Mastodon (Premium)

Like many Twitter users, I have concerns about Elon Musk’s takeover and the ham-handed way he’s managed the company. And while my worst fears have yet to come to pass, it’s normal and logical to start thinking about a Plan B. And while there are a few alternatives contending to be the next Twitter, the most obvious replacement is something called Mastodon.

Yes, it’s a ridiculous name. But then, so is Twitter, which benefits only by being familiar. And the language of both services is equally ridiculous. Instead of tweets, Mastodon has toots. Instead of retweets, Mastodon has boosts. And instead of likes, Mastodon has favourites, which, yes, is written in the UK style with that superfluous “u” because there is no U.S. English on Mastodon. (I know.) Replies, at least, are still called replies, and you can still direct message people.

But just as the once-ridiculous word Pentium became not just common and accepted but obvious, so too will all this nonsense. Assuming, of course, that Mastodon somehow becomes popular. It could happen: over 2 million people fled Twitter in the first month after Musk took over Twitter. Which, by the way, still has somewhere between 400 million and 450 million users. So there’s your bar.

Getting past the unfamiliar terms, potential Mastodon users face two major hurdles: joining the service and quickly making it useful to them. Both are daunting processes, unfortunately.

I got lucky: Leo Laporte, my Windows Weekly cohost and the founder of the TWiT network on which it is hosted, has been promoting Mastodon for years, and he manages an invite-only Mastodon instance. So I was able to get up and running pretty quickly. But unlike Twitter, Mastodon is a decentralized social networking service. And while there are very real benefits to that, it also means that there’s no central place to sign-up and create an account, as you can with Twitter and other social networks.

We put up with this nonsense because there is no singular entity behind Mastodon lurking the background to impose its corporate needs on us with advertising, tracking, or paid programs. Instead, Mastodon is like the Internet itself, an open platform.

To get started with Mastodon, you need to find a Mastodon instance, or server. That is, there’s no Mastodon.com for signing up---actually, there is, of course there is, but it’s a website for a company that makes land clearing, timber harvesting, and forestry mulching equipment. Each Mastodon instance is run independently, but when you join one, you can access the broader Fediverse, the network underneath Mastodon, giving you access to all of Mastodon. (Fediverse being a combination of federated and universe.)

Not all Mastodon instances are created equal since the person or group that created one has some amount of control over it and, as it turns out, your data and account. (Similar to how Twitter has control over all of Twitter and its users’ data.) Each one can be ...