So people keep asking why I haven't joined Mastodon yet, and I thought I'd write up something I could link to. It isn't an angry screed against Mastodon or anything (if anything, I hope the platform flourishes in the wake of Twitter's slow collapse), but more just a collection of thoughts about why joining that platform for me in this particular moment is difficult.
The big tents are closed
I don't think people who got on Mastodon a year or more ago know what it's like looking for a Mastodon server now. Mastodon.social is closed for signups. There is no general purpose place for anyone who wants to sign up to turn. If you hit up joinmastodon.org right now, the first instances it recommends are small-ish 1k-2k servers that tend to have a specialty - LGBTQ/furry/disabled friendly spaces, professional Unix developers, citizens of Glasglow, etc. And there's certainly no problem in Mastodon supporting those communities! Indeed, the federated system is expressly designed to promote smaller communities that can federate or defederate other communities as a self-protection measure!
But it means that users coming in now during the Great Twitter Exodus don't really have a catch-all instance of tens of thousands of users just waiting for people to sign up. You have to make an upfront choice before you can even create an account, and that involves picking one of a handful of promoted servers that make one part of your identity Your Whole Deal. And I just can't really commit to that.
"Your Mastodon Instance Doesn't Matter"
No, I get that, I do. I understand that I can follow pretty much anyone on any other instance, and anyone can follow me. Great!
But it does matter.
First, just sharing my handle requires me to share my instance, and by extension my instance becomes part of my identity. campster@mastodon.social is a very different handle than campster@footfetishdungeon.net. Upfront I am choosing how I present myself to others.
But also: You want to find an instance that will be around for a while. Even if you find a perfect match, thematically ( campster@youtubegamecritics.social would rule, especially if it was a community of like-minded game video essayists! ) it doesn't matter much if there's only 15 people there supported by 1 moderator and it goes belly-up by March due to lack of interest. Your account lives on the instance, and if the instance is just a server in some guy's closet and gets unplugged... whoops! There goes your account, its content, and all its followers. Even if you have a benevolent mod who lets you know the server is going down with advanced warning, migrating your account between instances means keeping your followers but losing all previously posted content. It's A Known Problem.
You also want an instance whose moderation team you trust. Famously if they were so inclined they can peek into your DMs. And yes, this is also a problem on Twitter, but (at least until the last few months) Twitter was a publicly traded company for whom there would be serious consequences if it became known employees were casually peekin' in the DMs. On Mastodon that's at most some interpersonal internet drama where there's way less accountability. But on a more day-to-day reality: they control which instances get defederated, which can limit who you can see. And again, this is an intentional safety measure - being able to defederate problematic communities is one of Mastodon's strength. But the defederation is done by mods, which means you have to trust their selections.
Faced with all of that when being asked to choose, I lock up. I can't simultaneously boil my personality down to being LGBTQ friendly or being a game developer or living in the southern USA or whatever while also taking a guess about the viability of the instance long-term and going on nothing but a gut feel about whether the mods are fair.
Maybe The Platform Is The Problem
In these dying days of Twitter (especially after trying to spend some time away from it) I've realized how negative its influence really has gotten on me. How... angry I get every time I log in. It's started to feel like I'm interacting with it the way reactionaries interact with their own forums of choice - to see a bunch of things that upset you, get angry, and then get an illusion of catharsis as you shout at how furious you are at no one in particular. That enraged nihilism starts to become the closest thing to a feeling the platform can even evoke. It isn't healthy.
And Mastodon is very intentionally designed to be Twitter with some structural tweaks. It isn't bad the way Twitter has become very, very bad (in fact, in a number of ways it's significantly better). But at its heart it's got the same incentive sets.
And like... I think maybe I'm done with Twitter (and Twitter-alikes) in the wake of its collapse? The freedom afforded to me on Cohost still feels refreshing - I can shitpost and effortpost alike and both are valid and celebrated. This feels like a place that validates joy and laughter as much as it lets legitimate outrage or anger seethe. Meanwhile, YouTube remains a solid place for my actual creative output (at least for the moment). And with a 16:9 feature added to TikTok, I think that could be my experimental short-form platform. And with that I'm feeling like I've got a pretty full docket of ways to interact digitally.
As someone who has been in the business of chasing views, subscribers, likes, shares, retweets, and other metrics for over a decade now, I'm kind of ready to settle in and just focus on my content - which has always been a secondary concern on Twitter, and I don't get the sense that Mastodon is all that different. It's a social media site where the emphasis is on social and not media - and increasingly I'm looking to work on the latter rather than the former.
Again: This isn't to shit on Mastodon or say it's a bad platform or anything. It isn't! And if you find value communicating there, great! And I hope it continues to grow and evolve and be a force for good in the world. But people keep asking why I haven't just "jumped on board" yet, and this is largely why. In short: "just jumping on board" is more complicated now than in the past, and also I'm not sure I want to be on board anything that structurally similar to Twitter anymore.
