One month on Mastodon

Contents

Introduction ⚓

It’s been a little over one month since I opened my Mastodon account 🔗. I was part of the massive Twitter exodus that took place after the first wave of layoffs and the Twitter Blue 🔗 fiasco. Since then, I’ve had time to learn about the Fediverse, see how people communicate on it, peek my head into its culture, and even make a few friends along the way. So I thought to record some of my impressions in a blog.

Why Mastodon? ⚓

Let’s start with the big question: why did I join Mastodon and not one of the dozens of other social media sites and platforms like TikTok, Telegram, Hive, etc.?

For me, culture and governance is a huge differentiator in the platforms I use. I was never really an avid Twitter user because it felt like just another overly massive, indifferent, algorithm-driven ad machine. If I can help it, I’d much rather be part of a smaller, self-governing community than a massive platform ran by a corporation.

Smaller communities are generally less interested in money and more interested in socialization. Sure they need money to keep the lights on, but they’re usually not hoovering and selling data at a massive scale. They also make it easier to get to know individuals instead of brands or personalities. Conversations are more bi-directional, rather than just one person screaming to millions of followers. And they also encourage more participation. When people feel like community members, they’re more inclined to get involved in how the platform is run, the type of culture it wants to foster, and its rules, guidelines, and moderation strategy.

Mastodon checked all these boxes. It’s open source, so I could run my own server if I wanted. There are tons of smaller servers with hundreds or even just dozens of users, so I could join an existing community of my choosing. Server owners are doing this first and foremost as a volunteer service and only accept financial contributions to offset the time and energy they put into running servers, not to make money off user data. It just seemed like a perfect fit.

But Mastodon isn’t a Twitter replacement. Yes it’s similar in that you post short-form content, but it gives you more control over what you see and who you interact with. That alone makes it better than any algorithm-driven profit-motivated service.

You can curate your content ⚓

You can control what you see on Mastodon in multiple ways. First, instead of one view into the entire network, you actually have three:

1. Your local timeline, which shows posts made on the server/instance you joined.
2. Your home timeline, which shows posts made by you and anyone you follow.
3. The federated/public timeline, which shows posts made by folks from across the Mastodon network.

Mastodon also makes heavy use of hashtags for searching and filtering. If you only want to see posts about dogs, just search for #dogs and you’ll get a feed of just that. In the Advanced Web Interface 🔗, you can even pin this view and treat it as if it was its own timeline.

Likewise, if you have a specific group of people you follow and want to follow only their posts, you can create a list 🔗, add their profile to it, and view that list as if it were a timeline. I love using this to create separate views for artists, techies, and furries I follow.

Since there is no algorithm working behind the scenes, posts gain visibility via boosts. Boosts basically give a post a little nudge so that it’s more likely to appear in other folks’ feeds, both in the local timeline and across the fediverse. It’s another way of saying “I promote this post” and giving it a bump.

People are generally more social ⚓

Mastodon feels less like a platform and more like a community, and a big part of it is its design. Because it’s made up of thousands of different instances and not just one mega-instance, each instance is like its own little village. You could post exclusively to your instance timeline and still have a great experience. Because of this, I feel like I can connect with people on Mastodon in a way no other social platform offers.

The public timeline is more Twitter-like, with people posting anything from news clips to porn. Even then, the unique culture of Mastodon shines through with people using content warnings and generally being respectful of each other, i.e. not insulting each other or abusing quote posts 🔗 to mock or bully each other. I’m sure some of that happens, but because Mastodon has such powerful filtering & blocking controls, it’s easy to just hide anyone who’s disrupting the conversation. And while there is the risk of people creating their own social bubbles, the key difference here is that they’re doing it themselves, rather than having an algorithm do it without their knowledge or consent. It’s hard to shape the narrative when people have control over what they see.

Looking forward to more tooting ⚓

It’s been a really cool experience so far. It reminds me of my early days on the Internet when forums were en vogue and I’d spend hours just reading through threads. It’s a social network in the truest sense, and I never knew how much I missed that feeling until now.