I've been a Twitter user and fan since 2007. With Twitter's future looking a bit grim, I started looking around if there's another place to go.
Twitter can't really be replaced with anything else, because everyone's Twitter experience is unique to them and their community. For me, it's the main way I stay in touch with my Open Source / HTTP / API / Hypermedia bubble and some friends. Losing that would suck! Unfortunately, there's no way that group would all flock to another platform.
But for the ones that do try something else, the talk of the town seems to be Mastodon.
Mastodon is interesting. On the surface it might just seem like a Twitter clone, but it's based on a federated protocol called 'ActivityPub'. What this means in practice is that there's no central server. There's many instances. Each of these instances is managed by different people, and many of them focus on specific interests.
With email, it doesn't matter which provider you go with Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastadon. You're not siloed into a single instance,
and you can follow people from any other instance. Unlike email, it appears that with Mastadon you can actually migrate to different instances if you don't like your current one.
This has some interesting side effects too. I joined the
IndieWeb instance, which is a community I already loved. And even though I'm not siloed in, I get access to a local feed of like-minded people from that community. Everything feels new and more intimate.
Also, instead of one central authority that you have to trust to make the right moderation decisions, you can join one of many that aligns with your values, and you can block entire instances that don't.
So should you join? If you use Twitter to stay on top of news and follow high profile people then probably not. If you're like me, you might be able to find a community that fits your interest.
Will I stick to this? Who knows... but Twitter, like everything before, will fall out of favor one day and I'm enjoying Mastadon's ad-free, open source, developer-friendly experience. Reminds me of early Twitter or mid-2000's blogging culture.
Links
- If you're just getting started, check out https://joinmastodon.org/ and find a server.
- Follow me!
- To find your Twitter friends on Mastadon try Twitodon and Fedifinder.
- To automatically cross-post everything from Twitter to Mastodon and vice versa, use Moa.
Lastly, one of the interesting results of Mastodon building on open protocols, is that it allows alternative implementations.
The Microblog.pub project lets you self-host a single-user instance. Instead of joining some large instance, you deploy an instance on your own domain that's just for you. Can't get more control than that, and this might be something I'll consider in the future.
I don't see why this blog couldn't one day also be a 'microblog' and part of the fediverse.
Top comments (28)
I joined too into mastodon.social which seems to focus most of the attention in my community. We also started collecting links of community members in a git repo for easier tracking/follow.
I find the silo aspect less attractive. The big benefit of twitter is that if forces people to come together and communicate with people who have different opinions. It did it badly by promoting the lowest common denominator. But I don't want to be in a bubble. Not in tech or in politics.
as you say in the other comments, that "coming together" is also "regulated" by a certain algorithm which promotes hate speech and whatnot.
anyway, in mastodon you have three different feeds. the personal one a.k.a. people you follow, the local which is your instance, and the federated which is all of the instances your own is federated with.
hence, you can kind of "choose" your own degree of "siloation"? (yeah, tried a bad joke with silo and isolation here lol)
Agreed. That's a major problem I have with mastodon.
what is the major problem you're pointing at?
i genuinely didn't get it, sorry.
The fact that it's overly siloed. I want to face people I disagree with. I want my opinion challenged with thought provoking debate. I get that occasionally on twitter although often it's not as high brow. But it's important to me that I don't live in a bubble.
that's one way to look at it, which is also quite privileged tbf.
on mastodon as on anywhere else, people are victim of racism, queerphobia, ableism and you know what else. so, the "siloing" nature of that social media shield people from being in constant contact with fash content and hate speech basically.
im not sure what kind of disagreement you're looking to face, but all the constructive conversations you might be able to get over a social media are of course not affected by instance defederation.
That's true I do have some privilege. I agree content moderation is pretty essential for a good social network. I do have a problem with a lot of the "free" networks I tried in the past. They were terrible exactly because of those problems. I don't have enough experience in Mastodon but I do agree there's value to having a safe space for those who want it.
I want a middle ground. You can feel safe in a silo and that's fine. Unfortunately so do people with problematic opinions who enter their own echo-chambers. They come out as pretty deranged in the end. Fighting such people doesn't help. But engaging them sometimes does chip off a bit.
The other day there was a post about Bidens accomplishments on twitter. It got the obligatory "but inflation", etc. responses. Unfortunately, the responses for that were typically bad attacking Trump instead of correcting the misunderstandings about metrics. I was able to engage with several people I strongly disagree with, in a factual discussion. Did I convince anyone? Probably not. But it's crucial to force reasonable debate. My country just elected the most fascist government we ever had the other day. It wasn't overnight and the separation of "us vs. them" was key all the way.
That's literally what Mastodon is, though, it's you seeing your local and federated timelines on the same screen. I don't think it gets more "middle ground" than that!
Yes. But it does take some getting used to. I can't search the whole thing and it's less random than Twitter. I'm used to the way Twitter is and currently I still like it more. But I do like that mastodon isn't as addictive (in a bad way).
I joined toot.cafe some while ago which is an instance of nolanlawson.com. Under current circumstances the server is sweating a lot, but I really hope that the instance can stay and Nolan accepts funding.
Besides that: A dev.to #mastodon instance would be IMHO super nice as well. :)
Heyo Andreas!
I'm a Community Manager for DEV and we have a Mastodon account here... I think we set it up a while back, but I know our Social Media Manager, @erinposting, has just recently been getting it back into action.
Oh hello fellow toot.cafe person, I didn't see you there.
It's also running about 2 days behind because of the volume of traffic coming in from Twitter at the moment, which is, I guess, and example of the problems federated services can have.
Personally, I'd pay a couple of dollarpounds a month to help prop it up.
There is more power on the fediverse than just mastodon, you could comment a peertube (alternative to youtube)video from mastodon or viceversa.
The fediverse protocols are an amazing idea, is removing walled gardens, a real interaction and federated applications that csn talk to each other.
as a long-time mastodon user and twitter quitter, im clearly bias towards this post, but i will try to gve my contribution.
here people can find a useful, nice and easy to read guide/introduction to mastodon.
while this is a way for users to stay on top of news and follow high profile people through mastodon.
I've been on Mastodon for a while now, my concern with it is sharing user names with folks and making it easy for them to find and use (people don't seem to understand the instances when I try to explain it to them). I've tried a few clients including what I think is the official one, and they still do not feel as natural (yet).
But I am continuing to use it and hope that the new interest in it helps move the platform and the usage forward.
Can you explain why you think Twitter's future looks grim?
It's taken over by a psychopathic man-child billionaire.
Thank you for that in-depth, balanced & nuanced analysis. Could you expand a little, as I don't really feel it answered my question?
Unless you've lived under a rock, I doubt that the the sort of things he's known for or the general sentiment towards him has really escaped you. So what exactly is the question. You're not sure how his past behavior could have consequences in a place like Twitter?
Yes. I'm asking you what you think will happen to Twitter that makes you so pessimistic for its future? So far I've only learnt about your dislike of Elon Musk. What specific "sort of things he's known for" and "past behavior" could affect what he does with Twitter?
Hi, sorry I'm not engaging with this. Good luck with everything!
Not OP but I think Twitter is in a problem. Musk is very good at trolling. Giving him control over the platform is troubling. He also needs to monetize it fast since he took on an enormous debt. He has many stocks but he won't sell them so this debt repayment will weigh on him.
Already in the past couple of days we saw things like the attack on the husband of a congressional leader turned into a mockery online where people decided a made up story (promoted by Musk then deleted) somehow justifies attacking an 80+ year old man. I don't care what side of the political debate you are on, this is just shameful.
You are mainly referring to human behaviour here - and what humans choose to post on Twitter. THAT is the problem, not Twitter itself. If you choose to engage with, promote, or follow content like that - that's up to you.
I find it just fine, and I don't think Musk will do anything to stop the average user carrying on using it as they always have.
There have been many studies on the subject. Social networks promote bad human behavior since that promotes engagement. There were examples where the ranking algorithm got dialed back and suddenly discourse improved.
He fired almost the entire moderator staff. This is pretty scary.
Have you gone on an unmoderated social network like minds?
It's all racists and pedophiles. Moderation is problematic but also essential to stop that 0.1% of crazy/malicious.
OK, but it is possible to use these things in such a way as to avoid the idiots. I use most social networks in this way, and never have trouble.
People who choose to doomscroll and read whatever sh*t the 'algorithm' is promoting are simply opening themselves up to this all this junk and abuse. I do understand this is how a lot of people (bafflingly) choose to consume social media, and I'm not advocating for zero oversight - but Musk is smart and he understands some degree of protection for vulnerable people must be factored in somewhere.
I actively avoid algorithmic feeds wherever possible and curate my own content.
100%. I use social media in this way too.
Unfortunately, we're the minority. We're also a terrible source of revenue for such networks since we don't click on ads although I guess we make up some with content contribution.
The way things are going twitter can alienate the users, but also can get seriously hit by regulators and lawsuits. I just have very low confidence in Musk's leadership here.
To be clear, I still post on twitter. I'm just making sure I don't have all my eggs in that basket.
Is this the open-source software Trump used without credit for his Truth Social? The name sounds familiar to a lawsuit I read about.
Yes, at least one of those "free speech" things was exactly that.
Also, you might remember Gab, which was an attempt to create a massive central "free speech" mastodon instance and quickly got blocked by pretty much every other instance because of its ultra-right-wing population.
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