Mastodon, two weeks on
So, I, like many, joined Mastodon as a result of the mass migration from Twitter. Specifically, I did this on the 18th November 2022, whilst dealing with a major crisis at work, budget preparations, and embarking on an impromptu, last-minute flight for a weekend visit to #Amsterdam at the same time, so my #ADHD multi-tasking was in full swing.
You can find me at @moof@mas.to
What have I learned so far?
It's New and Shiny, but it's not
It's a new platform! Except, it's not really new. It's at version 4.0 and that means it's had a ton of development into making it a reasonable platform. In fact, for an Open Source project, it's pretty useable!
I actually had a mastodon account years ago and seem to have lost track of where it was, so I'm giving it up as dead, as I don't remember much of the experience.
As it is, we arrived, and there were a whole lot of people already there, and a whole bunch of abstractions already existing, so it's definitely a workable network
It's not the same as Twitter. It takes getting used to.
The first and most obvious thing is that toots are longer. 500 characters by default instead of 288, but this can be configured on a per-instance basis, and I've seen toots that are several thousand characters appear on my timeline.
Also, Introduction posts work! When you join, you're encouraged to write a toot that is tagged #introduction and adding all sorts of tags that will help with your discovery, and [when I did], I found a whole bunch of people following me as a result.
There's a big push toward image accessibility, making sure you use descriptions for your images. I've turned on the option on my mobile client to not allow me to post images without descriptions, which I suspect is going to get annoying very quickly.
Videos I feel a bit iffy about. They'd be hosted from whatever instance I'm on, which means that the distribution costs are on that server, and woe betide the server that has a 1Gig video uploaded to it that goes viral. Mastodon itself doesn't have video processing software as standard that would aggressively reduce file size serving to those who don't need full res, the onus is on the user. And finally, there's no instant preview for things like youtube or vimeo videos.
The timeline rant
The timeline itself is different, and it does need me to make some adjustments.
It is strictly latest first, there's no magic whatsoever. This means that I'm seeing more noise on my timeline, and that's frustrating.
Every boost is shown, even if I have already seen that toot boosted by someone before; which, given I follow people with similar tastes to mine, happens a lot. And sometimes I see the same toot a day or two later as it makes its way through my extended social network.
I'm also seeing the replies before the original tweet. This is quite frustrating, as I tend to click through, read the original tweet or thread, and then go back and I have to scroll through everything I've just read as part of my timeline, adding noise.
There's a lot of tooting at the moment about algorithms, and I'm not certain that much of it makes sense, but there are a few things that would make the timeline nicer to read by fixing the above niggles.
There's also the post visibility issue. As far as I can tell, the orthodoxy is that replies should be made unlisted, especially on threads, but that is spottily implemented in clients, and requires a lot of education of users, especially those that have come over from twitter, so I'm unconvinced it's a good solution.
I picked the wrong server
I had spent part of the week just trying to find the right community for me to join. I wasn't really sure what server to go for, but I was wary of picking the wrong one, as I view it as a sort of surname, and I didn't want to be identified forever as "a geeky queer" or "radically pro-foss" or a number of other things that my friend Matt seems to find helpful. I ended up going for mas.to because the name was short, I figured that it would at least be easy to write all over the place.
But two weeks in, I'm increasingly of the opinion that I've made the wrong choice. I'm lacking the community aspect of the local view in my client - there's nothing really that links me to the people on my server.
I wrote a thread about this that has devolved into much Mastodon Server Soul Searching
The smaller stuff
- I'm somewhat surprised that the language mix has changed. I seem to have lost most of the Spanish language tweeters I followed, as they seem to have stayed there or moved onto something else. I am seeing a little more German and Dutch in my timeline though.
- Trending is strange: I posted a toot on a trending topic that genuinely went a bit viral, or at least gave me a lot more feedback than I'm used to seeing. At the time of writing, I have 56 boosts, and 134 favourites - which made my phone notifications go on for days. However, very few follows or replies arose from that.
- People are a lot more willing to help out. I posted a toot asking for help and contacts and this had excellent take-up on Mastodon, much more than I was hoping for. On Twitter, I got one DM from a very old friend who offered some good leads, but little else in terms of interaction.
And it's got me blogging again!
This is partly as a result of the fact that it's happening alongside my fixation with Obsidian, but I can definitely say that Mastodon is one of the things that pushed me into blogging again.