So I’ve been using Mastodon a bit for the past few months, and with the latest influx of users via the great Twitter Migration of Late 2022 I thought I’d jot down some of my notes on the platform.
I have two active accounts, on different servers:
- My personal one, @chuggnutt@mastodon.cloud, which I originally created in 2018 when Twitter’s dysfunction was becoming increasingly apparent.
- The Brew Site account at @brewsite@mastodon.online, created earlier this year to start hedging my social media bets in earnest and also to work to expand the beer blog’s reach and learn the new platform in the process.
The first thing all new users encounter when creating a Mastodon account is server (or “instance”) selection, which can be confusing and mystifying. It took a minute to get my head around the concept, but once I did, I realized that except for a few caveats, it doesn’t matter which server you choose. Here’s why:
- Each server is running its own instance of the core software, and has its own set of rules.
- All of them can connect and share data in a manner similar to RSS.
- This interconnectivity, known in Mastodon parlance as federating, essentially consolidates it all into a more-or-less seamless social media experience, just like you’d expect without knowing anything about different servers at all.
Now, here are those caveats I mentioned:
- Because a server instance can be run by anyone, including bad actors, unsavories, and deplorables, you’ll want to check the rules of a given server before deciding if you want to join. Many of these “bad” servers end up being blocked by the good ones, and these good ones have rules of conduct. Pick one with good moderation and content policies.
- With the spotlight on Mastodon and the big growth surge that’s been happening recently, some servers are undergoing growing pains and performance issues. For instance, the mastodon.online server that I have The Brew Site on is one of the popular ones, and its performance had slowed quite a bit at one point, seeming to be about 12 hours behind in updates. (Of course the next day it was much improved and working in close to realtime again.) It’s hard to know ahead of time which servers are going to perform better but it’s something to keep in mind; you may want to pick a smaller, newer instance to join that isn’t getting hammered.
- If you decide you don’t want to be on that particular server, you can move to a new one and the process for doing so it supposed to be fairly easy, though I haven’t done it. One thing I’m unsure of for this process, however, is if you can move any content you created (posts, photos, etc.) to the new server as well, and if so how that works.
I’ve been using both the website interface and the official Android app and find both to be perfectly usable and fine. For the web, I activated the “Enable advanced web interface” setting and I like it better than the default interface; it sets up multiple configurable columns for easier viewing and seems to be more responsive. You can enable this in “Edit Profile,” “Preferences,” and “Appearance.”
Overall I like it so far; the multiple servers issue I mentioned above isn’t an issue for me at all (other than occasional performance) as my home timeline shows me posts (“toots” in Mastodon parlance, as opposed to “tweets” on Twitter) from every user I follow, regardless of what server they are on, and I can favorite (“like”) and boost or reblog (same as retweet) any of those posts just fine.
I don’t notice any algorithm issues, because there are none; that is, there’s no algorithm showing you customized content. To be fair, I always view my Twitter timeline in chronological order and don’t let the algorithm mess with it, so there’s no change for me there.
But hashtags (words prefixed with the “#” character, like “#hashtag” or “#craftbeer“) are super important on Mastodon, because the search features are more limited, and hashtags are one of the few things you can search for. So if you want any of your content searchable, liberal use of hashtags is key. Also, you can follow specific hashtags, similar to following people, which is something I’m still exploring.
When posting images, two things to be mindful of: you should include descriptive “alt” text for the image, which is important for screen readers for visually impaired users; and images which could be considered sensitive should be flagged as such, which allows for people to decide to click to reveal an image they may not want appearing directly in their timeline for whatever reason.
The alt text is simply another term for “text description” and it’s pretty straightforward to add a description to an image—either via the “Edit” button on the image, or even an “Add image description” option (or something similar). It’s good practice to caption all of your imagery this way to make your posts more accessible.
I’ve been making sure to caption all images I’ve posted in this way, and so far have only flagged one image as sensitive on my @chuggnutt account; there’s probably an argument to be made about flagged pictures of beer as sensitive on @brewsite but I haven’t done much of that, except for setting “content warning” on my Beer Advent Calendar posts (emulating a surprise reveal each day).
A lot of these best practices and FAQs can be found on Fedi.Tips, by the way, which I’ve found to be a useful resource.
Content Warnings are the other area of note. I’ll just quote the Fedi.Tips site for these:
Content Warnings (CWs) are optional Fediverse features which hide the content of a post behind a warning message. The post can be revealed by clicking on the warning.
Content warnings are for any kind of content where the person reading may not want to read it right that minute, but they may want to read later. It could be something serious like upsetting news, or less serious like film spoilers. There’s also a very strong Fediverse tradition that those who are able to should use CWs when talking about emotive topics such as politics or religion. It is also often used for potentially “not safe for work” content such as gore or nudity.
They’re very easy to add when you’re writing a post, and are entirely optional, though considered polite and considerate to use them.
So is Mastodon going to replace Twitter? Yes and no. “Yes” in that many Twitter users, disgruntled with how the service and safety have degraded under the new management, are migrating to Mastodon as a potential alternative. But “no” because Mastodon is its own beast (so to speak), similar but different and isn’t trying to be Twitter. It’s just another step in the ongoing evolution of social media.
I noted this fact on Twitter even, not long ago:
Everything ends. And nothing is as ephemeral and transient as social media.