Well look at me, blogging like it’s 2009 or something.
I spent a fair chunk of time over the weekend learning about Mastodon then signing up for an account as an insurance policy in case Twitter goes permanently south under the stewardship of Elon Musk. Now I’m on there I’m wondering how much to stay on Twitter even if it recovers as so far Mastodon / the Fediverse is a pleasingly retro experience.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a few useful things I learned about Mastodon along the way. One or two could seriously catch out people used to how Twitter works. Caveat: it’s quite possible I’ve got things wrong and welcome any (polite) corrections.
If you’re starting from scratch with Mastodon and the Fediverse like I was last week, I *highly* recommend fedi.tips for a user-friendly guide to getting started.
Choosing a server
I really don’t have the answers on this one! I’ve seen arguments for choosing big and small servers (in terms of user numbers) – the former is less likely to close down and lose your data, the latter more likely to be able to cope with moderation etc. Personally I went for a smallish server with a few thousand users.
I mostly stuck to servers listed at JoinMastodon.org as these have agreed to give three months’ notice before closing down. I also checked the code of conduct wasn’t too loose or too strict, and that they had blocked other servers with notoriously bad-behaved users. Some servers seem very strict on content so this is worth checking out. Finally I looked for some way to contribute financially as feel very nervous that server admins asserting ‘we’re fine, we’ll keep this running’ might not feel the same post-influx!
In case it helps, here is my entirely unscientific list of English-language servers that I considered joining based on the criteria above:
- Fosstodon.org (for people interested in open-source software) Edited to add: beware as their code of conduct disallows any ‘advocacy’ which is too strict for even mild-mannered me.
- Mastodon.green (technically not open to UK residents though I think this is an accidental omission! EUR 1.50 per month after the first month)
- Mastodon.me.uk
- Mastodon.online
- Mastodon.scot
- Mstdn.social
Cross-posting
I’m using Moa.party which feels vary bare-bones but seems to work well with just a slight delay. You log in with your Mastodon and Twitter accounts, choose your options, then their server automatically crossposts based on your settings. You can post from whatever interface you like.
Privacy is set per-post, not per-account
This has two important consequences:
- You can’t lock down your whole account at once. You can turn on follower approval at any time but your old posts will remain public, unless you always posted at ‘followers-only’ privacy level. To create the equivalent of a locked Twitter account you’ll need to do both from the start. Like on Twitter, you can mute conversations so that may be a way to silence an unwelcome viral post.
Read more about post privacy on fedi.tips - The equivalent of DMs are posts set to be visible only by those tagged. So if you only tag one person, only they can read it (plus the server admin, but that’s true of literally any service that isn’t end-to-end encrypted). But if you mention someone else in your message and tag them, they can see the message too, and I assume are notified of it! 😱 Thanks to Kieran Healy for highlighting this.
Design choices to reduce negative interactions
There are several design decisions which I found very surprising having come from Twitter. They are at least partly aimed to improve the typical user’s experience:
- Search only finds hashtags and doesn’t do full-text post searching
- There’s no such thing as a quote tweet equivalent to avoid people getting piled-on
- It’s very easy to put a post behind a content warning which is a great way to let people choose if they want to view or engage with certain content. Apparently standard etiquette is to do this with anything ‘political’ and certainly when sharing the awful. I get it for the latter but have Thoughts about the former – who gets to decide what is political and whose voices may be hidden? It’ll be interesting to see how this develops as the community expands and includes more journalists and others posting nothing but political content.
Data loss risks
Your posts are all stored on the server you chose when you signed up. You can migrate your account to a new server, keep your followers, set up a redirect from your old account, and easily export and import who you’re following. However your old posts stay on your old server and if it goes down, so do they. As a result I think you either need to treat your content as ephemeral, or download an archive regularly.
In addition, if you decide to delete your account, there’s no going back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and no-one can reuse your old username on that server. That includes you.
Multi-faceted 