Oh, hello there. Welcome to my good ol’ fashioned Neocities page. Today's topic is…
Twitter is a raging garbage fire at the time of my writing this. It’s run by a brain rotted billionaire who is either posting the worst memes you’ve ever seen in your goddamn life or pushing his increasingly fashy worldview. Not only that, the experience of the site is getting worse in ways anyone can feel. Random guys who decide to pay the Musk Tax are getting pushed onto everyone’s feeds, features randomly stop working, and we all had to stare at a fucking Doge instead of the Twitter icon for multiple days just so he could pump DogeCoin’s price.
Yet everybody’s still on Twitter. There have been promised exoduses to other sites and they have all just sort of… flopped. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that leaving a social media site is always difficult. People leave in waves and when you first arrive on the shores of a new site a lot of your friends and mutuals just aren’t there. Eventually if they don't show up, you go back.
But there can be other problems too. A lot of sites can’t handle all the new traffic, making them buggy and slow. Others just aren’t really ready, missing core features that make them enjoyable to use. And then some are well built and established, but just seem too complicated and strange.
Yes, that last one is referring to Mastodon. But I’m here to make a bold claim: Using Mastodon isn’t all that different from using Twitter. People are just really bad at pitching it, and this includes Mastodon themselves.
So if you’re sick of Twitter’s bullshit, why not follow along with em and give it a chance? But let’s flip the script. Instead of starting with all the differences and how ~cool the tech is~, I’ll show you how easy it is to get started, how familiar it is, and then we can talk about some of that later if you still want to.
Cool? Cool.
If you’ve heard of Mastodon, you’ve probably heard of their ~servers~. The most common thing I've seen said about the platform is that choosing a server is too much of a pain in the ass and is a really intimidating first step. I totally get that!
What you probably haven’t heard is that you don’t need to read a thesis paper and sort through a long list of servers before jumping in. Switching servers is pretty painless and which server you are on isn't going to matter at all for most folks. Oh, and you can follow people on other servers, so don't worry about that!
When getting started I’d recommend joining mastodon.social. The server is run by the same company that makes Mastodon. By joining it, your experience will be like signing up for any other social media app.
So with that out of the way, making an account is super easy!
That website you just signed up on? Take it and throw it in the trash.
Props to the folks at Mastodon for making a great piece of software, but User Interface and User Experience are absolutely not their specialty. The interface looks okay, but overall it's much more confusing than it needs to be. For example:
This is the same post viewed on the normal Mastodon website (left) and a web client for Mastodon called Elk Zone (right). Aside from aesthetic differences, look at how impossible it is to who is responding to who on the left. Meanwhile on Elk Zone it's very easy because of that faint connecting line.
Luckily for us, Mastodon users are spoiled for choice for how to browse their feeds. Twitter has been chasing away third party app makers and a good amount have decided to bring their talents over to Mastodon instead. The only caveat is a lot of these apps are new, so may be missing a feature or two.
Right now, my personal recommendations would be Elk Zone if you are on your desktop and Mammoth for iOS. I’ve also heard that people really like Ivory and Ice Cubes.
Okay so, you’ve got an account and you're using something with a nice interface but when you click Home there’s nothing there.
That’s because you need to find people to follow! If you’re a Twitter user, the easiest start will be finding folks you follow on Twitter who are already on Mastodon (unless you follow like 5 people, there will definitely be some).
There were a lot of services that helped you do just that, but unfortunately some changes Mr Doge has mandated on the back end of Twitter has broken some of them. However this one still works and I totally love the look, so I heartily recommend it.
After that, you can follow some accounts that exist to recommend interesting people to follow:
You can also always follow me over there, too! I’ll be trying my best to share interesting accounts.
Now on to maybe the most important step…
Okay, so we’ve successfully gotten you on Mastodon. Rad. Now let’s walk through some of its differences and similarities from Twitter.
There are other features, but I think these are the really important ones. As you use the site more you’ll discover them and be like “oh neat!”, but you won’t be like “wtf how did I not know about this?”
Dig in! Follow some folks, post some stuff.
If you don’t hate it, encourage other folks to join you in escaping from The Epic Doge garbage fire of Twitter! I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a strong vibe that Twitter is only gonna get worse. When it becomes straight up unusable I’d like some form of social media that isn’t TikTok, or an app trying to be TikTok.
And let's be real here for a second. Is Mastodon perfect? No. But there is never going to be a perfect liferaft when something like Twitter collapses. Mastodon works well, has neat functionality, and as more people use it the rough edges it has are going to get smoothed down as has happened with every other social media platform (google old screenshots of Facebook or Twitter).
I hope you enjoyed this little explainer, and thanks for stopping by!
Okay so… here we are. So servers are both the cool and the complicated part about Mastodon, and I’ll do my best to explain them in simple terms.
The Twitter corporation makes their software, runs the platform, moderates its users, and pays for the servers that it all runs on. Mastodon splits up these responsibilities.
The Mastodon corporation makes the Mastodon software. However, anyone is free to run their own version of Mastodon. When they do this they run their own platform, moderate the users who join, and pay for the servers.
These different versions of Mastodon are called “servers”. For example, my Mastodon account is currently on the server mastodon.gamedev.place which, instead of being run by Mastodon themselves, is run by a gamedev named Aras Pranckevičius.
However, because of the way Mastodon was built, you can follow anyone on any server, which is one of the big reasons I said not to sweat your server choice too much.
Twitter right now is actually the perfect example of why this “confederation of servers” model is really fantastic.
Twitter is a monolith and when it was bought Elon Musk was/is able to do whatever the hell he wants, and the users have absolutely no way to impact what happens other than trying to cyber bully the guy.
On Mastodon if a server moderator goes nuts, the entire service doesn’t just suddenly die. People can move off of that server to another server, and their entire social network still lives on.
Even if Mastodon itself, the company that makes the software, decided to go buck wild, the broader social network would still be resilient. This is because the software is open source, meaning anyone can see the source code and download it. If Mastodon started making awful additions to the software, someone else could decide to develop their own versions and servers could use those versions instead.
Luckily switching servers is pretty easy! There are lots of guides online but the most important stuff to know is:
Probably my favorite part of Mastodon is that it isn’t profit seeking.
The software that everything runs on is open-source, meaning anyone has access to it and any time. Servers are funded by people choosing to donate to the people that run them.
Other social media platforms need to turn a profit, either being beholden to shareholders or the venture capitalists who funded the start-ups. This means that regardless of how they start, they will progressively need to figure out how to squeeze more and more money out of their product. Sometimes this is as simple as ads, but can be as harmful as selling your personal data.
Anyway I'll leave it there! If you read this far, I hope you found it useful!