LIKE many others appalled by the current goings-on at Twitter since billionaire tycoon Elon Musk paid $44 billion to run rougshod over it, I sought refuge in Mastodon, a small-ish social media platform.
In a recent interview with IT magazine Wired, the 29-year-old founder of Mastodon, German programmer Eugen Rochko, said about 800,000 new accounts have been created in the weeks since Musk took over Twitter. This raises the former’s total number of users to an estimated 3 million (and counting) across 4,000 servers. Of course, that is still less than a fraction of Twitter’s 397 million users (as of November 5), but the influx of new users show that people want to keep conversations going, without the hate, or a profit-motivated megalomaniac with zero sensitivity and communication skills flexing his power on the platform.
Speaking from personal experience, I find Mastodon a less frenetic platform. It’s relatively peaceful as most users are on their best behavior. (Think of it as New Manila, versus Twitter’s Tondo or Divisoria, maybe?) While users do write about their passions the same as they do on Twitter, the conversations I’ve engaged in and monitored have largely been courteous. Maybe the trolls have yet to understand how the platform works, or server administrators have been on their toes moderating content earnestly, and kicking out the troublemakers.
Unlike Twitter, which has one central server, Mastodon, like I said earlier, has about 4,000 servers or instances. It’s a decentralized platform that allows new users to choose servers, according to their interests or hobbies, their professions, or even their language/countries. (Taken together, all these servers form the fediverse.)
So the first thing that new users should do before creating an account is select what instance they want to join. Don’t worry—most of the servers are networked to each other, so users in one particular instance can read the posts and interact with other account holders in other servers.
Mastodon.Social, which is maintained by Rochko himself, is the largest of these instances, with about 900,000 account holders from around the world. Another large server with over 780,000 users is Pawoo, which originated in Japan, and thus most interactions are in the Japanese language. There are servers such as tabletop.social, which caters to fans of board games, or borahae.love, which attracts the BTS Army.
Of course, it was confusing as hell at first, trying to figure out what to do. I first created an account at mastodon.world, intending to pollute the air there with my brilliant musings on life (hahaha). Eventually, I created another account (and have been publishing) on the journa.host server, founded by former New York Times reporter Adam Davidson. A home to some 2,000 journalists now, administrators recently disclosed to have received funding from the Craig Newark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York’s Tow-Knight Center, further underscoring its non-profit service.
The server is maintained by Davidson and a host of journalist-volunteers; to join it, one has to fill up a form so the administrators can verify your person. Since I primarily use Twitter to follow the news here and abroad, it made more sense to sign up to this particular Mastodon server. (Follow me @StellaArnaldo@journa.host.)
Other Philippines-based journos, I’ve noticed, have signed up to newsie.social or mastodon.world. (Meanwhile, I’ve recently encountered US-based Filipino users publishing on tambayan.us, while the University of the Philippines has already created its own server upsystem@social.up.edu.ph.)
So in the wooly mammoth’s world, I’ve largely shared my pieces published in this paper, posted other pieces from other news publications or digital news media, reblogged other users or favorited their toots, posted some personal stuff too like dishes I recently cooked. For pieces I want to share, but not sure others will appreciate due to the topic, I publish with a content warning (CW).
The CW makes it possible for other users in the fediverse to decide on their own whether or not they want to read what you’ve published, unlike on Twitter where everything is thrown at you. And let’s face it, sometimes you just have no choice but get sucked into reading all the items and musings of others whether you’re mentally prepared or not.
I’m not sure about the rules in other servers, but at journa.host, users are not allowed to insult or attack others, one of the prime reasons many account holders have deserted Twitter. This contributes to the relative calm in my Mastodon timeline.
Mastodon is not without its issues, of course. Sometimes I am unable to publish photos, and I’m not totally sure if videos are allowed at all on my server. And of course, since the platform is decentralized, I can only publish in my instance and not on the other servers. But I can choose the audience for my posts e.g. whether it is public, for my followers only, or for the users I only mention in it. When in doubt, read the admin rules on your particular server.
For now, Mastodon feels more like a social club or a place to hang with the cool, adventurous kids, and I relish the fact it isn’t like the public town square that is Twitter, where people can watch and cheer a (digital) public hanging.