I’ve spent more than 7 years in Mastodon, and in my experience, new users always come in with a Twitter mindset, then getting a cultural shock because they come to Mastodon expecting a Twitter experience and end up finding something strange and bizarre.
To soften the blow, I’d like to explain the cultural differences between Mastodon and Twitter.
What Twitter was:
- You could follow microcelebrities (or “influencers”) to read interesting things
- You didn’t reach people unless you got lots of likes quickly, so it became a popularity contest
- The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.
- Toxic people drew others to quote posting, so it became a yelling competition. You didn’t build community, you built followers by standing on a platform and holding a megaphone.
- Unpopular users just yell to the void.
What Mastodon is:
- A bunch of communities of people with diverse interests and real lives.
- Mastodon servers (instances) are careful of who they federate with. Some servers just moderate poorly and there are too many assholes.
- There are microcelebrities, but they’re NOT looking to be popular. They just post the things they do; they’re popular because their lives / hobbies are interesting.
- In Mastodon, you reach people who are actually interested in your stuff. You don’t need to game an algorithm. There is no algorithm, people ARE the algorithm.
- If you don’t want to engage with someone, you can block and report. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon admins do take reports seriously (unless it’s one of the big instances; then good fucking luck). Reporting is encouraged on Mastodon, it keeps the community clean.
- Because admins often maintain the server using their own money, it’s in their best interest that the community is healthy. (Unless they’re assholes, but their instances get blocked quickly)
- There are no quote posts. You can paste a link to the other person’s post, but it is discouraged because we know where that leads.
Longer explanation:
Mastodon has an entirely different culture compared to Twitter. Mastodon was founded and populated by people who believed Twitter was too toxic and corporate-driven. Mastodon is full of gays, transgender folks, sex workers, artists, furries, autistic people, etc.
These people were driven out of the big platforms (Facebook, Twitter) by hate and discrimination. These people have experienced sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, body shaming, etc. in their lives. It follows that the majority of Mastodon is left-leaning, anti-conservative, communist and anti-corporate.
Furthermore: Because it started (or quickly became) as a sort of safe haven for queer folks, they were more open to sincere posting. They post their problems, the discrimination they’ve experienced; their body dysphoria; depression; homophobia; transphobia and racism. And they give each other support, even economic. In my timeline I see posts asking for emergency money more than once per day.
If you wonder why this doesn’t appear on Twitter, it’s because the Algorithm filters them out. The public, the customers don’t like hearing about people asking for money not to get evicted. They don’t like to hear how people were harassed the other day by some karen who believes they’re a man in disguise.
But Mastodon is different. People talk about their daily lives because they know their followers will receive 100% of their posts. This is how communities are built.
Mastodon is not, and never aimed to be a Twitter replacement. It was meant to be something different; a place where you could form communities and build connections without Big Brother examining you or deciding how you should behave online.
So the next time you look for “interesting people to follow”, it could be possible that you’re entering Mastodon with a Twitter mindset. No Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Start following people you think are interesting in YOUR instance. Then start seeing their boosts and follow people you think are cool. Little by little, expand your network, prune your follows and block / mute people you think are obnoxious, and keep building and shaping your network like a beautiful bonsai tree.
The time you invest on building a network from scratch is worth it: You will meet many interesting people, and you will meet new friends; real friends, not just a series of followers whom you have to entertain.
Please take the below as said with the most respect. Especially as I am very empathetic of the struggle of communities finding a space away from hate.
My … concern is:
What you describe is … Reddit / Threadiverse model. Small tight communities focused on openly discussing niche topics. This is why I am on Lemmy.
I use mastodon as “microblogging” - public posting on topics of interest and honestly as an RSS feed since many news orgs’ Twitter feeds are ported over to masto.
But my problem is. If mastodon is a place where we form tight private communities. … and Lemmy is a place where we form tight private communities …, and kbin is a place where we form tight private communities … why do we have all three? What is the difference?
We need fediverse software with clarity of purpose. And the purpose you described … does not fit at all to me with the way things, like replies, seem to work in Mastodon.
Does that make sense?
(And I fully admit I may completely be wrong in this opinion)
I see it in a similar way to how having multiple 3rd-party reddit apps is valid.
If you want to develop a 3rd-party reddit app, the aggregation and structure of the way content is delivered is already determined by reddit. In principle the task is to build a GUI around that.
Fediverse content could be threadiverse-style, or microblogging-style, or both. So to develop an app for this, first you’d need to figure out those aggregation and structure prerequisites. Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon are like different apps for fediverse content which each take a different approach to this. But since it’s FOSS, there is no 1st / 3rd party, they’re all made by one collaborative project.
If I’m not wrong, generally those that prefer threadiverse style will likely end up migrating to Lemmy or Kbin organically, users that prefer microblogging to Kbin or Mastodon, and users that engage in both might use Kbin for a unified presentation. Or, they might prefer discrete presentations which each specialise in the content type, and use both Lemmy and Mastodon. I understand this is a very loose set of overlapping parameters, but the clarity of purpose here is determined by the individual user’s chosen method(s) of interaction with fediverse content. This is definitely a more abstract notion for a user to think about than simply preferring a given visual style like with a reddit app.
Wherever users lie on the spectrum of use cases might not be clear enough to make generalisations like “lemmy is better than kbin for reddit users” accurately, but I think it’s clear to the users individually either a) the type of things they want to post/see or b) the existing forums e.g. reddit, twitter that they want to replace. So while it’s a more individual purpose, I don’t think it’s lacking in clarity to those individuals.
The culture that exists within the communities that use these pieces of software isn’t determined by the software, it’s determined by the instances and the users. But the different approaches to aggregation/structure might lend themselves better to certain kinds of community in a similarly organic way, which would also contribute to shaping which users are on which platform.
The difference between Lemmy and Mastodon, is that the former is topic centric. There are subreddits and each post is topic specific. Mastodon is people centric. You’re not on Mastodon to see what’s happening around the world or what interests you, you’re on Mastodon to see what your friends are up to. It’s the difference between going to the public plaza and going to an expo.
I’ve been using Mastodon since Twitter was taken over by Musk, so I’m not a super long-term user, but I can give my perspective:
Platforms like kbin / lemmy are more like “topic” communities. Like people on kbin create “magazines” and on lemmy they are actually “communities”. From the user perspective, you can just look for these communities you are interested in and sign up to get updates from them.
Platforms like Mastodon are more like you and specific people you like to see content from. So you find people you like to hear from and you follow them to get their updates. They may post on subjects you aren’t interested in but oh well, that’s up to them.
Both formats can produce desirable, tight-knit communities, but they just use different structure. In my opinion, the kbin / lemmy style is more accessible in terms of finding people interested in a specific subject but feels less personal since you are just all there to talk about a specific subject. On Mastodon, when I find people posting content I like, I end up learning more about the random nonsense they are interested in. Like my feed there has a ton of moose pictures now because one person I followed likes to post pictures of moose. I don’t mind seeing them, but I never expected to see so many moose.
TLDR: Mastodon is about following people, kbin / lemmy are about following topics.
To be fair, all I’ve heard from Mastodon is “it’s decentralized Twitter”. I can’t blame it on the newcomers, intentional or not that’s the way it’s presented. Also, ideologically platforms should strive to be neutral and seeking common ground. It’s one thing if you access a specific community (magazine/ subreddit or what have you) but when the platform itself is expected to lean towards a certain ideology, it ends up being an echo chamber that both works as a circle jerk and prevents others from joining in. I get that instances are self hosted and basically your own turf online so you get to do what you want, but defederating over personal beliefs is kind of authoritarian and detracts from the end user experience.
I’m not shitting on Mastodon here, to be very clear. On the contrary, I want the Fediverse to be the best it can be and find a good balance between growing to a size where it’s worth keeping it as a general home without being tethered to other social media for your frends and different perspectives and content but also keeps the values of decentralized and community-driven space.
Unless you just want a niche space isolated from the rest of the world, compromises need to be made on both ends, from the more hardcore and passionate members of the community and the “average online user”.
I guess I never used Twitter as “intended”. I always just cultivated my follow list and watched the people I was following, and looked at the ppl they were replying to & retweeting to identify new people to follow.
For me, Mastodon has been much the same.
Me too. I always saw Twitter as the internet’s “stream of consciousness” and I use Mastodon in much the same way. Now that I’m all set up, the only real difference is that the stream is somewhat more sedate and far less likely to encounter a section of rapids.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. This just sounds like my usage of Twitter, just without the negatives of Twitter. I have my community on there, but I never really ventured outside of it or followed celebrities or influences.
So I might just actually join. I hate the idea of starting over, but oh well. I’ll probably log onto Twitter for the first time in awhile, let people who I talked to know I’m on there, and see if anyone else is as well.
ok.
I’ve been on Mastodon for little more than a year. People here have been generally polite and give each other the benefit of the doubt. I have yet to see a “flame war” as we used to call it on USENET. But Mastodon (and Kbin and Lemmy) instances will have to decide if they will federate with Meta’s new platform. I’m pretty vehemently opposed, but my Mastodon admin seems to think we should wait and see. So here we have Meta, which hasn’t joined the fediverse, has already begun fragmenting us. Is that our fault? Maybe. But I don’t think we’re the problem.
Oh, we do have flame wars. We just call them drama. They’re not a good thing to watch :-/
Remember the Wil Wheaton drama? If you know, you know :-)
Is there an app for mobile users or is it a web app like Lemmy (if I save it as a shortcut my phone treats it like an app)
I just use it in the browser like a web app
Cool. Also, is there anywhere I can read up on the last 10000 years of political rivalry between instances so I know which one to start at? Or at least a short description of what they are like
quick summary of the most notable instances i’ve read about:
lemmy.ml is run by pro-china folks. there’s some drama surrounding that. it is defederated (fully or partially) from some other instances.
lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance. if you want to find something reddit-like, this would probably be the first place to try.
beehaw is a much more private instance that only has a few moderators but has stricter standards on being nice to one another. it ended up having to defederate with lemmy.world early on because it couldn’t handle the moderation load from too much content.
kbin.social happened to pick up a lot of tech type folks for some reason. it was just a side project from one dev so it was not as polished at first and barely survived the incoming users but it’s in a good place now. he’s got a few folks helping him so the future looks bright to me at least.
There’s Tusky which is what I use because I think it looks nice
There are multiple apps for both iOS and Android. I use Tusky on Android and have found it pretty nice for the most part.
Mastodon has mobile apps, Lemmy does too on fdroid
op thank you for this post. I have a draft of text I’d like to type it’s ok. Its related to the topic of Mastodon, not necessarily a reply to the post itself.
Anyway, I’m still trying to learn Mastodon. I do like that we get 500 characters (1000 on techhub.social).
I’m kind of learning I think, that, in order to run a “search”, you kind of have to make a post with the search word with a hashtag. So, if I wanted to search for the topic of let’s say “weather”, on Twitter I search that word. Or even a phrase. On Mastodon, you can’t really do that. You have to make a post that has “#weather” in it and then you can click that hashtag to see if anyone else made a post with that hashtag.
I apparently have always used Twitter wrong since I mostly just lurk and people I follow don’t get into flamewars or whatever they’re called. It’s kinda unrecognizable for me how you describe Twitter.
Mastodon on the other hand is just pretty dead for me. I haven’t found that much interesting stuff and I don’t really know where to look.
From my perspective, they function pretty similarly. I don’t see the toxicity you’re talking about. Quote tweeting is handy because it’s not used to put down others but just, you know, sharing and adding something to the original tweet.
I can definitely agree, Mastodon feels empty and there’s not alot to look out for
It’s very similar to how Twitter felt in its early years. You had to know exactly what you wanted to see (topics, people), otherwise you’d feel lost.
Have you tried searching for hashtags and following ones that look interesting?
Those sounds cool! I may have to check it out. Does it matter what instance you join?
Like Lemmy and kbin, it’s a federation model, so strictly speaking you can join any instance that is federated to the rest of them. The first instance I joined (mstdn.plus, I think) got defederated for some reason and the updates from outside the instance stopped coming, so I joined techhub.social, it’s been pretty good.
In my opinion, you should start out by joining one of the bigger instances. Once you are used to Mastodon, you may if you wish, move to a smaller server that is focused on your niche or your specific interests. But whichever instance you join, you can curate your timeline by following the right hashtags along with people.
I’ve never been a social media guy so I have no idea what to post or how to interact with people.
I used to use Twitter a ton before the Musk takeover. Switching to Mastodon has gone really well so far. It’s taken awhile to build up a follow list of people and tags that interest me, but now that I have it’s a much nicer experience than Twitter ever was.
I’m just following cool people doing cool things and it’s really fun to scroll through. The lack of an algorithm pushing content to my feed was jarring at first since I had to get used the lack of “infinite” scrolling… But it’s been way healthier overall. I can pop in, check out what’s new from people I actually follow, and then close the app and go back to more productive things. Also the people are a lot nicer.
Ars Technica recently published an article very critical of Mastodon. The main takeaway is the argument that Mastodon won’t scale well to a large userbase, as the more instances there are, the bigger the server burden to everyone. And as most users are against corporate funded instances (they’d defederate from any that emerge), it may be unsustainable mid/long-term.
I wonder if these scaling-issues apply to Lemmy too? The instances make copies of posts/comments from other instances. They copy images too? And videos? If so, I imagine a future where only the bigger and wealthiest instances will survive.
And concerning moderation tools, I know they’ll improve with time. But how can a federated system like Lemmy do certain tasks that Reddit’s Pushshift enabled? Example: bots detecting and deleting re-posts, spam, bad actors across multiple communities, etc.
Mastodon does not need to scale well. Even if the userbase shrinks to what it was before the Big Twitter Exodus (or whatever you want to call it) of last year, it will be perfectly alright.
Mastodon was fun and enjoyable before. It does not need more users to remain so.
I feel like this post is basically saying “our hammer isn’t a hammer because we put a really nice grip on it and it’s being wielded by a very nice person”. At the end of the day, it still drives a nail.
Just because there’s a cultural difference doesn’t mean it isn’t the same type of social media tool. Simply call it a better form of Twitter and be done with it.
Yeah, in the end to move you need your interest (or topic or interesting person you want to follow) to exist in Mastodon. For most people, the topic (or interesting people they want to follow) only exist in Twitter, so there’s no incentive for them to move from Twitter.
Yep. And the claim that there are not celebrities, or that if there are they are only popular because they’re sharing their interests, is comical. Whenever I pull up the main popular feed it’s the same slew of people that would have been copied to reddit on PoliticalHumor (Qasim Rashid, George Takei, etc.) sharing snarky political takes fiending for views.
I don’t even necessarily disagree with them most of the time, but it’s clearly the same type of celebrity engagement that Twitter has.
I dunno, this is mighty rose tinted. I’ve run into some spectacular assholes on Mastodon, worse than on twitter, in fact. Most of whom are those aforementioned communists, being just as grating and insane as the nazis are over on twitter.
If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they’re using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.
Don’t want people to think it’s supposed to be Twitter? Don’t model the entire UX after Twitter.
The sane take.
You’re missing OP’s entire point. The two platforms are completely different. You see, Twitter is a microblogging platform, but Mastadon is a microblogging platform. They’re as different as Word and Pages, or Excel and Sheets, or Photoshop and GIMP. Just entirely, utterly different in every way, with the sole exception being that they are functionally identical. (-:
This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected. The users expected a similar experience to Twitter but the goal of Mastodon is not to emulate Twitter.
A lot of the UI/UX may resemble Twitter, but the high level decision making, design, and stakeholders of the project are completely different.
Do you mean to say that Mastodon and similar projects have to adopt an entirely different UI/UX that is unintuitive in order to produce something different just because Twitter is what they expect? Are you aware that big tech pours in inordinate amounts of money into psychology and UI/UX research to ensure they provide experiences with the lowest amount of friction possible?
This feels rather unreasonable, uninformed, and confused in motivation.
This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected.
Yeah, if you copy Twitter’s UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.
It’s not complicated, mastodon just kind of sucks from a user perspective compared to twitter while completely copying it, leading users to dislike it.
Decentralization is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.
And I’ve worked at FAANG companies developing their apps and am well aware of precisely what they do to get people to use them, and it’s not make a carbon copy of twitter that’s harder to use.
Yeah, if you copy Twitter’s UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.
Again, breaking from that expectation is not an inherently bad thing. Fediverse projects are not looking for some stupid IPO pump and dump exit strategy.
Decentralization is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.
Decentralization is an implementation detail to achieve the feature that is “an online service that doesn’t treat you like cattle and owns all of your fucking data”. Clear?
Still not a feature users care about.
Still not a feature users care about.
What planet are you on? What “users”? Lemmy users? Obviously they do!
Twitter users? Who cares!? Privacy, data ownership, apps that don’t fucking implode and DDOS themselves because the owner is an absolute moron, etc. may not be features most Twitter users care about.
But, why should anyone here care? Fediverse projects are not in a market competition to make money. These projects exist to add value to the lives of its users without perverse corporate incentives ruining everything.
I don’t think I will find myself asking, “What app would Twitter users want me to design?”, ever. Why would you want to recreate something as awful as Twitter?
I see you point but I think you are being harsh here. It is clear that it is not to be taken literally that Mastodon is nothing like Twitter in therms of looks. I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.
I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.
If you want to organize discussion around topics, model it after reddit, where you subscribe to topics.
If you want to organize discussion around people, model it after twitter, where you subscribe to people.
Kbin and lemmy do a good job of modelling things after reddit, where you subscribe to topics. The decentralized nature just adds another layer of community duplication, but that was already a problem with reddit (r/gaming and r/games) and isn’t that big a deal since all are subscribable from your preferred instance as long as it’s federated with everyone.
The problem with Mastodon though is that it wants to model itself after Twitter where you subscribe to people, but unlike with topics, having duplicate copies of people is a real problem since it makes it hard to trust that you’re actually subscribing to the right person and not a spam account. That is an extremely real problem that Mastodon tried to side step by pivoting to following topics, but at it’s core the mastodon/twitter UX is not formatted for that, it’s formatted for following people in real time and Mastodon seems like it has ignored that and is trying to insist that it’s it’s own thing that no one actually wants. Organizing discussion based around servers is not a user helpful format, it’s exposing unwanted technical implementation details to the user in a way that only a tech nerd could ever love.
If Mastodon became as popular as Twitter it would end up with at least part of it being almost the same as Twitter. The main reason for the differences are that very different types of people are using the two platforms currently.
