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Back around November, Twitter lost a lot of its lustre. Almost all of that is attributable to the wealth-hemorrhaging man-child in charge, whether it was firing almost all the employees, or welcoming back white supremacists, or just generally being a gigantic asshole. Not that the previous guy was any better: Jack Dorsey was and is a terrible person, an absent CEO and disinterested Silicon Valley technik who'd rather go meditate overseas than stop the use of his site for genocide. (Imagine writing that in the late 90s; almost impossible then to see what the web would become.)
Welcome to the 'free-for-all hellscape' that is Twitter
Why did Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey ignore the Rohingya genocide on his trip to Myanmar?
I started looking for alternatives. I think a lot of people did. While I knew people who upped and left once Musk took over (and power to them), I wasn't until recently able to abandon the site that has meant so much to me from a poetry perspective. All the lit mags are there. A sizable minority of my peers have accounts. And so I started to spread out my online activities, trying a bunch of different things, but still coming back to Twitter, liking and RTing a few things a day instead of dozens, scaling back my activity while I looked at what else was possible.
This capsule was one of those efforts. I have a website as well, where I do a bunch of stuff (like here) that I don't want to put under my real name. I have an account at cohost, a social media site that's queer-friendly and -protective (I'm a cis straight white guy, but am happy to use a site that doesn't allow homophobes, transphobes, and racists). And like everyone else, it seems, I tried out Mastodon.
At first I wasn't impressed. I couldn't get an account at the instance I was interested in, so I ignored it, until a former mutual from Twitter sent me an invite over to her instance. I signed in, filled in my profile, and found it...not difficult to use, but not easy, either. Discovery, compared to Twitter, wasn't great (but still better than cohost!). There were communities you could sort of stumble into. They felt and feel like tiny islands, harder to map without Twitter's recommendations based on your context.
Not that that's bad! You can't go from one thing to the next expecting to receive the same experience every time. Compared to web forums in the late 90s or early 00s, it was bustling. Well, Mastodon overall, maybe. Instance-specific local timelines feel particularly poor for anyone who's been part of an active forum. But on the whole, things are there, and you can (sort of) find them, as hashtag search lets you find things across instances. But that's definitely not perfect. Or, to be honest, even good. Restricting search to hashtags or similar makes sense both from an indexing and a safety perspective. But at the same time, it's another way that Mastodon adds friction: from the initial server selection, to search, a lot of the decisions are justifiable in terms of building a federated social network, but hinder it when it comes to growth.
Friction is bad. Friction creates opportunities for people to bounce off. And some people are fine with that, even prefer it, arguing that small communities of people that want to be there is what Mastodon was built on, what makes it good. Well, okay. I've only been there since November. But: it's also fair to point out that if you want people to leave the umbrella of corporate surveillance/data brokerage/etc for a more user-centric and respectful model (which is definitely one of the goals of the Fediverse), you need to provide an alternative that's just as good, or at least close, to what they had before.
Thousands fled to Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter. Are they still 'tooting'?
Like a lot of people, my Mastodon account shows a November 2022 signup. I bounced off it pretty quickly at first, but started spending more time there once I found more compelling accounts to follow. A couple of weeks ago, I decided I was basically done with Twitter: cleared my bio, blacked out my avatar and banner, locked my account. I'd made all kinds of efforts to ask people to stay in touch. A grand total of one person asked me to add her to my contacts (I guess I'm that memorable). I found very few people from my community on Mastodon.
That's a loss. And while I don't mind using Mastodon, it's definitely warty. That drives some people off immediately, some gradually, some (like me) from time to time. But I'm still there because it's the most interesting alternative that isn't under corporate control and won't inevitably fail in the same way that almost all other online communities eventually do. I'm not going to Instagram. I'm definitely not going to Facebook. 100% you'll never find me on Bluesky. I'm expecting most of the rest of my life will be spent in online communities that are more intentional, that are smaller and probably unconcerned about user counts and monthly active accounts and unfettered growth. Things run by people, not companies, the way it used to be. Ought to be.
And perhaps more importantly, I'll keep up here, and on my dusty corner of the corporate-dominated web, hoping that people remember that there's an online world beyond the apps on their phone. That they can make something. Or even just try. That there's more to internet than just posting, that they're allowed to expand their interactions beyond a few sentences, and ultimately, finding really interesting people and places means they're going to have to try.