposite of the last one: maybe there’s some good people on the instance, but the admins and mods are either too lazy to do anything about bad behavior, or actively encourage it.

If your reports are going ignored by the receiving server, and you don’t want to play whack-a-mole with a bunch of different people over there, your best option may be to simply block the domain.

#Fediblock

Fediblock is an ongoing conversation that exists under the #fediblock tag on any instance. It’s an informal way for people to talk about instances with particularly bad policies, problematic communities, and poor moderation, and serves as an advisory for server admins about what domains and/or accounts they should probably think about blocking. If you see an instance that’s repeatedly ignored your reports or engaged in malicious behavior, making a post with the #fediblock tag is probably a good idea.

Moving to a New Server

At some point, you’ll make the decision to move to a new Mastodon instance. The good news here is that you can hook your new account up to your old one, and run an import process. Your old account will get marked as Archived, and your followers and followers will get carried over to your new account.

The layout is a little confusing, but all you need to do is: set up a new account somewhere, and point your two accounts at each other before initiating a move.

Move from a Different Account

After you’ve signed up to a new instance, go to your Account Settings, and click “Moving from a different account“. You’ll be taken to a screen to set up your account alias. Type in the fediverse handle of your old account, and save it here. Afterwards, switch back to your old account for the next step.

Move to a Different Account

Log back in to your old account, and navigate to the Account Settings on there. This time, we’re going to click “Move to a different account“. Type in your new fediverse handle and password, then click Move Followers.

After you’ve done this, your followers will transfer over to your new Mastodon account, and your old one will be set up as a redirect that points to where you are now.

That about sums it up! We hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and maybe learned a useful thing or two, and that it helped you in trying out Mastodon for the first time!

wedistribute.org/2023/07/masto…

#fediblock #fediverse #Mastodon

Goodreads listing here: goodreads.com/book/show/438628…

A vital read for anyone interested in the inner workings of capitalism's most fundamental institution.

This has immediately become one of the best books I've ever read. If you want a systematic takedown of the Ricardian labour theory of value, you will not find a better text.

Bailey is ferocious and utterly uncompromising in his immanent critique. At first he simply shows the flawed logic used by Ricardo, Mill et al. when progressing from their theory of value to even the most minimally fleshed-out examples, but later in the book he goes ham ripping the LTV's basic premises to shreds.

He does all of this with precise and taut chains of argument that are a joy to read; and he peppers them with understated yet devastating zingers. I can't count the number of times I said "hey [partner name], listen to this...!"

Bailey, like Marx, takes seriously the importance of the ontology of value. He understands that the form of production and exchange have huge ramifications for society as a whole. And while Marx is definitely more sociological, Bailey lays vital groundwork for effectively doing this kind of sociological analysis

Given that I'm a Marxist and that I read this book to further my knowledge of the value-form, I'm going to start with Marx and work from there.

So, some of you may also know that Marx explicitly critiques Bailey's book in his 1861-1863 manuscripts, but unfortunately Marx's criticism of this is lacking.

And while I love chapter 1 of Capital as much as any Wertform nerd, Marx definitely hung on to the LTV a bit too hard by virtue of his "third thing" argument.

Marx's (very angry) critique of Bailey mostly reduces to this "third thing" position: he believes that in order for commodities to be commensurable (ie, able to be be exchanged for one another on a quantitative basis), they must have some substance in common, which Marx terms abstract labour. Likewise, Marx believes (at least in the manuscripts) that each commodity as such only has one value, which can then be expressed in some quantity of another commodity.

So Marx's model looks something like this:

Abstract Labour -> Value -> Expression of Value

There are some problems with this model, however. First, like utility in neoclassicism, abstract labour is completely unmeasurable, and it can be inferred only in retrospect.

Second, this model explicitly does not handle other subjects of exchange that use the value form but are not products of labour (land being the obvious example, something Marx only gets around to later and unsuccessfully, c.f. the transformation problem debate).

The problem is that if there are things that use the value form but don't have value, then price and value are two different phenomena, of which price is a mere surface expression. This then creates the transformation problem and the questions of whether or not capitalists are evolutionarily pressured to maximise value or price, and so on. It becomes a huge mess that at best requires extensive exegetical work to make functional.

Bailey on the other hand dispenses with all this in one fell swoop, by showing that value is inherently relational and nothing but relational.

In other words, something may have use, completely outside of exchange or comparison: bread is food, iron can be used to make tools. But we do not call this value, typically. We would say "what is the use of iron," but not "what is the value of iron," for this purpose.

"The value of iron" inherently implies comparison and the choice between alternatives: do I want X more than Y?
And so it is impossible to express the value of a thing except through some other thing. And this is true even prior to the mode of production: this is a deeply, fundamentally human process, and is effectively just the process of making any decision between alternatives. If we ask someone "what do you value in a partner?," for example, what it really means is something like "what traits do you select for?."

So when Marx (or Ricardo, or Heinrich) say that a commodity has both a real AND nominal price, or is "trading above it's value," or the like, what can that possibly mean? What would it mean for a thing to have a value as a property inherent in itself prior to any act of exchange?

To be clear someone can list anything for any price at all: I could list my boots on eBay for ten million pounds of I so desire, but no one will buy them. But if they do sell, say for five hundred pounds, you would be well within your right to say "I don't think they're worth that much," but all that actually amounts to when you get down to it is the fact that you wouldn't make that exchange. Which is a perfectly valid position, but it doesn't erase the reality that this act of exchange did actually occur.

Bailey's insight is that even in a world dominated by commodity fetishism, this is ultimately a mental process: neither uses nor different kinds of labour share anything to render them commensurable with each other. Instead, they are rendered commensurable only via the real abstraction of exchange, of which there is no fundamental substance beyond people deciding to do the specific act of exchange.

Much like Austen's performativity whereby to say "I promise" is itself the action of promising, to act out exchange between 2A and 10 pounds is itself to render A as being worth 5 pounds. At least at this moment in time and space.

One has to take Occam's Razor to Marx's model: what is the point of maintaining that labour (even in abstracted form) is the source of value? When we know there are things like land, monopoly/market power, and one-off collectors' items that both break this pattern constantly? And (at least in the case of the first two), these are fundamental to the everyday functioning of capitalism. It's not helped by the fact that what abstract labour even is is highly controversial within Marxism, and numerous completely incompatible understandings exist.

To his credit, Marx is hitting at something very important here, it's just that abstract labour is a suboptimal tool to represent it. What he is hitting at is fourfold:

First, he's hitting at cost of production in general, which sets a hard limit to the viability/profitability of a product, and which said product will orbit more closely around the greater the competition between producers.

Secondly, he's hitting at the cost of maintaining the life of the average worker (the reproductive cost of the average worker, also known as the "real value of labour" in the political economic literature), which is both a cost of production and a transcendental minimum necessary for any work to be carried out at all (you need your workers to be alive to do their jobs).

Thirdly, he's pointing out that different labours are worth different amounts. It's impossible to tell whether a professor writing a paper is working harder than a bricklayer for instance, they're just not commensurable activities. But more than this, social prestige effects the price of labour power also: female-dominated industries are generally considered less valuable and have lower pay rates.

Finally and most innovatively is what Sohn-Rethel calls the social validation of labour: every society must decide how to expend it's ability to labour, and labour can be wasted. It's only at the point of successful exchange that the labour expended in the production of a commodity in a sense joins the mass of successfully utilised labour. And what makes capitalism unique is that this decision of expenditure is fundamentally decentralised and uncontrolled.

But why put these multifarious causes inside the value-form itself, when the value-form clearly doesn't actually give a solitary crap any of these issues? In fact it is the sheer dumb simplicity of the value-form that causes so many problems:

The value-form has no concept of society, survival or necessity, so welfare and collective bargaining by workers becomes necessary in the face of capital accumulation.

The value-form has no mechanism to analyse why one kind of labour is worth more than the other. The costs of production, misogyny and bargaining power are all downstream of the form itself, and the form doesn't say anything about how valuable any specific article should be.

The value-form has no way of rewarding inventions as such, only the sale of units of commodities, so intellectual property rights emerge.

The value-form has no way of rewarding infinitely reproducible articles, like digital data, and so artificial limits (DRM), artificial scarcity and moralistic claims like "developers need to eat and deserve a reward for their hard work" are leveled to try to squeeze digital objects into the value-form as best as possible, despite it not at all being a natural fit.

The value-form does not know what an externality is and has no mechanism to account for externalities.

The value-form does not have a concept of corruption, or the external legal institutions required to make a capitalist society actually functional, and will erode them naturally.

The value-form is entirely empty of all specific content. There is a void at the heart of capitalism.

Bailey also presages Marx and Roy Bhaskar in other important ways: the inherent emergent necessity of the money-form, and a stratified ontology with many interacting powers, but this review is already far too long, so I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader.

This is a book that should be widely read by Marxists of all stripes, as it will rip the guts out of any lingering Ricardianism rattling around your brain.

Chris Arthur is the name in particular if you want to read more in this direction (in fact, his paper The Spectral Ontology of Value is very good, and put me on this track in the first place). Other thinkers that Arthur lists in this tendency (of moving incorrect or downstream specifics out of the value-form) are I. I. Rubin and Moishe Postone.

Finally, I will share my view of the origin of the value-form:

Use -> evaluation -> pre-monetary forms (like debt and credit) -> the money-form (the generalised unit of exchange) -> the commodity-form (large-scale production for exchange) -> commodity fetishism and capital (the universalisation of commodity production and the self-expansion of money).

Okay, I found this on Reddit and I had to share it.

A guy shows up in r/bbs, a subreddit dedicated to classic and new computer bulletin board systems. I'm a big fan. Anyway, this guy shows up and says: Hey, does anyone remember the BBS game my dad wrote? It was called Buccaneer, and it was a pirate game you played on BBSes. Dad died six and a half years ago and I just wonder if anyone heard of his game?

Turns out... people have heard of Buccaneer.

One person has it running on their board. Another person was able to share the ZIP file for others to put it on their boards. Oh no! It was software you had to buy if you wanted the full version of it. But Dad is gone, and the kiddo has no idea how to open up the software to everyone.

No problem, someone posted a quick C programme that will generate keys for you. The kid might be crying because now even more people can play his dad’s game.

There’s some kinda lesson here in abandonware, but also in humanity. This kid may or may not own the copyrights to his dad’s stuff. Who knows? But one thing he certainly doesn’t have is the ability to make it work.

But because of a few folks on the Internet, running some old software, and someone who took a few minutes to write a keygen? Well, his dad is still out there somewhere, and he’s playing pirates.

reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/1b62…