Time to Migrate (To Mastadon)

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”. This month marks the third anniversary of my Mastodon migration and I’m convinced that right now, in late 2025, it’s the best place to go. Come join me. Here’s why.

Defining terms · In this post, by “Social media” I mean “what Twitter used to be, back when it was good”. We should expect our social-media future to be at least as useful, safe, and fun as that baseline. (But we can do better!)

By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly running the Mastodon software, that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol. Now I’ll try to convince you to start using one of them.

The simplest argument · Have you noticed that social-media products, in the long term, can’t seem to manage to stay fun and safe and useful? I have. But there’s one huge 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 and it Just Works. Nobody can buy it and make it a vehicle for their politics. Nobody can crank up the ad density 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 and 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 specifically better than the alternatives. But if that simple pitch sounded good, stop here, go get an account and climb on board.

Why now? · Two things motivated me to post this piece now. First, this month is my three-year anniversary of bailing out on Twitter in favor of Mastodon.

Second is the release of Mastodon 4.5, which I think closes the last few important-missing-feature gaps.

The software is improving rapidly, 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.

The server-selection menu has lots of options.

This 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 this.

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 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 then sometimes I get told firmly that I’m wrong about this or that, 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 can.

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.)

The “Ivory for Mastodon” app for Apple platforms,
one of the many fine alternative clients.

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. So there’s some 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 can see posts from anyone on it. Your site is no longer part of the “Fediverse”; this is a powerful incentive for server owners to take moderation seriously.

The effect of all this is that the haters and scammers and Nazis who show up get shuffled off-stage PDQ. Well, almost always; a couple of years ago a wave of incoming Black people had bad experiences with racist abuse. Ouch. 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 my favorite posts to read are too.

On Mastodon, when you have a link in a post, the software automatically fetches a preview of whatever you linked to and uses it to decorate your link. 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 are lots of clients to choose from, mostly open-source. The best ones are miles ahead of Xitter and Threads and Bluesky and, really, anything.

Anniversary post in the Android “Tusky” app.

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 on both Android and iOS.

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. Obviously 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 novelty, 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.

The “Trending” display in Phanpy.

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) 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 enjoys 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 or fall to earth, the Fediversians will still be there.” After “scurrying” I should have added “and evolving”.

What about Bluesky? · I like the Bluesky people and their software, but I worry a lot about whether they’re really decentralized in practice, and even more about their financial future. I wrote up the details in Why Not Bluesky.

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.)