I finally decided to create an account on Mastodon. You can follow me at @jsq@mastodon.social. I put this off for so long because I was skeptical and I did not want to manage another social account, but it has turned out to be pretty fucking awesome.
I’ve only been using Mastodon for a few days so far, but wow — I’m impressed. It is truly a version of Twitter without all of the bullshit. And by bullshit I mean surveillance, corporations, shitty ads, an algorithmic feed that persistently shows me bullshit I do not care about, crybaby billionaires who are larping as world saviors and pretending to be free speech enthusiasts, and venture capitalists pretending to be philanthropists while clamoring about how you can also be rich if you would just stop being poor.
Mastodon profiles are better. I like that you can add 4 metadata items. These are commonly used for website links. For example, I can link to my personal site as well as my GitHub profile, without having to put one of those links in the bio section. As far as I can tell, Mastodon pretty much has all the same features as Twitter — at least the ones I care about. Another huge benefit of Mastodon is that automated post deletion is built-in, which I really appreciate. You can achieve this on Twitter, but it requires a third-party app like TweetDelete. I’ve configured my account to delete posts after 6 months. Perhaps one of the most welcome features of Mastodon is that you can edit posts — something Twitter could not be bothered to implement. Mastodon also allows you to opt-out of search engine indexing. The only real complaint I have about Mastodon is that Giphy is not built-in. But I’m sure that will be added eventually.
The only other problem is that not all of my connections from Twitter are on Mastodon (yet), which is not Mastodon’s fault. I used a tool called Movetodon, which was super helpful to find people who have created accounts on Mastodon and automatically follow them. Here’s to building that momentum to encourage more folks to create an account. If you were unsure like me, you should do it! Hit me up for an invite link if you need one.
For now, I’m still on Twitter and I don’t necessarily have plans to leave. Although, you’ve probably noticed my lack of activity there recently. Anyway, I’ll wait to see how high it climbs up Bullshit Mountain™ and then decide what to do.