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 configured differently, will be moderated differently (or not at all, I suppose), and so on. You can move your account to another instance, of course. But choosing the right instance is still important.

I got lucky, as I noted, so my advice here will be brief and high-level: Mastodon maintains a list of instances, and you can filter it by location and interests. It is perhaps notable that the page linked above explains all the guidance that Mastodon itself provides, such as it is. (I believe you can actually sign up directly using the Mastodon mobile app too, but I’ve not tried that.)

Assuming you can get on the service, the next hurdle is to turn it into something useful. It’s hard for me to remember this, but when I joined Twitter back in May 2008 (!), it was a wasteland with little in the way of conversation and interactivity. Flash forward over 14 years, and I have over 120,000 followers and I follow 190 people/accounts, and so it’s a hotbed of instant interactivity. But Mastodon, for me or any new user, starts out with that wasteland problem. And my first month or so on the service has been quiet. Very quiet.

That can be disconcerting, but someone, um, tooted me the other day with some useful information: there is a service called Movetodon that will help you find all your friends on Twitter who are also on Mastodon so you can friend them again on the new service, turning that wasteland into more of a virtual watering hole where you can chat with familiar virtual faces in a new location. It turns my sleepy new service into something a lot more serviceable. (Debirdify is another similar solution.)

Depending on how you use Twitter and now Mastodon, you may also want to consider enabling the “advanced” user interface, which turns Mastodon into a multi-column view similar to TweetDeck, so you can view multiple feeds at once in columns (Home [people you follow] and Notifications by default). You do this in Preferences > Appearance > “Enable advanced web interface.”

I’m still feeling my way around the new digs, but what I’ve seen so far is a more civil and friendly place than Twitter. That makes sense: it’s smaller, has fewer looky-loos, and prevents trolling by eliminating full-text searching (which is how trolls overpower conversations they’re not part of). The instance I’m on is heavily moderated for civility. And I think a lot of users are tired of the toxicity of Twitter, which has gotten markedly worse under Musk, whose belief in free speech extends to COVID and Qanon conspiracists but not to reporters, incredibly. We’ll see how that evolves.

For now, I’ll check in on both Twitter and Mastodon throughout the day. I’m still more active on Twitter, of course, and we’re not auto-posting anything from Thurrott.com to the new service, though I expect that will happen in time. Change is hard, especially behavioral change. But it’s nice to have a fallback, and it’s one that very well could replace Twitter in the long run. I won’t do anything brash either way.

Good luck!