ongoing by Tim Bray · Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean<br>any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun.<br>It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which I’m here to say not only<br>offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives, but also that the alternatives are fatally flawed.

By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly (but not all) running the<br>Mastodon software, that<br>communicate using the<br>ActivityPub protocol. Now I’ll try to convince you to start using one of<br>them.

[I posted an earlier version of this essay called<br>Time To Migrate last year, but enough things have changed<br>that it’s worthwhile revising and reposting.]

Start at<br>joinmastodon.org

The simplest argument ·<br>Have you noticed that social-media products, in the long term, seem inevitably to enshittify?<br>I have. But there’s a major exception, a tool that’s been serving billions of us for<br>decades, and works about as well as it ever did. I’m talking about email.

Why does email stay reasonably healthy? Because nobody owns it. Anyone on any server can communicate with anyone else on any<br>other. Nobody can buy it and make it a vehicle for their politics. Nobody can crank up the ads or<br>make things worse to improve their profit margin.

Mastodon’s like email that way. Plus it does all the Post and Repost and Quote and Follow and Reply and Like and Block stuff<br>that you’re used to, and there are thousands of servers. Anyone can run one and nobody can own the whole thing. It doesn’t have<br>ads and it won’t. It’s dead easy to use and it’s fun and you should<br>give it a try.

The rest of this essay goes into detail about why Mastodon is generally great and why the alternatives have little future.<br>But if the pitch sounds good so far, stop reading,<br>go get an account, and climb on board.

Why now? ·<br>Along with that “can’t be owned” and “no ads” stuff,<br>the software is getting really good, particularly in the last couple of releases. It’s got cool features you won’t find<br>elsewhere, and there’s very little cool stuff from elsewhere that’s not here.

There was a time when newly-arrived people had<br>confusing or unfriendly experiences, or missed features that were important to them.<br>It looks to me like those days are over.

Migration ·<br>Mastodon is many thousands of servers, and you can join the biggest,<br>mastodon.social, or<br>shop around for another. But here’s the magic thing: If you end up disliking the<br>server you’re on, or find a better one, you can migrate and take your followers with you! You can’t ever get locked<br>in.

The server-selection menu has lots of options.

Migration is probably Mastodon’s most important feature. It’s why no billionaire can buy it and no corporation can enshittify it. As<br>far as I know, Mastodon is the first widely-adopted social software ever to offer it.

Interaction ·<br>You hear it over and over: “I had of followers on Twitter and now I have on<br>Mastodon, but I get so much more conversation and interaction when I post here.”

One of the people you’ll hear that from is me.<br>My follower count is a bit less than half the 45K I had on Twitter-that-was, but I get immensely more intelligent, friendly<br>interaction than I ever got there. (And sometimes I get told firmly that I’m completely wrong, but hey.) It’s<br>the best social-media experience I’ve ever had.

Dunno about you, but conversation and interaction<br>seem like a big deal to me. One reason things are lively is…

Sex ·<br>Here’s an axiom: An ad-supported service can’t have sex-positive or explicit content. Advertisers simply won’t tolerate<br>having their message appear beside NSFW images or Gay-Leatherman tales or exuberant trans-positivity. Mastodon<br>has all that stuff.

Of course, you gotta be reasonable, posting anything actually illegal will get your ass perma-blocked and your account<br>suspended. So will posting anything that’s NSFW etc without a “Content Warning”. That’s a built-in feature of Mastodon which<br>puts a little warning (“#NSFW” and “#Lewd” are popular) above your post, which is tastefully blurred-out until whoever’s<br>looking at it clicks on “Show content”.<br>I use these all the time when<br>I post about #baseball or #fútbol because a lot of the geeks and greens who follow me are pointedly uninterested in sports.

(Oh, typing that in reminds me that you can subscribe to hashtags on Mastodon: Let’s see, I currently subscribe to, among<br>others,<br>#Vancouver,<br>#Murderbot, and<br>#Fujifilm.)

The “Ivory for Mastodon” app for Apple platforms,

one of the many fine alternative clients.

Moderation and defederation ·<br>Did I just mention, two paragraphs up, getting blocked? Mastodon isn’t free of griefers, but the tools to fight them are good<br>and getting better.

The good news is that each server moderates its own members. There’s variation<br>of the standards from server to server, but less than you’d think. Since there are...