This is a list of things I think are important to understand if you’re new to Mastodon. A lot of how Mastodon works isn’t immediately clear, but the effects of how it’s designed can have a big impact on your experience.
While a lot of this advice includes warnings and critiques, I’m very much on Mastodon’s side. I want Mastodon to succeed, and that’s why I care enough to write all of this!
Yes, your server matters. It’s not a choice you should make lightly. Whoever runs your server also runs moderation for your server. They decide on the rules and how they’re enforced (if at all). They can read all your private messages. They’re your only line of defense against government surveillance. They even make aesthetic decisions for your experience of the site. And they can also run away at any time and stop maintaining the server.
If anything goes wrong, moving is possible but definitely not easy for the average user. You might lose your followers in the process, or have to “re-add” all your followers in bulk, causing all of them to receive notifications from you. Edit: See this post by Erin Kissane for further discussion of moving difficulties.
This thread gives a good overview of these safety issues, and this thread makes the larger point about how much power your server admin has.
It’s not obvious, and we don’t have a great way to explain in two sentences, that “pick a server” means making a decision about some or all of:
- a service provider
- a moderation & safety policy
- a federation policy
- Terms Of Service (including reliability guarantees & data retention policies
- a community (or clique?)
- an interface aesthetic
- a trustworthiness decision about the operators
… at once, all choices hidden by monolith services.
It’s a lot.
— @mhoye@mastodon.social
I don’t have much advice to offer new users here — it’s hard to vet a server and I don’t want to point you in the wrong direction — other than to be careful. Here’s one list of Black and trans-friendly servers that might be useful.
But here’s one hopeful note: Mozilla is building their own strongly moderated instance, which should open up in beta this summer. I’m keeping my eyes on this!
When you click on a post to see all of its replies, you only see replies known to your server. Whole conversation threads are invisible to you, unless you manually click through to the “original post.” Most Mastodon users are unaware of this issue.
I think this immediately leads to two bad effects, with more likely downstream.
First, I think this contributes to Mastodon’s infamous frequency of “reply guys” (see below), which turns a lot of people off the platform. If you see someone’s post but can’t see the 10 other people already replying to the post, you might unintentionally reply with the same advice, aggravating the poor poster who doesn’t realize why this is happening.
Second, because replies are shown if people on your instance follow the reply author, you’re stuck in a filter-bubble whose boundaries you might not understand. You think that by following someone, you’re exposing yourself to not just their content but also their audience and community, but you’re actually only seeing the subset of their community interaction that already intersects with your home community.
(Edit: A third bad effect occurred to me. For users experiencing harassment from other servers, this might result in a disorienting harassment bubble where your allies can’t see what’s happening to you.)
I first learned about this from this thread by Simon Willison, and you can also see my short thread on the same topic. There are also many Github issues and discussions, like here and here.
Hopefully someone will fix this someday, but until then, be aware that you’re seeing only parts of conversations, and that your audience is seeing only some of the replies to your posts.
Edit: Via @Xanatos@social.dev-wiki.de, there might be a partial solution on Fedilabs. Via @b2c@wien.rocks, there are also other projects that attempt to patch this issue: FediFetcher, FakeRelay, MoarFediverse.
By default, Mastodon uses a reverse chronological feed. If you follow more than 100 people or follow a few very prolific people, the reverse chronological feed can quickly become unmanageable, making it hard to stay updated. To have any other kind of feed, you’ll need to use a custom app or tool, which generally aren’t accessible to the average user.
To re-state what others have explained better, there’s no such thing as a “non-algorithmic” feed. All feeds are algorithmic. You might have a personal preference for a reverse-chronological feed, but that’s far from a universal preference. Most people prefer an automatically personalized feed! We should have options for our feeds, and those options should include both a reverse-chronological feed and a personalized “algorithmic” feed.
There are a couple ways to escape the reverse chronological feed. You can use a tool like Mastodon Digest, a personalized feed by Matt Hodges and Mauricio Foronda, though this takes quite a bit of technical skill to set up. You can also use fediview, which doesn’t require any coding. But neither of these are built into a full-featured app, and neither tool provides the experience of a feed like those of Twitter or other popular platforms.
You can also upvote the Github issue requesting alternative feeds here, and you can also see a very Mastodon-like debate play out in the issue’s discussion thread.
If you’re coming to Mastodon from Twitter, one of the first differences you might notice are content warnings. These are labels that you can attach to your post, hiding the rest of the post’s content until someone clicks on the warning.
People use these content warnings in all kinds of ways, including as trigger warnings, spoiler alerts, and generic topic tags. Some servers have specific etiquette around the use of content warnings, requiring their members to add content warnings to all political posts, for example.
There’s debate about the best way to use these warnings, and you can decide for yourself what you prefer. If you don’t like having to constantly click on people’s posts to see their content, you can turn off content warnings in your settings. Just know that because of the unfortunate conflation in use cases, you’ll also be exposing yourself to spoilers and triggering content.
As a new user, one thing to prepare yourself for is the amount of over-explaining and “helpful” replies that you’ll receive to your posts.
I sometimes see Mastodon users complain that critics of Mastodon just can’t handle not getting a lot of likes and engagement on Mastodon. I don’t think this is true at all. My posts often get more re-posts and replies on Mastodon than on Twitter. The problem isn’t the amount of engagement, it’s the style of engagement.
It’s exhausting and frustrating to have random people soapboxing in your replies or correcting you on topics of your own expertise. This happens more often on Mastodon than on other platforms, partly caused by the broken conversation threads discussed above, partly by the cultural origins and preferences of the Mastodon community. It’s aggravating, but you should know to expect it.
Edit: I love this definition of sealioning (via Chris Albon), describing it as a “denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings” that involves a “type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.” Unfortunately, this rings very true of my own experience on Mastodon and with sharing this post, and it makes the community a miserable place for conversation.
Finding people isn’t easy unless you know exactly how they’ve chosen to sign up (their user name, their server). Without full text search, it can be hard to find people posting on specific topics.
And then when you find people, if they’re not on your server, their profile will only show you a tiny portion of their total followers, follower counts, and posts. To see the rest, you need to click through to their “original profile.” And no matter where you view their profile, you won’t be able to see your mutual follows and followers, making it more difficult to vet potential connections.
Unfortunately, tools that automatically searched for your Twitter follows no longer work, thanks to Elon Musk’s API changes (not Mastodon’s fault). But you can use Followgraph, which shows you users who are followed by many of the people you follow on Mastodon. It’s also important to use hashtags on Mastodon because of the lack of text search.
Some real, thoughtful, extremely competent human beings have real need for extremely simple, extremely user friendly well connected and marketed online social media products that allow them to connect to their communities quickly and easily. Lots of people I love can’t and won’t come here. Or wouldn’t find me easily in a entirely “self-hosted” world even if I had the capacity and motivation to attempt that.
— Martha Crawford, @shrinkthinks@spore.social
Mastodon is a confusing place. Some of the poor design is obvious (the DM interface is so confusing), while some of it is hard to see at first (hiding replies that aren’t known to your server). This post by Ben Adida, Don’t let federation make the experience suck, gives a great overview of the many choices currently making Mastodon difficult to use, and users like Mekka Okereke have been vocal about design choices that hurt Black people.
Sometimes people try to hide this poor design, as when the big push to recruit users in fall 2022 insisted that server choice wasn’t important. At other times, and way more frequently that I would like, people mock users who can’t figure out the Mastodon interface, in the same pointless way that some Linux users mock people using Windows or Apple products.
Design is important, actually, and it’s sad that anyone is still arguing about this in 2023. With Meta set to release its own Twitter competitor this week, it might be a good time for the Mastodon community to reflect on how it’s failed the average user — the kind of user who is most comfortable with easy-to-use apps like Facebook and Instagram. We need healthy social media alternatives so badly, and the way to win this war is by creating alternatives that are realistic and delightful to use.
How we ended up in this situation starts making more sense when you understand a bit of FOSS history, the worse is better mentality, and contempt culture. I also highly recommend reading this essay on the affordance loop by Erin Kissane.
Here are a couple tools that I’m currenty using to make Mastodon a friendlier place for me:
The huge bright side, of course, is that Mastodon and the Fediverse are free and open and not owned by any one CEO. We’re not at the mercy of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk’s whims.
There are good features too. The ability to edit posts and write long posts are both really useful, especially for more technical academic and industry conversations. And if you enjoy tinkering and are comfortable coding, it can be fun to customize your Mastodon experience and contribute to the community.
Culturally, Mastodon feels both more thoughtful and casual than Twitter, perfect for Sunday morning reflections. It’s often (thought not always) more relaxed and intimate than other platforms. And certainly, it’s less gamified and has fewer grifters.
We’re also here because the alternative platforms have their own problems. If I wrote up a similar list for Twitter or Bluesky, it would be just as long. And despite its many issues, Mastodon is still mostly functional, and there’s hope that the issues will eventually be fixed.
And we’re here because big public conversations are important. Mastodon isn’t perfect at this (a lot of its design is explicitly anti-virality, and its unfriendliness to the not-tech-savvy results in a smaller audience), but it still works ok at spreading important messages beyond your own social circle. I’ve seen some people celebrate the death of Twitter and the fragmentation of “the discourse,” but the kind of public conversation that Twitter brought us was powerful enough to scare people like Elon Musk into trying to destroy it. #MeToo and #BLM were both empowered by Twitter, and we need to hold onto that power.
Since writing this post, I’ve come across some critiques of federation itself, leading me to doubt whether or not federation is actually what we want. Some of the problems I’ve raised above, and some that I didn’t mention (like difficulties around implementing private DMs and blocklists), arise directly from federation.
For example, here is a report from the Stanford Internet Observatory on how child sexual exploitation is enabled by federated social media.
And here are some thought-provoking critiques from Wells Santo.
I highly recommend these posts by Erin Kissane. They cover many of the same topics I’ve covered above, but in more depth and with more insight into and background from the design world.
July 04, 2023
Updated: July 24, 2023