When I first joined Mastodon in 2019, it was via a server — an instance, as it’s called — named mastodon.social. In part, joining that particular instance was from being a bit overwhelmed with trying to wrap my head around what an “instance” even meant, having only been exposed up to that point to social media through centralized services like Facebook and Twitter, where you just sign up on the one site and you’re ready to follow or connect with anyone you want to who’s also on that site.
Decentralized social media like Mastodon works similarly as far as following people and being followed goes, albeit in a different, better way, which I’ll touch on in a minute. Ultimately you still get access to read from and follow anyone else on Mastodon, it’s just that getting there takes a one-time initial extra step. With Mastodon, you sign up at one of many (many, many) servers, instances, that people around the world run. All instances on Mastodon mesh together to create an overall, globally merged feed of posts, similar to the feed you theoretically get on Facebook and Twitter. This means that no matter what Mastodon instance you join, you’ll still be able to see posts from everyone else on Mastodon, regardless of what instance they’re on (other than those blocked or banned; see below).
A bit of why that’s better
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Mastodon has no algorithm determining what posts you see when. I’ve touched on this a bit previously, but in short, Twitter and Facebook, and certainly other commercial social media, keep you using their platforms by employing an algorithm that shows you more and more content you disagree with or gets you riled. This is because perversely, people react to disagreeable content — they will thumbs down the post or reply a disagreement to it or re-post it with a scornful comment, etc. — slightly faster than they react to positive content. These platforms want to keep you engaged and on their site because that gives them more data about you, which is then packaged, along with data about hundreds of millions, or billions, of other users, and sold to advertisers. This is how Facebook continues to run a robust, slick service that’s free to use but earns the company more money than all of Canada’s banks combined.
Because of that end goal of data-selling profit by the likes of Facebook, what you see isn’t just the chronological feed of what people you follow have posted, as you may understandably expect. It’s a feed of posts from people you follow, but that is constructed by that algorithm, which has determined what content you’ll react to/engage with more readily and so pushes that your way. You’ve perhaps noticed that even if you follow hundreds of people on Twitter or Facebook, there are many, maybe even most of those people, who you never see posts from. The posts are there, they exist and you can see them if you seek them out, it’s just that because it’s been determined that you won’t react to or engage with those posts as much as others from someone else, you just aren’t being shown those posts in your home feed. Which is antithetical to the whole point of following people.
Mastodon, meanwhile, doesn’t package or sell any data. It’s entirely non-profit, although users of instances may opt to throw their admins some money, via the likes of Patreon or Ko-fi, to help pay bills to keep the lights on. But in short, what you see on Mastodon is precisely what has been posted by anyone you follow, in pure, chronological order, period.
… and really, isn’t that kinda the way social media should work?
Added bonus
In a decentralized social media model, if you find you don’t like the way the person running the instance you use is operating it, or if there are other issues with the service itself, you can just migrate your account over to another instance that better aligns with your preferences. Or if you’re tech savvy enough (or opt to go with a service that is), you can pay to start your own instance so you aren’t relying on anyone else running the show. Can you imagine how different Twitter/X would be if people could choose to leave the version Elon Musk is running and get the same wanted content but from a place that someone else is running? Cue playing A Whole New World from The Little Mermaid.
mastodon.social is the most popular Mastodon instance. It’s the one people tend to default to signing up on, being a bit of a catch-all. The problem with it being the go-to base of operations for so many, though, is it will also increasingly host people, and faked accounts, that others may find unsavoury. Such is the evident state of mastodon.social lately.
Administrators of instances are the ones responsible for enforcing their rules and dealing with problem accounts/people. But there’s going to be a point at which an instance is so popular that it’s simply impossible for one person, or even a small team, to effectively keep up with resolving all the complaints. That seems to be the case here.
For some time now, there has been a big uptick in comments from people on other instances saying that mastodon.social is increasingly a base for alt-right people (for those not up to speed on that term, basically Nazis) as well as bot accounts — a bot is an independent, autonomous “agent” created by software that uses A.I. and machine learning to mimic human dialogue as a means to a social or political end; accounts are created for bots and they’re unleashed on social media to promote or denounce specific individuals or events or political parties, etc., in order to try to influence real human users on the social media — and “cryptobros”, people (usually men) who keep hyping the importance and relevance of cryptocurrency in order to benefit themselves from others buying and selling it.
… all of which is to say, mastodon.social is becoming a source of enough hassles that, rather than bothering to block each individual account they don’t wish to hear from or be hassled by, some users, and even entire instances (by the choice of their administrators), are simply blocking everything from mastodon.social itself.
While doing the latter neatly stops all unwanted posts from the mastodon.social instance, a downside is that it also blocks the posts of legit user who happen to be based there as well. The end result is that mastodon.social users are get decreasing numbers of people seeing (/maybe liking/maybe sharing/maybe discussing) what they post. Given my whole thing on social media is to read the content of others and hopefully amuse or engage with others as a result of my own posts, being on an instance getting more and more broadly shut out was no good.
I figured it was finally time for a change of where I call home on Mastodon.
Look, I found the lede! It’s buried down here!
I did a little poking around and decided quickly that the instance called beige.party was the place I hoped to go. It was quite active and was the home instance of an increasing number of users who posted quality, often amusing content. I applied to join it, got a fast go-ahead from the administrator — that personal touch again over Facebook and Twitter, actually getting vetted by a real person who weighs your prose and cons and considers whether or not you’d be a good mix on their instance — and underwent a number of steps on Mastodon to set my default account to beige.party and migrate over all the users I follow and who follow me. Unfortunately in such a migration, one’s old posts don’t follow them to the new instance, so some 17,000 that I’ve written since late 2019 are forever connected to my previous account (whether or not I use Mastodon excessively is a whole other discussion). But that didn’t bother me much because hey… new instance, new me. I’m sure I’ll get it back up to those numbers again before too long (a whole other discussion, I said).
So for now, and hopefully for a long time to come, you can find me on Mastodon here. Look me up there when you’ve finally had enough of racist and/or conspiracy-hyping and/or narcist billionaires running the show on your current social media and you realize that the more people who join Mastodon, the more it offers the same opportunities to connect with the same people and create the same groups but in a much more mentally and emotionally positive place. The grass really is greener.
Hope to see you there soon.