Skipped the Black Friday lines this year. Sat on the couch in sweatpants with cold stuffing on a plate and finally did the thing I'd been putting off for two weeks: made a Mastodon account.
I want to say I did this out of some principled stand about decentralization, but really it's because Twitter has been exhausting since early November. You probably remember the week the $8 Twitter Blue checkmark launched and then got yanked a few days later after someone made a fake verified Eli Lilly account and tweeted that insulin was free, which actually moved the stock. There was a fake verified Nintendo account too, and a bunch of others. It was funny for about six hours and then just felt like the whole site was on fire. So, fine, Mastodon.
Here's the thing nobody tells you going in: the app itself isn't the hard part. Signing up is easy. The hard part is that before you can even sign up, you have to pick a server, and there's no good explanation anywhere of why that matters or how to choose.
Quick version of how it actually works, since I had to piece this together myself: Mastodon isn't one website, it's a protocol. Anyone can run a "server" (they call it an instance), and instances talk to each other, so a person on fosstodon.org can follow and reply to someone on mastodon.social without either of them switching sites. Your username ends up looking like an email address, something like @[email protected]. It's a neat idea. It is also a genuinely bad first-run experience if you just want to make an account and start scrolling.
I tried mastodon.social first, the flagship instance, and it wouldn't take new signups when I tried around 11pm, presumably because half of tech Twitter had the same idea that week (Eugen Rochko, the guy who built Mastodon, posted that the network passed a million monthly active users this month, which tracks). Ended up on hachyderm.io instead, which has a decent number of software people on it and, more importantly, was actually letting people in.
A few things I wish someone had told me before I started clicking around:
- Your instance choice mostly affects moderation and vibe, not who you can talk to. You can follow people on other instances fine. Some instances do block each other over moderation disputes, which is its own whole soap opera I don't fully understand yet.
- There's no algorithmic feed. It's chronological, full stop. I actually like this a lot more than I expected to, though it also means the timeline is dead quiet at 7am and a firehose at 9pm.
- Rebuilding your follow list is annoying and there's no way around that. Some sites let you upload your Twitter following list as a CSV and it'll try to match accounts, which caught maybe a third of the people I actually wanted to find.
- Third-party apps are still catching up. I heard Tapbots (the Tweetbot people) has something called Ivory in early testing, which if true is good news because the official mobile experience is pretty rough right now.
None of this is a knock on the people building it. It's an open-source, mostly-volunteer-run thing getting slammed with a decade of pent-up Twitter refugees in about three weeks, of course the plumbing shows a little. I just wish the onboarding flow said something like "pick literally any instance, you can always move later" instead of dumping a list of forty server names on you with a one-line description each and no context for a newcomer.
Small complaint that has nothing to do with the tech: my timeline is currently 40% people posting a screenshot of their Twitter bio captioned "just in case," which, I get it, but if I see one more I might actually log off for real.
Still have Twitter open in another tab. Old habits. But I made a little starter list of people to follow on the new place, and I'm going to give it a proper two weeks before deciding if it sticks. Ask me again after the holidays.