More thoughts on Mastodon

This post is more like a continuation of Another social media app - Mastodon I wrote back in early November 2022. As of the time of writing, I have been on Mastodon (hachyderm.io) for 3 months now. I’m mostly happy with my experience so far and there are many positives. Although I have not made the complete migration from Twitter at the moment, I foresee that moment will not be too far in the future.

There are two kinds of people I follow on Twitter; tech people and journalists. The migration of tech people I followed on Twitter migrates was much faster than I thought. By now, most of them has been landed on Mastodon already. There are very few journalists in Hong Kong made the jump yet. I guess that is partly due to the fact that some of the Mastodon instances (servers) are not very reliable yet. Another reason could be accounts of journalists involves a lot of private posts (or direct messages in Twitter terms) and the fact that administrators of a Mastodon instance can see those posts is quite a security and privacy concern. Although the problem can be solved by news agency setting up their own Mastodon instance, I’m not sure if any small agency would like to include this undertaking.

The feed of Mastodon is a feature itself comparing to Twitter. Firstly, there are no promoted posts (imagine the minutes saved in a day…). Secondly, the feed is chronological and it means there is no infinite scrolling where posts are “suggested” by Twitter. This avoids biases from Twitter’s suggestions, or reading a viral topic, and, as many of us suggested, “dumb scrolling”. Another feature is that Mastodon has a “local” feed. What that feed composes of are posts from people on the same Mastodon instance. This greatly helps building a community (and another reason choosing an instance to join is an important step).

In relation to feed, a part of federated ActivityPub is also a feature not being utilised but I think it will be very popular in the future. Mastodon is a Twitter-like implementation on ActivityPub. Pixelfed is a Instagram-like implementation on ActivityPub. Since both implementation speaks the same protocol (or “language”), users of Mastodon can read posts from a Pixelfed should it follows. That allows merging of multiple implementations and makes one big social platform.

APIs of Mastodon is much more powerful than Twitter. As a result, there are already many implementations of CLI tools. The one that I used often these days is toot (and it is built in Python). This allows me to browse social media without opening a browser.

You may not be able to get verified (blue tick) as a person on Mastodon. But you can definitely do it for the links you put onto your Mastodon profile. For the details, feel free to refer to verification documentation on hacdyderm.io.

Twitter was having a good balance between making it free for user and getting enough revenue. With recent chaos (suspension of journalists, ending free access to API), I think users of Twitter will become part of the product and will not being served well anymore. Thus, I do think it is time to start considering “jumping the ship”.