My social-media life has been Fediverse-first for a year now. I stick my head into Bluesky and Threads regularly, but visit Twitter rarely if at all. This piece takes a close look at Mastodon-land as things stand in late summer 2023. What’s working, what’s not, what are the alternatives? [Originally published August 2023, updated November 27th for my one-year Twitter-exit anniversary.]
Mastodon Exit Interview
I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.
Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter?
How Mastodon was prepared for Elon Musk’s Twitter to fail.
Cage the Mastodon
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.
How Does Mastodon Work? - Kev Quirk
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
Private and Public Mastodon
Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble: Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet. And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer. And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter. And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ’em and let everyone search ’em and find wonderful things! So you lurch into the Mastodon conversation, all excited, and blurt out “Hey folks, I’m gonna index all this stuff and let the world in!” That’s when you get your face torn off.
How The Enshittification Of Social Media Is Decreasing The Switching Costs And Enabling Something New
In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also…
Mastodon Features That Twitter Should Steal (but Won’t)
Elon Musk's platform could learn a thing or two from its most popular alternative—like how to build a social platform people actually want to be on.
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Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
The new social software is subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter
Mastodon's Eternal September
Figure 1: A ‘joke’ t-shirt made in 1994 commemorating Eternal September, taken from The Eternal September Wikipedia page The latest round of Twitter nonsense (changing the way “blocking” works) has caused another wave of people to abandon that site for pastures new. Nearly every one of them went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon. 1.2 Million people joined Bluesky in 48 hours. I wonder why that is? I bet there’s something about where people draw the line on Twitter’s behaviour and where they choose to go next. But I bet there’s something else to it too.
My top Bluesky feature requests for 2024
In 2023 my social media consumption changed dramatically after I DM'd a random mufo on what-was-then-called Twitter for a Bluesky invite. At the time, I was floating between Twitter itself and Mastodon for my primary daily social media experience. On one hand, I loathed Twitter (and
The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...
Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...
The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...
Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...
Mastodon and federation
The more I read about Mastodon promoters' opinions on how it should work, the more I think, "How could you possibly think that is how it is going to go?" One group of people want a Federated Feed Reader: They want to read the clever updates and memes from their friends and favorite celebrities. They want to post a GIF and have their friends validate them by hitting "like" on it. They want to ...
It’s Not Just Mastodon
2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment: Moderation Across the Social Web The Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and moderation is bigger than any one platform. Last year, we heard from moderators on Mastodo…
