7 Minute Miles

Three months on Mastodon


Tomorrow marks three months since I joined Mastodon. Just like with Twitter and Tweetbot, I don’t use the web interface of the instance I joined (mastodon.social), but have exclusively used the iOS and macOS Ivory clients, published by Tapbots. I love their work (thanks, Paul and Mark!) – the interface is familiar and polished and my timeline syncs well between devices.

Current stats: 110 posts, 26 followers and following 252.

So what are my thoughts on Mastodon after 90 days? I’ve already written a few posts about Mastodon that you can view here, but I thought I’d write a little today about some big picture things.

In general, I’m now probably spending about as much time reading through posts as I did with Twitter. That’s good *and* bad, as my curated follow list is producing quality content I want to read, but gets to be a lot once I get behind. Engagement so far is lower for me, likely due to having fewer followers here than on Twitter (and I don’t reply to a lot of posts). Also following a bunch of people new to me that I don’t know personally. Not hugely different interaction, though.

The “Mastodon culture” that some critics cite hasn’t really impacted my enjoyment of the platform so far. It definitely exists, but it’s been easy for me to filter out. I don’t really understand the debates about some things (Fediverse vs. Mastodon, intro posts when you have bios), while things like getting more people to add alt descriptions to images is a solid cause. I will never love hashtags, but at least I understand the connection between them and the limited search capabilities of Mastodon (hardly ever used hashtags or search on Twitter).

When everything started to go downhill with Musk and Twitter, there were lots of options that popped up: Post News, Spoutible, Bluesky, Nostr and others. I grabbed an account on Post when I got an invite and I thought I asked to be on the notification list for Bluesky, but I don’t think I will do anything other than Mastodon for now. There seems to be growing advocacy for the platform (and for continued feature improvements). I’d love to play around with my own instance (kingsbury.social?), but the learning curve is quite high compared to other things I’ve done online. Hope to get there eventually, though.

Many times when I get excited about new technologies, I sometimes lose empathy of how that technology is viewed and valued by others. This is probably not uncommon – just look at how much has been written about Twitter (which is significantly smaller than the other major social media platforms). The majority of my family never cared about Twitter and none of them have a Mastodon account. Ask a random person on the street about microblogging or the Fediverse and chances are good those things will be unimportant to them.

That said, I want Mastodon to grow and succeed. I don’t want to see bad actions (and bad actors) be rewarded in the market. An open internet is one of the best inventions humans have ever devised – let’s keep it going, no?

Originally published by DK on April 23, 2023 at 9:06 pm in Housekeeping, Longform, Mastodon, Technology


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