Rethinking Mastodon

I wrote a fairly scathing blog post about Mastodon recently but I’ve dedicated some time to being on there… and it’s not quite as bad as I thought.

The main issue I had was that my feed seemed to be highly politicised and not an enjoyable place to be. No one seemed to enjoy talking about things and so I didn’t want to stick around.

This stemmed from not realising that I needed to treat Mastodon a bit like RSS. X does a lot of heavy lifting for you by algorithmically filtering out things it doesn’t think you like. Or conversely it might put them on your feed. In general, I haven’t found that to be the case.

For Mastodon there is no algorithm so you need to utilise hashtags and mute lists a lot more. Once I figured this out the quality of my feed has dramatically increased.

The last couple of days I’ve loved heading onto Mastodon for a bit to discover great content.

I still don’t think Mastodon is perfect. I have big concerns about censorship and how easy it can be for instances to stiffle the voices of those on them but I am also enjoying the “smaller” feel of it compared to X.

I still spend time on X as it gives me access to conversations that aren’t happening on Mastodon. But I’m also happy to be here.