I’ve spent more than 7 years in Mastodon, and in my experience, new users always come in with a Twitter mindset, then getting a cultural shock because they come to Mastodon expecting a Twitter experience and end up finding something strange and bizarre.
To soften the blow, I’d like to explain the cultural differences between Mastodon and Twitter.
What Twitter was:
- You could follow microcelebrities (or “influencers”) to read interesting things
- You didn’t reach people unless you got lots of likes quickly, so it became a popularity contest
- The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.
- Toxic people drew others to quote posting, so it became a yelling competition. You didn’t build community, you built followers by standing on a platform and holding a megaphone.
- Unpopular users just yell to the void.
What Mastodon is:
- A bunch of communities of people with diverse interests and real lives.
- Mastodon servers (instances) are careful of who they federate with. Some servers just moderate poorly and there are too many assholes.
- There are microcelebrities, but they’re NOT looking to be popular. They just post the things they do; they’re popular because their lives / hobbies are interesting.
- In Mastodon, you reach people who are actually interested in your stuff. You don’t need to game an algorithm. There is no algorithm, people ARE the algorithm.
- If you don’t want to engage with someone, you can block and report. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon admins do take reports seriously (unless it’s one of the big instances; then good fucking luck). Reporting is encouraged on Mastodon, it keeps the community clean.
- Because admins often maintain the server using their own money, it’s in their best interest that the community is healthy. (Unless they’re assholes, but their instances get blocked quickly)
- There are no quote posts. You can paste a link to the other person’s post, but it is discouraged because we know where that leads.
Longer explanation:
Mastodon has an entirely different culture compared to Twitter. Mastodon was founded and populated by people who believed Twitter was too toxic and corporate-driven. Mastodon is full of gays, transgender folks, sex workers, artists, furries, autistic people, etc.
These people were driven out of the big platforms (Facebook, Twitter) by hate and discrimination. These people have experienced sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, body shaming, etc. in their lives. It follows that the majority of Mastodon is left-leaning, anti-conservative, communist and anti-corporate.
Furthermore: Because it started (or quickly became) as a sort of safe haven for queer folks, they were more open to sincere posting. They post their problems, the discrimination they’ve experienced; their body dysphoria; depression; homophobia; transphobia and racism. And they give each other support, even economic. In my timeline I see posts asking for emergency money more than once per day.
If you wonder why this doesn’t appear on Twitter, it’s because the Algorithm filters them out. The public, the customers don’t like hearing about people asking for money not to get evicted. They don’t like to hear how people were harassed the other day by some karen who believes they’re a man in disguise.
But Mastodon is different. People talk about their daily lives because they know their followers will receive 100% of their posts. This is how communities are built.
Mastodon is not, and never aimed to be a Twitter replacement. It was meant to be something different; a place where you could form communities and build connections without Big Brother examining you or deciding how you should behave online.
So the next time you look for “interesting people to follow”, it could be possible that you’re entering Mastodon with a Twitter mindset. No Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Start following people you think are interesting in YOUR instance. Then start seeing their boosts and follow people you think are cool. Little by little, expand your network, prune your follows and block / mute people you think are obnoxious, and keep building and shaping your network like a beautiful bonsai tree.
The time you invest on building a network from scratch is worth it: You will meet many interesting people, and you will meet new friends; real friends, not just a series of followers whom you have to entertain.
If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they’re using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.
Don’t want people to think it’s supposed to be Twitter? Don’t model the entire UX after Twitter.
You’re missing OP’s entire point. The two platforms are completely different. You see, Twitter is a microblogging platform, but Mastadon is a microblogging platform. They’re as different as Word and Pages, or Excel and Sheets, or Photoshop and GIMP. Just entirely, utterly different in every way, with the sole exception being that they are functionally identical. (-:
The sane take.
I see you point but I think you are being harsh here. It is clear that it is not to be taken literally that Mastodon is nothing like Twitter in therms of looks. I think the spirit of the OPs comment is that it is the style of conversations, atmosphere and culture that each of them foster what makes them somewhat different.
If you want to organize discussion around topics, model it after reddit, where you subscribe to topics.
If you want to organize discussion around people, model it after twitter, where you subscribe to people.
Kbin and lemmy do a good job of modelling things after reddit, where you subscribe to topics. The decentralized nature just adds another layer of community duplication, but that was already a problem with reddit (r/gaming and r/games) and isn’t that big a deal since all are subscribable from your preferred instance as long as it’s federated with everyone.
The problem with Mastodon though is that it wants to model itself after Twitter where you subscribe to people, but unlike with topics, having duplicate copies of people is a real problem since it makes it hard to trust that you’re actually subscribing to the right person and not a spam account. That is an extremely real problem that Mastodon tried to side step by pivoting to following topics, but at it’s core the mastodon/twitter UX is not formatted for that, it’s formatted for following people in real time and Mastodon seems like it has ignored that and is trying to insist that it’s it’s own thing that no one actually wants. Organizing discussion based around servers is not a user helpful format, it’s exposing unwanted technical implementation details to the user in a way that only a tech nerd could ever love.
If Mastodon became as popular as Twitter it would end up with at least part of it being almost the same as Twitter. The main reason for the differences are that very different types of people are using the two platforms currently.
This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected. The users expected a similar experience to Twitter but the goal of Mastodon is not to emulate Twitter.
A lot of the UI/UX may resemble Twitter, but the high level decision making, design, and stakeholders of the project are completely different.
Do you mean to say that Mastodon and similar projects have to adopt an entirely different UI/UX that is unintuitive in order to produce something different just because Twitter is what they expect? Are you aware that big tech pours in inordinate amounts of money into psychology and UI/UX research to ensure they provide experiences with the lowest amount of friction possible?
This feels rather unreasonable, uninformed, and confused in motivation.
Yeah, if you copy Twitter’s UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.
It’s not complicated, mastodon just kind of sucks from a user perspective compared to twitter while completely copying it, leading users to dislike it.
Decentralization is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.
And I’ve worked at FAANG companies developing their apps and am well aware of precisely what they do to get people to use them, and it’s not make a carbon copy of twitter that’s harder to use.
Again, breaking from that expectation is not an inherently bad thing. Fediverse projects are not looking for some stupid IPO pump and dump exit strategy.
Decentralization is an implementation detail to achieve the feature that is “an online service that doesn’t treat you like cattle and owns all of your fucking data”. Clear?
Still not a feature users care about.
What planet are you on? What “users”? Lemmy users? Obviously they do!
Twitter users? Who cares!? Privacy, data ownership, apps that don’t fucking implode and DDOS themselves because the owner is an absolute moron, etc. may not be features most Twitter users care about.
But, why should anyone here care? Fediverse projects are not in a market competition to make money. These projects exist to add value to the lives of its users without perverse corporate incentives ruining everything.
I don’t think I will find myself asking, “What app would Twitter users want me to design?”, ever. Why would you want to recreate something as awful as Twitter?