Some thoughts about moving to Mastodon from Twitter.

Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, there is a bit of a hue and cry to leave Twitter. I totally get that. Musk’s recent tweet (since deleted) responding to Hillary Clinton’s tweet about the attack on Paul Pelosi was nothing short of abdominal. Essentially, Musk helps spread offensive, inaccurate lies. He is legitimizing absolute lies. He is pushing for more attacks on people. The tweet reinforces the fears of Musk running Twitter.

However, I’m not yet convinced that people will leave Twitter in massive numbers. There are lots of people who believe and support exactly that kind of thinking. There are even more people who don’t consider that kind of speech “My problem”.

I’ve never seen tons of hate speech on Twitter. I follow a bunch of educators. Mostly, my Twitter feed has been K-12 educators and a few parody or comedy accounts.

I’ve researched leaving Twitter several times. The biggest alternative is Mastodon. However, Mastodon isn’t Twitter. It is different. It has a different intent. It functions differently.

Mastodon

Mastodon is not owned by a specific company. There is no algorithm to provide you content. Rather, it can be what the community wants it to be. That’s the first difference, Mastodon isn’t a single site, but a connection of sites. Each user joins a Mastodon instance (server, community) that fits their perspective. There are a wide range of Mastodon instances (sites) available. Generally, one starts with the Mastodon instance (site) that fits their interest. Instances (sites) centered on things like Art, Music, LGBTQ+ issues, Programming, and much more are available. Here is a quick link to some site listings. However, just because you join one instance, doesn’t mean that you can’t see things from other instances. So, if you join a community focused on Art, you can still follow people from other communities. Thus, you can create a feed of people that you are interested in. Those people can be on any community at all (pretty much, communities can block other whole communities – which is actually a good thing, very few communities get blocked).

Mastodon seems to be seeing a huge influx of users. Some have closed registrations (new accounts).

Why Scholar Social registrations are closed

We’ve spent 5 years developing a culture at Scholar that is intentionally different from Twitter and even from academic Twitter (with varying degrees of success)

We’re more chill, we’re in academia but intensely critical of academia, we’re anti-racist and pro-queer; we’re “the teacher’s break room of the Fediverse”

I’m not going to throw that all away, trampled by an influx of users who think that this space is just “different Twitter”

Mastodon is comprised of three basic feeds, whereas Twitter only has one. Those three feeds are:

  • Home – those people you have chosen to follow
  • Local timeline – those people in the same community (server) as you
  • Federated timeline – Pretty much lots of things from different communities

Coming from Twitter, these changes are definitely different. It took me a while to understand the differences. Once you understand that the second column is the instance (community feed), things can make more sense. Following people is easy, but there isn’t a company-wide algorithm to direct you to users. You have to find them.

Here are a couple of guides:

Mastodon is not new. Mastodon has been around for quite a long time. Please don’t join an instance and start requesting changes. The community has debated, and decided, how Mastodon should look, work, and feel. If you are passionate about wanting some changes, please be part of the community for a while BEFORE you start asking for things to be changed.

The biggest issue may be a bit ironical. There are fewer users on Mastodon than on Twitter. The same network effect really isn’t in place. One of my frustrations has long been that there isn’t really a Mastodon targetted for K-12 educators. Maybe Twitter will get so screwed up that people will leave and look for something similar, but different.

I’m not yet convinced that Mastodon will replace Twitter. I still think that it’s too early. It is an interesting time though. I’ve tried to make the change a few times. If enough people do try out Mastodon and stick around for a bit, it really could be a better experience.

I remain an open-source advocate. I hope that more and more people will realize the advantages of open-source. Having control is a good thing.

Another resource:

If you have issues with your Mastodon account and are on mastodon.social, take these steps:

  1. Go to https://instances.social/ & do the wizard
  2. Select any instance that pops up that looks nice to you
  3. Create an account there
  4. Set up an account alias by going to Settings -> Account -> Account Settings -> Moving from a different account
  5. Move your account by going to https://mastodon.social/settings/migration

The #Fediverse is distributed, you don’t need to be on the most popular instance to participate.

https://chaos.social/@pludikovsky

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