Over the weekend I'd made the decision to make Mastodon my new 'social' home, and if I'm honest I'm a bit annoyed about the timing. This had nothing to do with Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, and his subsequent breakdown when trying to control a hugely out of control social media platform. I'd planned to go for a while. Quietly slip away and give up Twitter entirely.
Reasons? Many really. Lack of engagement would probably be the number one, in fact in most cases the only engagement I got were with folk I'd been hanging around online with since the dawn of time (or at least when most of us were game-obsessed geeks hanging around on the Eurogamer forums).
I lost my audience once we stopped book blogging, and though I enjoyed the art challenges on Twitter (something Mastodon could do with catching up on) and the awesome folk who ran them, my art wasn't getting much engagement either (probably because it's crap but there y'go).
So I dipped a toe in the water over at Toot Community, one of the friendly instances of Mastodon based in the Netherlands, for no better reason than I like looking at scandi landscapes (and there are a lot of them), love Scandi folk (who are friendly and clever and witty) and really didn't want to associate the perceived moral sewage that might be attracted to the UK servers.
Mastodon might, on the surface, look a lot like Twitter but it doesn't work in the same way. There's no lazy engagement. If you engage with folk, you'll get engagement back. If you expect to just lazily quote tweet posts, or to express moral outrage when the shitposters turn up and do their usual "Oh look at me, I'm being controversial and upsetting the snowflakes" then again Mastodon doesn't work like that, and in a lot of cases the moderation per-instance is impressive. Like the old days of the internet BBS boards or online chat forums where mods would actively root out the arseholes and chuck 'em off.
It has the same tools Twitter does to block and mute shitposters, which is a good sign, and a 'report' button should you need it. But what I liked about it was that in just a few short days of use the horrible doomscrolling habit was replaced by scrolling through genuinely interesting content by folk who seemed to be sick and tired of Twitter's modus operandi - serving up depressing news item after depressing news item lovingly retweeted by folk who don't have anything better to do all day.
Mastodon happens at a slower pace too. Less followers means picking and choosing hashtags and subjects to suit what I want to look at rather than being served up everything whether I like it or not via followers and their own networks. Great integration with web or client stuff on iPad and Phone makes it a breeze to use. But ultimately those who are wailing and gnashing their teeth about how 'complicated' it is, or how 'primitive it is compared to twitter' are better off not coming aboard. In fact, just don't if you can't be bothered to persevere. It'll probably be a better place without you.
Alas, it probably won't stay nirvana-like for long. It's been big news that over 700,000 people also made the leap this weekend (my timing sucks, it really does!) which is an interesting juxtaposition for Mr Musk who has just spent an entire annual budget for a medium sized country on a social media platform that got too big for its tweets. I'd planned to give up social media entirely before Christmas but for now I'm willing to go the distance with Mastodon, find my peeps and stick around for a while. Who knows, it might work out OK.
Find me on Mastodon by my 'old' handle peejmaybe@toot.community
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