Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which I’m here to say not only offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives, but also that the alternatives are fatally flawed.

By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly (but not all) running the Mastodon software, that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol. Now I’ll try to convince you to start using one of them.

[I posted an earlier version of this essay called Time To Migrate last year, but enough things have changed that it’s worthwhile revising and reposting.]

The simplest argument · Have you noticed that social-media products, in the long term, seem inevitably to enshittify? I have. But there’s a major exception, a tool that’s been serving billions of us for decades, and works about as well as it ever did. I’m talking about email.

Why does email stay reasonably healthy? Because nobody owns it. Anyone on any server can communicate with anyone else on any other. Nobody can buy it and make it a vehicle for their politics. Nobody can crank up the ads or make things worse to improve their profit margin.

Mastodon’s like email that way. Plus it does all the Post and Repost and Quote and Follow and Reply and Like and Block stuff that you’re used to, and there are thousands of servers. Anyone can run one and nobody can own the whole thing. It doesn’t have ads and it won’t. It’s dead easy to use and it’s fun and you should give it a try.

The rest of this essay goes into detail about why Mastodon is generally great and why the alternatives have little future. But if the pitch sounds good so far, stop reading, go get an account, and climb on board.

Why now? · Along with that “can’t be owned” and “no ads” stuff, the software is getting really good, particularly in the last couple of releases. It’s got cool features you won’t find elsewhere, and there’s very little cool stuff from elsewhere that’s not here.

There was a time when newly-arrived people had confusing or unfriendly experiences, or missed features that were important to them. It looks to me like those days are over.

Migration · Mastodon is many thousands of servers, and you can join the biggest, mastodon.social, or shop around for another. But here’s the magic thing: If you end up disliking the server you’re on, or find a better one, you can migrate and take your followers with you! You can’t ever get locked in.

Migration is probably Mastodon’s most important feature. It’s why no billionaire can buy it and no corporation can enshittify it. As far as I know, Mastodon is the first widely-adopted social software ever to offer it.

Interaction · You hear it over and over: “I had <a big number> of followers on Twitter and now I have <a less-big number> on Mastodon, but I get so much more conversation and interaction when I post here.”

One of the people you’ll hear that from is me. My follower count is a bit less than half the 45K I had on Twitter-that-was, but I get immensely more intelligent, friendly interaction than I ever got there. (And sometimes I get told firmly that I’m completely wrong, but hey.) It’s the best social-media experience I’ve ever had.

Dunno about you, but conversation and interaction seem like a big deal to me. One reason things are lively is…

Sex · Here’s an axiom: An ad-supported service can’t have sex-positive or explicit content. Advertisers simply won’t tolerate having their message appear beside NSFW images or Gay-Leatherman tales or exuberant trans-positivity. Mastodon has all that stuff.

Of course, you gotta be reasonable, posting anything actually illegal will get your ass perma-blocked and your account suspended. So will posting anything that’s NSFW etc without a “Content Warning”. That’s a built-in feature of Mastodon which puts a little warning (“#NSFW” and “#Lewd” are popular) above your post, which is tastefully blurred-out until whoever’s looking at it clicks on “Show content”. I use these all the time when I post about #baseball or #fútbol because a lot of the geeks and greens who follow me are pointedly uninterested in sports.

(Oh, typing that in reminds me that you can subscribe to hashtags on Mastodon: Let’s see, I currently subscribe to, among others, #Vancouver, #Murderbot, and #Fujifilm.)

Moderation and defederation · Did I just mention, two paragraphs up, getting blocked? Mastodon isn’t free of griefers, but the tools to fight them are good and getting better.

The good news is that each server moderates its own members. There’s variation of the standards from server to server, but less than you’d think. Since there are thousands of servers, there are thousands of moderators, which is a lot.

If you act in a way that others find offensive, you’ll probably get blocked by the offended people and also reported; the report can come from any server and it’ll go to the moderators on yours. On a well-run server, those mods will have a look and if you’ve actually been bad, your post might get yanked and you might get warned, or in an extreme case, booted off.

(I’ve been reported for saying unkind things about Bibi Netanyahu and for posting too many photos of my cats (no, really) but that kind of thing is cheerfully ignored by good moderation teams.)

Then there’s Mastodon’s nuclear weapon: Defederation. Suppose you’re prone to nasty bigotry in public and you get reported a lot and your server’s moderators don’t rein you in. Eventually, word will get around, and if things aren’t cleaned up, most servers will defederate yours, so that nobody on their server can see posts from anyone on yours. Your site is no longer part of the “Fediverse”; this is a powerful incentive for server owners to take moderation seriously.

The effect is that the haters and scammers and Nazis who show up mostly get shuffled off-stage PDQ. Not always, unfortunately; a couple of years ago a wave of incoming Black people had bad experiences with racist abuse. Ouch. Is there anywhere in the world that a loud-voiced Black woman won’t provoke a chud eruption? [sigh]

But the good news is that recent Mastodon releases have been shutting prone-to-abuse channels down, so things are better than then and should continue to improve.

Links are good · Corporate social-media services like to downrank posts with links. Which makes me want to scream, because my favorite thing to post is a link+reaction to something cool, and so are my favorite posts to read.

On Mastodon, when your post has a link, the software automatically fetches a preview of whatever you linked to and uses it to decorate the post. I mean, it’s the damn Internet, it only got interesting to non-geeks when we figured out how to turn millions of servers into a great big honking searchable hypertext.

Search · Speaking of which, Mastodon search is pretty good these days. It’s become, just like this blog, part of my outboard memory, and I’m always typing things like “telephoto from:me has:media” into the search box. Fast enough, too.

Great clients · Another good thing about Mastodon is that there is plenty of good client software to choose from, mostly open-source. The best ones are miles ahead of Xitter and Threads and Bluesky and, really, anything.

There are official Web and mobile clients from the Mastodon team and they’re fine, especially for admin and moderation work. But iOS people should check out Ivory, Androiders should look at Tusky, and everyone should try Phanpy. I live in Phanpy on both my Mac and my Pixel — it’s a Web thing but installable as a PWA.

Commercial products, especially social-media services, have never been at peace with third-party clients. Twitter used to be, but then it stabbed those developers in the back. It’s easy to understand why; every product manager has it drilled into them that they must control the user experience. This ignores the ancient wisdom (I first heard it from Bill Joy) “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.”

Mastodon doesn’t have that kind of product manager, but it does have a fully-capable API, developed in the open and with no hidden or restricted features. Which means you’re going to get better clients.

Algorithms · The algorithms that commercial social-media services use to sort your feed have one goal only: Maximize engagement and thus revenue. They have no concern for quality or morality, and have been widely condemned by people who think about this stuff. So much so that there’s a feeling that Algorithms Are Bad.

Mastodon has an algorithm: Show the posts from the accounts you follow, latest first. It works pretty well. It also has “Trending” feeds of the most popular posts, hashtags, and links. I hit those once a day or so to get a feeling for what’s going on in the world.

I do think there’s room for improvement here; Bluesky has shown off the idea of pluggable feed-ranking algorithms, with many to choose from, and I like it. No reason in principle we couldn’t have the same thing on Mastodon.

Money · Every other social network has started with a big pot of money, whether from venture-capital investors (Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky) or from a Big Tech corporate parent (Google+, Threads). The people who provided that money want it back, plus a whole lot more. Thus, the manic drive for “engagement” and growth at all costs. They need to build huge data centers and employ an elite operations team plus an even more elite marketing group.

Mastodon, eh… a gaggle of nonprofits and co-ops and unincorporated affinity groups, financed by Patreon or low annual dues or Some Random Geek who likes running a server.

Since nobody owns it, nobody can extract a profit from it. Which means that from the big-money point of view, it’s entirely non-investable. The goal isn’t for anybody to make money, it’s to be instructive and intense and fun. It’s run on the cheap. You know what they call systems that are cheap and diversified? Resilient. Sustainable. Long-lived.

Last year I wrote: “Think of the Fediverse not as just one organism, but a population of mammals, scurrying around the ankles of the bigger and richer alternatives. And when those alternatives enshittify and fall, the Fediversians will still be there.” After “scurrying” I should have added “and evolving”.

But Bluesky! · I like the Bluesky people and their software and some of their ideas. But I don’t see it as a good long-term option, for two reasons. First, it’s not decentralized, in that it couldn’t survive if Bluesky Social PBC fell on bad times. Yes, I know about BlackSky (am a fan) and Eurosky (dunno enough yet) and they don’t change my opinion.

Second, I think it’s inevitable that Bluesky-the-company will indeed go sour. They have raised a total of $123M in venture-capital investments. The biggest chunk, $100M from Bain and friends, was signed in April 2025 but not disclosed until a year later. Why not, I wonder? Actually, I don’t wonder at all: Because they knew perfectly well that long-term survivors like me would be horrified.

You, see the people who coughed up all those millions didn’t do it out of pure love or idealism, they want Bluesky to become a money machine that emits a fountain of gold so they get a payback in the billions. Which, OK; that’s what Venture Capital is for. Except for, I see no evidence that Bluesky has anything resembling a business model. See the problem?

I see two possible outcomes: The company craters when the money runs out, or it builds a lucrative income stream, probably based on advertising. Which means we can expect to see the pathologies that make X and Facebook and friends so loathsome.

Mastodon’s the only option · The only social-media option, I mean, that’s decentralized, not owned or controlled by anyone, and working well today as you read this. It’s intense and interactive and fun. Why settle for less?

(Disclosure: I have no formal connections with the Mastodon organization, aside from being a low-level supporter on Patreon.)