As the Elon Musk/Twitter shitshow has unfolded over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Mastodon more. I originally signed up for an account on mastodon.social in 2018, but didn’t really take to it. Back then, most posts were about liber software/FOSS activism—one of my interests, but not my only or primary one.
In early November Twitter made controversial changes to its verification policy and a spreadsheet listing profiles of journalists was circulating, and I followed all 50 or so on there at the time (there are currently over 1,200 accounts listed).
In the month or so since then, I’ve found I’ve been gradually increasing my time spent interacting with the community on Mastodon, and decreasing my time on Twitter. Mastodon isn’t perfect, my instance had performance problems during peaks of sign-ups. Some of the UI could be improved, and the ‘great migration’ from the ‘bird site’ has replaced FOSS as the primary topic of conversation (although that may be a function of whom I’ve chosen to follow).
The great community and decentralised, federated model behind Mastodon more than make up for the downsides, it just feels more comfortable than the corporate-owned walled-garden approach of traditional social media. Imagine if Amazon ‘owned email’—nobody would use it. That decentralised social media feels like a radical paradigm shift to most of us should concern us all.