It’s my Mastodon Anniversary!

After two years of trying out multiple alternatives to Twitter—yes, I will always call it that—I feel like Mastodon is my new favorite. I tried BlueSky and Threads, I still have an account on posts.CV, but my go-to place is Mastodon 💛🐘

Why I like Mastodon

To me, Mastodon feels calm. Mostly, I guess, because I’m on a small server, and I avoid using hashtags on potentially controversial posts—you could call this strategy “anti-engagement strategy”. I also compare my Mastodon feed to my YouTube suggestions. I’ve heard from a few people whose experience on Mastodon was or is bad—all of them joined the Fediverse via one of the big Mastodon servers. Maybe that is relevant for their experience, maybe not, I don’t know.

What I like most about Mastodon is the absence of an algorithm. The feed I look at when I open Ivory or Elk.zone contains posts from people I follow, and the boosted posts those people chose to boost to their followers. Thats it! No ads, no posts pushed to my feed by an algorithm, no posts from a hateful CEO. There are usually 30 to 60 new posts in the morning, about 90% of which are interesting, all of which are worth reading, none of which are hateful, angry, stupid, or unnecessarily alarmist. Its actually nice to relax scrolling on Mastodon for me, I feel refreshed afterward—as opposed to scrolling YouTube, Twitter, Threads, etc. For someone used to Threads or Twitter, this must sound strange…

A while after I moved away from Twitter, I wrote about algorithms in “The ROI of Social Media”:

If you want to sell your new course, book, workshop, or promote an event, use algorithm-driven networks like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. […] If you want high-quality content from social media, use Mastodon or another network with no engagement-optimized algorithm. Avoid Mastodon servers with too many members, rather find a server you resonate with. […] There is an obvious conflict of interest here. Algorithm-driven social media allows advertisers to pay to be seen by the network‘s users. They are the network‘s bread and butter, but too much of their content will make people leave and move to another platform.

I think this still holds up really well. And I believe the Instagram timeline with 25% ads is unscrollable, as will the Threads timeline be, once enough people are hooked.

About BlueSky and Threads

I had accounts on Threads and BlueSky since leaving Twitter—“had”, because I deleted both. My experience with BlueSky was chaotic and boring, while Threads was chaotic and enraging. I hear BlueSky has changed and become more interesting, but at least for now, I have no interest in giving it another try.

Threads uses Meta’s engagement strategy, a strategy that shows posts to more people if the post provokes more interaction. This leads to outrageous, stupid, hateful, and angry posts filling the timeline, while interesting, thoughtful, and calm content is drowned out. I feel like there is probably a connection between the current political climate and Meta’s algorithm, but I expect they’ll keep it like this, as it is very successful in generating engagement. Once Zuckerberg feels happy with the usage numbers, and Threads has become unavoidable for most, I expect Meta will start showing ads in the feed. All commercial roads lead to ad-supported, algorithmic engagement machines, I guess?

I really appreciate that Mastodon is free of ads, I’m happy to contribute financially via Patreon 😄

On Crowd Size and who’s where

On Mastodon, I mostly have a new crowd compared to Twitter. My Twitter crowd^[1] was to a significant extent from Germany, and very few Germans in my circle moved to Mastodon as early as I did. We lost contact. I think Musk’s takeover of Twitter and subsequent conversion into a megaphone for himself did long-term damage to online communities that were scattered by him. I also think it’s a very positive development that social media is less monolithic these days than it was two years ago. I hear BlueSky is gaining popularity in Germany these days. Maybe ActivityPub and the AT protocol will find a way to interconnect in some way at some point.

I actually have almost as many followers on Mastodon as I had on Twitter, but I notice a lot more engagement from those people than I ever saw on Twitter. There is something to be said for platforms with no algorithm—you can really only follow about 50 people before you start being overwhelmed by your Mastodon feed. I think that limit is the reason behind more engagement with fewer followers. While I had a Threads account, I think I had more followers, but I only saw any engagement when I posted something stupid or outrageous. In my mind, every Mastodon follower is worth more than 100 Threads, Twitter, or BlueSky followers. So, thank you if you’ve decided to follow me there!

⌞w⌝