Mastodon is one of the many Twitter alternatives currently available (others you may have heard of include Threads and Bluesky). I have been using Mastodon for a little over six months and enjoy it immensely – in fact I enjoy it so much that I deleted my Twitter account in its entirety. Here is a list of reasons why you might be interested in trying it out as well (and you can do that by signing up here).
1. You Prefer No Ads
Mastodon is not supported by any advertising revenue and as a result no paid or promoted advertisements are forced into your timeline.
2. You Want More Control of What You See
Mastodon has a large number of tools that let you control what you see in your timeline, including filters (to hide posts with certain words), temporal muting(so you can “pause” content from people for a certain amount of time), the ability to hide “boosts” (the equivalent of a “retweet”) from people while still seeing their own content, unrestricted blocking (for people who you don’t want to see or interact with) and there is no “algorithm” created by someone else pushing content into your timeline based on what they think you would be interested in.
3. You Support Decentralization
Unlike many other social media platforms which are subject to the whims of often unpredictable owners (see, e.g., Twitter) the protocol upon which Mastodon is built is decentralized, meaning there is no single person or entity in control of your content. How everything works is beyond the scope of this article, but if you are interested in learning more I recommend the following:
https://www.popsci.com/technology/activitypub-fediverse/
4. You Prefer An Anxiety-Free Social Media Experience
Because there is no algorithm and no financial incentives to push promoted content into your timeline (see items #1and #2 above), there is far less of the non-stop “rage-baiting” designed to drive engagement that you may be accustomed to elsewhere.
5. You’d Like to Build a Following of People Who Are Actually Interested in Your Content
I know from personal experience that building a following on social media is hard. It’s even harder if you’re not the type of person who likes to “perform” for the social media “crowd.” I’m one of those people, and despite just “being myself” on Mastodon, I’ve managed to grow to 1,300 followers in the course of just over six months.
6. You’re Seeking High Quality and Civil Discourse
On balance, I have found that the conversations on Mastodon are far more civil and thoughtful than on other social media platforms, and that includes LinkedIn. It is actually possible to have a nuanced discussion without random people showing up in your replies and yelling at you, and when that does happen, you have the tools to mute or block them if you don’t wish to engage with that sort of behavior.
7. Content Moderation is Important to You
Despite being moderated mostly by volunteer community members, content moderation on Mastodon is extremely well done, at least in my experience. This is in sharp contrast to what is currently happening on Twitter and even on Bluesky. “Protecting the community” is a high priority on Mastodon.
8. You Want Everything Above Without Having to Pay For It
Unlike Twitter (which now requires a monthly fee to get certain features) and other social media platforms (which extract their fee in the form of user data shared with advertisers), there is no monthly fee required to use all of the features of Mastodon (including being able to edit your posts whenever you feel like it). Donations to whoever is administering your server (also called an “instance”) is of course recommended, but not at all required.
In conclusion, if any this has inspired you to try Mastodon, you can sign up here. And if you read this article and enjoyed it feel free to let me know on Mastodon and I will be sure to say hello.
This is a guest post and the author does not represent or work for NodeSpace and NodeSpace does not necessarily share the same views as the author. Guest posts are used to highlight and showcase technology, bring awareness to issues we feel should be known about, and to help increase awareness.
You can follow NodeSpace on Mastodon or even spin up your own instance on a virtual private server or dedicated server.