Migrating away from Twitter, towards Mastodon

Logo image by Eugen Rochko & other Mastodon contributors, AGPL <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html>, via Wikimedia Commons

Over the past decade, since I signed up for Twitter, I’ve found the platform useful, engaging, and informative. During COVID, especially, it was a great source of information, with a wealth of Twitter threads written by medical experts.

But I’ve been forced to reconsider—and change—my social media profile.

I’ve noticed, in the past three weeks, a hard shift to the right in the tweets that show up in my feed. Tweets by people like Dr. Andrew Jackson, who I don’t even follow, who has made unfounded accusations of election fraud in Maricopa County, AZ, after the defeat of gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. I was also disturbed by seeing Elon Musk drag Ye (should we now call him NazYe?) and Trump back to the platform while, at the same time, trolling posts from prominent progressives. His public agreement with Dinesh D’Souza that, before the Musk takeover, “censorship had been a one-way operation against conservatives” on Twitter leaves little doubt in my mind about which side he’s on.

My caveat here is that my Twitter experience is likely atypical. Unlike with Facebook, I followed just about every Twitter account that’s suggested to me by the algorithm, mostly because I don’t want to be stuck in a social media stove pipe. I want to see perspectives from all political persuasions—including Musk’s.

The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter is a complex figure. He’s a visionary when it comes to seeing a place for mankind in space. That optimism is very much needed now. But Musk has also proved, over the past month, how big an asshole he can be on Planet Earth. He is, by many accounts, unnecessarily cruel in his management style, and he seems to relish the experience of firing people. Unfortunately these people, as Bryan Keogh argues in The Conversation, may have little legal recourse.

Musk may, in the end, have the vision and the gumption to get humanity to Mars. But his implementation of a monthly $8 user fee for the “blue check” status on Twitter seems greedy and boneheaded and does not bode well. You may wonder how much he will make people pay for oxygen when he finally gets around to sending people to the Red Planet. He seems, at the present moment, preoccupied. He doesn’t seem to have considered the downsides to his pay-to-play scheme. Either that, or he doesn’t give as shit. There are, at any rate, real world consequences for his actions. Consider that dozens of extremists, followed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, have been able to pay their way into blue check status under Musk. The blue check, before the Musk takeover, used to confer credibility on journalists, but that’s all out the window now.

In search of an alternative, I did some research. I found out about Mastodon, which is an open-source software designed for self-hosted social networking sites. The microblogging features are similar to those you find on Twitter—think of a hybrid between Twitter and Facebook—but the distinguishing feature of Mastodon, other than its cute icon, are the independently run nodes, or instances, that compose the network.  Each Mastodon instance (aka a server) has its own codes of conduct, moderation policies, etc… and these instances, incorporating a federation, can interact with one another. 

Some of the networks are geared towards extremely specific interests: software development, union membership; urbanism and walkable cities; the disabled, their friends and family. One that intrigued me was hostux.social which describes itself as being for beer and free software lovers. “Our server,” they write on the subhead, “is hosted in France.”  

One called “pettingzoo.co” seems kind of tongue-in-cheek, described as “A chill server run by some queer leaning gay dudes. Come enjoy the Petting Zoo. Fuzzies welcome.”

The instance I applied for, one of many, was Federated.Press, which aligns with my interests in journalism. It took about an hour for the administrators to process my online application. After setting up my profile, I promptly used the Mastodon search bar to find my friend Rob Burgess, host of The Rob Burgess Show. Rob had made the move from Twitter to Mastodon a week earlier, and now resided at Newsie.Social. I followed Rob and after I “tooted” (Mastodon-speak for the equivalent of a tweet) my first post, he followed me back.   

It’s been 24 hours since I first posted on Federated.Press. I’ve already had interactions with several members of and comments on the poem that I linked from my blog, titled “Future Citizens of the Galaxy,” about that certain megalomaniac triple-threat CEO that everybody’s talking about. 

While I haven’t yet detached from Twitter yet—that may take some time—I’m excited about Mastodon. It feels like a social network in its infancy. It feels like a network that’s there for the right reasons. It feels like a network that can shine light where light is needed, that can also build communities across barriers. Will I see you there?