I’ve been using Mastodon for over a year now and since the platform has grown considerably over the past couple of years, I thought it best to describe my feelings regarding the platform and whether I plan to stay.

I left Twitter a while ago, well before Elon Musk acquired it. I’ve already expressed my thoughts about the acquisition in another post so I won’t be elaborating here. The main reason I left is because I felt like the platform wasn’t giving me enough in return for my time and energy. Musk waltzing in and trashing the place only cemented my decision. As such, I set out to find another platform that met my needs. Because Mastodon was becoming popular at the time, I decided to start there.

So, how does it measure up?

The Community:

The community is alright. What I like about Mastodon is that the discourse is more friendly and less fast-paced than Twitter. On Mastodon, the interactions I’ve had with other people feel more genuine and authentic. I’ve always felt that the quantity of my relationships isn’t as important as their quality. On Twitter, I felt like I had to post non-stop just to please the arbitrary demands of the algorithm just so my posts would be visible. I never felt like the relationships I had on there were authentic and gaining enough engagement felt like a never-ending contest. It was exhausting. On Mastodon, I could disappear for weeks at a time and always pick up where I started. This experience was far more pleasant compared to the unrelenting rat race that Twitter promoted.

With that said, while I’ve met some pretty cool people on the platform, I still feel… out of place. The particular instance I’m on, cryptodon.lol, is mostly a handful of actual people who only post occasionally and the rest are crypto news/market accounts. It honestly feels pretty lonely. Most interactions I have are from Federated and while those interactions are pretty nice, most people I engage with either aren’t involved in web3 or oppose it entirely. On Twitter, I was able to participate in some engaging and interesting discussions about web3 with some pretty bright people. It’s become difficult to find that type of discourse on Mastodon.

Another problem I see with the Mastodon community at large is a rising sense of elitism and gatekeeping. There’s this prevailing atmosphere of tone-policing on the platform and you constantly see posts criticizing the “birdsite” and talking about how they’re so much better than Elon Musk, etc, etc. It can get a little annoying. I also see community members harshly criticizing other people for using Twitter instead of going elsewhere which I feel is a bit unfair.

So overall, the community is okay, although I would prefer a community that is a bit more web3-centric. I just don’t feel like I’ve found a digital tribe that I can truly resonate with yet.

The UX:

The UX design for Mastodon is… not very good. For starters, the sign-up process can be tricky. Unlike Twitter, where you can just spin up an account and start interacting with people right from the get-go, Mastodon requires you to find an “instance” for a particular community and then request access to that instance. You then have to wait for the admins to give you permission to join their instance (and in some cases, that’s a big if).

It took me a while to figure out how to even join Mastodon and it was a little confusing. For a sign-up process, it’s not very user-friendly and it’s enough to keep many people away from the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if this lack of good UX is the cause behind Mastodon’s recent slump in user growth*.

The UI on the main site itself is pretty janky and there are a few design choices that honestly make me scratch my head. One feature that doesn’t make any sense to me is the “favorite” button. At first, I thought it was some type of like button, and in a way, it is as you can (kind of) see it on people’s posts. On the toolbar to the right, there’s a favorites tab where you can see all the posts that you have favorited before. However, at the same time, you have a “bookmark” feature that does exactly the same thing. What is the purpose of this? Why would I want to see all of the posts I’ve favorited when bookmark already does that? It’s unnecessarily redundant. I also noticed that, instead of showing how many replies your post got, any post with more than one reply instead shows a “1+”. That’s not super helpful. Why can’t it just say how many replies there are?

So yeah, the UX needs a lot of work. Perhaps as the platform evolves these UX issues will be ironed out, but as it stands, the current design is likely stunting Mastodon’s potential growth.

Conclusion:

I’m going to be honest, I’ve never been a social media type of guy. I just never enjoyed using it. Maybe that’s due to me being a massive introvert but I’ve never found a social media platform that I genuinely enjoyed. So why do I use it? There are a few reasons.

The main reason is that I want to network with like-minded people. Before creating an account, I knew the hellhole that Twitter was and I swore, up and down, that I would never use the platform. However, after diving down the web3 rabbit hole, I wanted to integrate myself into the larger community, and the only place web3 people congregated was, well… Twitter. What’s a crying shame is that this still holds true.

For all of Twitter’s faults, it’s a place where I’ve met the most interesting, intelligent, and brightest minds currently working to build the decentralized web. With this in mind, I really have to ask: Why on earth are they still using Twitter? There are other decentralized alternatives available (some of which I’ll discuss in a minute) and while it’s true that they still aren’t on the same level as Twitter, they are steadily growing and have a lot of potential. If these people care so much about building a truly decentralized internet that’s free from the power of elites and corporate interests, why do they continue to use a platform under the complete control of a frivolous billionaire who doesn’t care about its users? Why do they continue to enable someone like Musk and the people who follow him?

I’ve already made the decision that I’m not going back to Twitter. I cannot, in my own good conscience, continue to use a site that actively promotes toxic behavior and divides people for the benefit of an elitist pig like Musk. The downside of this decision is that it effectively severed me from the one online community that I’ve always felt I was a part of. Although I’ve met some pretty great people on Mastodon, the discourse there just isn’t the same as what I could find on Twitter.

That’s the second reason I often use social media: I want to find “my tribe”, a digital homestead where I feel I belong. Human beings are social creatures and need a group of people they can identify with. Since I left, this has become increasingly difficult to find. In a way, I feel like a displaced nomad. While I still don’t regret my decision of leaving Twitter behind for good, I wish there was somewhere else online where I felt at home.

I’ll continue to use Mastodon for the time being. Was planning to discuss other decentralized platforms out there but that will have to be a post for another time. I think Mastodon still has a lot of potential and if the dev team makes the right decisions, it could eventually grow to be a suitable replacement for Twitter. With that said, it still has a long way to go.

*While writing this article, I found out that the devs are actually working to fix the sign-up process and make it more user-friendly. We’ll see if that helps the platform’s growth.