Mastodon, explained for regular folks
And I consider you one of the regular folk
Years ago I signed up for Mastodon. I tell you that so you know I’m not some Johnny-come-lately to the technology. But I never used it. So take all this with a grain of salt. If you find this helpful, won’t you forward this email to someone else that might find it useful and encourage them to subscribe?
GUIDE BEGINS!
Mastodon is Twitter, but…
Way fewer people use it
It is “decentralized” (more on that later)
It is initially confusing to use
Wow, sell me on it more, Chris!!!!!
Mastodon is trying to be emulate Twitter. That means you post little updates1 and your followers see them. When you look at your homepage, you see your timeline of people you are following. One nice thing immediately: when you view your home timeline, as far as I can tell it is your followers’ content and the content they are boosting in reverse chronological order and no other algorithmic BS. Already that’s a great improvement over Twitter!
So it’s easy, you go to mastodon.social and sign up, right? Yeah you can! Do it! I’m there @chrisgrace.
That’s it, have fun!
Wait, what was that stuff about “decentralized”?
Haha, it’s fine, it all works out, just get an account and start enjoying yourself.
[taps foot….]
Siiiiiiigh. Okay.
So Mastodon is “decentralized” and “federated” or “federalized” or something. Essentially, it means there is no one big company running a big server that everyone is on. The biggest server is mastodon.social, as of this writing, it has about 850,000 users on it. But anyone can start a Mastodon server (called an “instance”). You can host a Mastodon instance for your family, or even just for yourself to make a little microblog.
Why? Why is this a thing?
Think of it like this. Remember bulletin board systems? Or message boards? Or forums? They were all the hot thing. You’d go to your “Bruce Springsteen forum” and talk to other Bruce Springsteenheads about “Born to Run” or about what a jerk Max is and you would meet a bunch of like minded people and go on road trips to see the Boss at the Stone Pony or whatever. An individual Mastodon instance is like that. You can create, or join, an instance themed to certain interests, or regional areas, or anything. Each instance can set their own content rules. There might be a Christian instance that bans users if they use profanity, and another instance called OnlySlurs.
Cool, silos are back?
Sort of. The big difference here is that the instances can all talk to each other. That’s why they call the Fediverse. So you can follow me @chrisgrace@mastodon.social even if you aren’t a member of mastodon.social. (George Takei just joined universeodon.com, a different Mastodon instance, and I followed him. Now his posts show up on my home timeline even though we are on different instances.)
So you separated all the groups but now they are joined again?
Yes.
Um, what.
Well, now each instance has their own little boss, which can turn into a huge pain in the ass, but it also means there are some ways to control who is in your audience and whose content you see at the server level. So if the admin for your server that’s all LGBTQ folks realized “Hey maybe we don’t need to have any link to the TrumpBoyz instance” they can disconnect and you have to have or allow any access to those red-hat-wearing rapscallions.
I guess this sounds okay?
Yeah, I think it sounds okay too. I’m not totally sold on it. But since five years ago, Mastodon has gotten a little easier to use, so it’s relatively seamless. Just go to an instance, sign up, and start following people. Apparently you can move your account and all your content to another instance relatively easily.
That’s good because what if the instance goes away?
Well, yeah, that’s a thing. They say you’re supposed to get a lot of notice ahead of time if this happens. But yeah this could be a problem.
So… how is it?
It’s nice. It’s a little slow (or at least, mastodon.social is). The people are nice so far! Most of the users are fleeing Twitter so there isn’t a strong urge yet to cause a ruckus. And I think because the algorithm isn’t really there to exploit your attention, maybe systemically it won’t lean towards trying to get you angry to keep you engaged.
But!
The things that are nice about it so far might also be because it’s very very very small (relative to Twitter).
But!
Maybe its obtuseness… your grandparents are probably not going to grok being on Mastodon … means that the audience will always stay a little sharper than your average social media user. (That’s probably a little wishful and it’s definitely elitist.)
But I know recently after leaving Twitter I’ve been wanting someplace to put little thoughts, and I even appreciated while deleting my tweets the way Twitter served as a microblog slice of life over the years2, and I think Mastodon might be a nice place to do that.
If you want to try it, come check out my profile and follow me and I’ll follow you back!
Updates in Mastodon are called “toots”. Okay.
This also illuminated how mad I would get about something in the moment, and then a few years later I literally could not remember what the issue was. I would tweet something in 2018 like “I can’t believe what a clueless idiot Joe Schmoggs is!!!” and then I couldn’t even figure out who Joe Schmoggs was in 2022.