Mastodon is not Twitter but it is glorious
Every time I go on vacation, the tech world boils down. In April, when i go to the Bahamas, Elon Musk announced his offer to acquire Twitter, sparking a storm of speculation about the platform’s end time. Similarly, I went to Mexico for a week’s vacation just days after Musk took over this month, and sure enough, everything explodes.
Also: Quit Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon
I guess I need to mentally prepare myself for the holidays. Luckily, they didn’t run out of alcoholic beverages on Riviera Maya.
The migrate to other platforms has begun – and while my colleague Ed Bott is correct that there is no direct replacement for Twitter, a large number of users have switched to Mastodon, the distributed open source social networking platform, created by a 24-year-old German software developer Eugen Rochko it’s amazing.
In the last week, Mastodon servers have seen more than 640,000 users added to the network, with over 130,000 in a single day, bringing the number of active users to over 1.6 million. While this is only a fraction of Twitter’s estimated 450 million users, sustained growth is undeniable and there’s no sign that this will slow down anytime soon.
So what is Mastodon?
We should start with the fact that Mastodon is an open source software platform – anyone can host and run a community in a completely isolated environment, if they want, like run a wiki or an intranet discussion board. Only if you connect it with Fediversea loosely linked network of services consisting of individual Mastodon communities, does it become part of that association.
About 4000 of these Fediverse Connected Mastodon instancessome have up to 170,000 users, such as the original mastodon.social where is the server? I glued the board onand those with only a few thousand. These include servers like journa.host, has set up its own homing account specifically for journalists. Similar, newsie.social and MastodonMedia.XYZ Also for communication professionals.
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Individuals also run a number for their singular use. Of course, there are any number of standalone servers that smaller teams run, as well as those that aren’t connected to Fediverse, such as counter.social, exists separately due to the difference in management philosophy as well as the common sense and thought of users. As expected, these servers also include a bunch of the usual no-requests you’ll find on any social network, so it’s not uncommon for server block lists to be published and shared. share on Fediverse, such as this was recently updated by newsie.social.
Although the Fediverse servers are loosely connected through a communication protocol, it acts as a single network. Therefore, it is possible to look up and track other Mastodon users on Fediverse even if they reside on different servers. So, for example, I follow many journalists on journa.host and newsie.sociaI though my account, @ jperlow @ mastodon.social is on another server. However, I can view my server’s “local” feed without having to follow all of those people, nor the “link” feed of everyone I follow.
How is it to use?
The user experience on Mastodon is similar to that on Twitter in the sense that there’s a scrolling feed of small blog posts from the individual accounts you follow, but it’s also quite different.
For starters, there is no “algorithm” that determines a post’s exposure based on overall popularity or other criteria set by the Fediverse network or an individual version operator. Amplifications exist by “boosting”, which is pretty much the same as a retweet, except that they cannot be “quoted” by comments, they are simply retweets.
Posts (formerly known as “dots”) can also be “liked”, but all this does is let the author know that you like it; There is no public acknowledgment of likes in the main feed. So if you really like something and want it amplified, use the reblog/boost function and do it often.
Unique to Mastodon is a Content Warning or “CW” for short. If you choose to add a message to your post, your full message will be hidden in a preview that is limited to revealing the subject only. The user can then click to show your entire post.
When should you use CW? That depends on the poster, their community, and the general sentiments of the server members. Former NYT journalist Adam Davidsonadministrator of journa.host suggests that almost everything posted by their members should have a CW as almost anything of a reported nature could cause discomfort or injury. I don’t use them, so your mileage may vary.
This also goes to the topic of What server community? you should choose as your home base. You can have accounts on different servers and independent followers on them if you want. However, most people choose a single server as their main community and follow people on other servers as needed.
While many servers are restricted by region or membership due to occupation or other criteria, some server communities are dedicated to topical issues, such as infosec, open source software, LGBTQ+ or even cook and have their own local discussion feed. If you decide to move your account and handle/address to another server, along with all your followers and those you follow on Mastadon Fediverse, it’s as simple as importing and exporting. files on the server itself through the web interface.
Mastodon Client and Web UX
For completeness of features, per-server web UX is the best way to use Mastodon, especially if you use a desktop or laptop computer. As of this writing, main codebase pending an upgrade to version 4.0, which includes new features like automatic post translation and better post discovery via hashtags, among other things.
Know that upgrading to 4.0 from 3.5.3 is at the discretion of each server operator, so your experience may vary – mastodon.social, e.g. is a 4.0 release candidate run by Rothko himself, so it may take some time before you can implement all the features in your community. Some communities no longer accept direct registration due to their server load or are now invite-only, such as mastodon.social.
In web UX, there is a simple layout and “advanced” multi-column layout similar to TweetDeck, you can interact with other users, configure your user profiles, and import and export lists according to your needs. track.
As it relates to who you follow on Twitter and how it maps to Mastadon, this is currently a flexible situation, but tools exist to make the transition easier, such as solve, will search your Twitter account for other accounts you follow using the API and match it to the respective Mastodon accounts. You can then download .CSV files that you can easily import into the UX. There are also some websites that host large lists of original verified Twitter users with large followings, such as Anorexiawhich you can export and track in bulk, as well as large spreadsheet of journalists maintained by Tim Chambers, which you can download as an importable .CSV from boskee.co.uk.
There are also some Mastodon . clients for smartphones and tablets, such as the official client for iOS and Android, as well as third-party open source clients such as Metatext developed by Metabolizer for Open Collective (by far my favorite and most actively developed in this group) and also paid customers. Keep in mind that none of these have all the Web UX features, and they vary between clients in their UX and what works.
The Mastodonians themselves
The growing and resilient Mastadon Fediverse population is going through so many changes in such a short amount of time, so it’s naturally frustrating for those old on the platform as well as for those New is establishing shopping as the result of a massive Twitter exodus among certain populations, such as journalists, and those who can see the writing on the wall for “the bird site.” “, as Twitter is often called.
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Many long-time players on different servers see Mastodon’s rapid growth as a good thing and have welcomed newcomers with open arms. In contrast, others see Twitter migration as an existential threat to the culture they have nurtured for years. This includes wanting more people to use the CW for the most innocuous topics and not liking people who want to claim to have been verified by outside sources and bring their followers along, as well as any any potential advertising and monetization activities they may have engaged in on Twitter.
Should you move to Mastodon?
So if you have a Twitter account, should you switch to Mastodon? I don’t have an easy answer for that because it’s not a replacement for Twitter; it’s something completely different. The biggest challenge to overcome for end-users is choosing the server they want to use in the first place, but once you do that, the user experience isn’t so different that you just can’t get over the curve. learning after a few hours of use. .
Rebuilding your list of people to follow is obviously a pain as this migration is still ongoing and will take months – if not longer – but the tools is now provided to make this really easy dealing with an automated process. It’s unlikely we’ll get that from Mastodon.
Most importantly, you need to figure out if you want to use something that’s fully distributed and at the mercy (and budget constraints) of individual server administrators and not a centralized (and monolithic), high-performance environment with a consistent set of policies (though that even describes Twitter?). But it’s wild, fun, and certainly engaging, and I plan to spend more time on it.
Have you switched to the Mastodon server? Talk back (at @ jperlow @ mastodon.social) and let me know.