I’m Using Mastodon Social: First Impressions
Users who may not want to use social media sites powered by Meta, Google, or otherwise may find solace in decentralized social media. I first became curious about different decentralized social media applications such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and Peertube during the Pandemic and daydreamed about my time in a smaller, slower, Internet.
Many people are curious about alternative decentralized and federated social media applications, so I decided to start this journey by taking a dive into one that I heard plenty of times over during the death of “X” or Twitter - Mastodon.
This Twitter clone where you can even create your own server (with the proper expertise and equipment of course) is what I will be starting to use as an experiment into other decentralized and federated social media communities in hopes of inspiring you to do the same.
The Beginning
The Katterhaus Mastodon Account - a Blank Slate
Of course, my first impression of the Berlin based social media was early Twitter.
At 9:30 am on a Monday morning, the trending topics have 60-70 posts rather than 60k to 70k posts.
Most I saw on trending hashtags was #sosomovies at 3:30 pm on a Thursday afternoon, which had 208 posts.
Wholesome meme accounts posting caption photos from 2015, super independent journalism and 35mm photos of unassuming towns from photographers across the world is what populated my feed. There’s no ads, but there is the occasional photo of cosplay and day in a life videos. You will also see posts in many languages like Japanese, German, or French.
There is an obvious change from the corporate heavy algorithm that we are thrown into on every popular social media site. That’s when it clicked..
Decentralization shifts the focus back to the people on the free web.
Right off the bat I was getting traction from audiences all across the world (Mexico City, Berlin, and Chandigarh) at a rate I have never seen before. Hashtags are still commonplace and even the news I get here is different. More global, more objective, nuanced, and perhaps niche.
Since Mastodon is a open source federation of network rather than a centralized social network, there is no way to count views on posts but rather gauging your performance through engagement. Personally, I have found it easier to reach a more engaging audience on Mastodon than on other sites that I would have never found otherwise.
There are no posts that feel like they are pining for your attention, users are looking and reading because they are simply interested. The timeline is still truly chronological. The Internet used to be a place where you could explore, connect with others from vastly different worlds, and immerse into what you could surf and explore - this is a return to form in a way.
We now live in a world where the Internet is spoon fed. For the first few years I was conscious on the Internet, the decentralization and humanity that creates the Internet’s social network is what exactly the world wide web was originally available freely for.
Now, I also did feel the immediate presence of bots on Mastodon as well, but they are labelled by Mastodon and seem to only have one function (reposting boosting posts with certain hashtags, in certain languages, etc). I felt comfortable knowing some of the accounts that are reposting my blog content are automated. Automation isn’t bad in moderation, thank you to whoever built those bots to help writers and readers like me out!
Many of these bot accounts would bring together certain topics from anarchy, tech, queer news, to photography from server to server, acting as bridges between digital worlds.
I have enjoyed Mastodon so far, it’s a reminder of a slower, more human Internet.
I am just enjoying getting used to somewhere where I can really post whatever I want and not worry about if it is trendy or favoring an algorithm.
I think that participating in an Internet that is centered around genuine discovery is what we deserve.
An Internet where you can even move server to server and transfer your account, where a majority of the users are anti AI and support independent journalism. If you have never experienced that type of Internet, I urge you to jump into your nearest Mastodon server and try.
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