tl;dr: Mastodon is neither Musk-less Twitter nor the whole Fediverse nor only mastodon.social
Okay, so you're part of the #
TwitterMigration. You wanted to get away from the #
birdsite as it started to gradually turn into another Nazi hive after the #
TwitterTakeover. Luckily, you've been pointed at the #
Fediverse, i.e. #
Mastodon. You go there with the following mindset:
- Mastodon is a 1:1 #Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk, but otherwise absolutely identical to Twitter. I mean, how could a microblogging service possibly be any different from Twitter? That's just as strange an idea as a desktop operating system that isn't exactly like Windows. Unless you're a Mac user, that is.
- Mastodon.social is Mastodon. Because that's the website you've been pointed at on Twitter.
- Also, the Fediverse = Mastodon. Only Mastodon.
Now you try to register an account on Mastodon. Which means on mastodon.social. And you discover you can't do that because registrations on mastodon.social are closed, because mastodon.social is full.
Either you can't be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then your understanding is that
Mastodon itself is full. And you're back at Twitter. Avoidable mistake; see right below.
Or you
can be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then you discover the blue button that takes you to
a list of public Mastodon instances on the actual Mastodon website.
Um, instances? Servers? What the...? What's that?!
Okay, this'll be hard to wrap your mind around if the entire IT world has only consisted of commercial, corporate-owned walled gardens so far. Windows/macOS, iOS/manufacturer-provided Android, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer/Edge/Safari/Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Maps, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, maybe iTunes, your Microsoft/Apple/Google cloud etc. You couldn't even imagine that alternatives to these exist, much less alternatives that don't belong to yet another U.S. gigacorporation. Or even alternatives that aren't as monolithic as these.
Mastodon feels like a revelation to you, an epiphany. All this commercial, corporate-owned stuff is, in fact, not the entire IT world. It's a bubble. And there's a world outside this bubble. And this outside world is
strange.
For starters, Eugen Rochko is the core developer of Mastodon. And yes, he is also the admin of mastodon.social. But that does
not make him the owner and overlord of the entirety of Mastodon, just like Elon Musk is the owner and overlord of Twitter.
Also because Mastodon is, in fact,
not mastodon.social.
Not only. Mastodon.social is only one out of many Mastodon servers or instances.
Thousands of them. Literally. Those listed on the official website are only those recommended by "the makers" of Mastodon.
Here are even more.
There are instances for all kinds of special interests. There are also instances for lots of places in the world. People have set up instances for
cities; Chicago actually has two of these.
Mind-blowing, right?
Okay, so you still absolutely have to join mastodon.social because that's where people went whom you know from Twitter. You want to stay in contact with them. So you can't join a different instance.
Wait, wait, wait, calm down.
You can. And you can still get back in contact with your acquaintances on mastodon.social.
Even more mind-blowing, right? How can this possibly work?
Well, I take it you use e-mail. You need an e-mail account to use Mastodon after all. Most likely, you're on Google Mail. Are all your e-mail contacts on Google Mail, too? Do you only ever receive mails from accounts on Google Mail? Does Facebook send mails from a Google Mail account?
No, Facebook doesn't send mails from a Google Mail account. Facebook runs its own mail service. And yet, Facebook's mails get through to your Google Mail account. And that has probably been perfectly normal for you.
This is made possible through a technological miracle known as "federation". Basically, all e-mail servers in the world can communicate with one another, send mails to one another, receive mails from one another.
It's the same with the Fediverse. After all, the "Fed" in "Fediverse" comes from "federation". Generally, all Mastodon instances can communicate with each other. Unless one instance has "defederated" (completely blocked) another instance. There are actually Mastodon instances which are defederated by most other public Mastodon instances. But otherwise, everything connects to everything.
Once you've joined an instance, you'll discover first-hand that you can, in fact, follow people who are on mastodon.social. Or just about any other instance, all without having accounts there.
There goes the second bullet point.
And the first one will quickly start to crumble, too. First of all, Mastodon looks nothing like Twitter. Also, everything is named differently. Tweets aren't named "tweets" but "toots". You don't retweet, you don't even "retoot", you "boost".
And Mastodon works quite a bit differently from Twitter.
- You've got three timelines. Next to your personal timeline which lists whatever your contacts have tooted or boosted, there's the local timeline which lists what the other users on your instance have tooted or boosted (this is how and why special interest instances or local instances make sense), and there's the federated timeline which is the local timeline plus what local users' contacts on other instances have tooted or boosted.
There is, however, no timeline for the entire Fediverse. - There's no full-text search for the entire Fediverse. Deal with it.
- There's no secret algorithm telling you what to read or whom to follow. All timelines are strictly chronological.
- This also means that there's no secret algorithm shoving your toots into other people's faces. If you want people to discover your toots, use #hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a gimmick. In the Fediverse, they're vital.
- There's a #newhere hashtag. It matters. As someone who is new here, you're expected to write an introduction, use the #newhere hashtag in it and then pin your introduction so that it's always on top or near the top of your personal timeline for others to read.
- There's no quote retweet. And there will never be. Eugen Rochko has a very strong opinion on that, he doesn't want that popular trolling tool on Mastodon, so this won't happen.
- Privacy settings per toot. You can choose who can read your toot. If you write threads, it's common practice to only set the first toot to public and all other ones to unlisted so that they don't clutter the public timelines.
- Delayed toots. You can choose when your toot goes out.
- Content warnings (CW) that blank out your toot. And yes, they're taken very seriously. People are likely to demand you use them when you don't.
- Alt-text for images. Again, people are likely to demand you create them when you don't. Some people on the Fediverse are blind and use screen readers, and they, too, want to know what that picture in your toot is.
- Not to mention that toots can be almost twice as long as tweets, namely 500 characters. Unless the owner of an instance has changed that number.
Speaking of the latter: As the first bullet point from the beginning crumbles to dust, the one about Mastodon being Twitter minus Elon Musk, you may have been rubbing your eyes in disbelief already.
How can I possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot? How can you write in
italics on Mastodon? Or use lists with bullet points in a toot? Where on Mastodon are the buttons for that?
Well, you are right now having a glimpse at the Fediverse
beyond Mastodon. As in: There is a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are other projects out there which are federated with Mastodon just like Mastodon instances are federated with one another. This is possible because they speak one common language: #
ActivityPub. And they're all decentralised themselves with multiple instances each. For example:
- Not all of them are "not Twitter clones", i.e. microblogging services. Pleroma is another one which was created out of disagreements with how Mastodon works. Akkoma is a Pleroma fork which came to exist because someone didn't like where Pleroma went. There's also Misskey. Obviously, they aren't "Mastodon clones" either, they were designed to be different from each other. And there's GNU social, the oldest one on the list.
- Pixelfed is "not an #Instagram clone".
- Friendica is definitely "not a #Facebook clone" because, while created for a similar purpose, it's still vastly different. And it federates with just about everything that moves including e-mail or WordPress. It even used to federate with Facebook itself eons ago. By the way, #Friendica makes everything possible that I've done in this post which is also why it's usually filed under "macroblogging". But I'm not on Friendica; I'll get to that. Also, Friendica is the second-oldest one on the list.
- Mobilizon is "not a #GoogleCalendar or #Doodle clone".
- Funkwhale is "not a #SoundCloud or #BandCamp or #Spotify clone", also because you're unlikely to find mainstream commercial music on it. Castopod: ditto, but specialising on podcasts.
- PeerTube is "not a #YouTube clone".
- Owncast is "not a #Twitch clone".
- Lemmy is "not a #Reddit or #HackerNews clone", although the "not a Reddit clone" part can be debated.
- WriteFreely and Plume are "not #Medium clones".
- BookWyrm is "not a #GoodReads clone".
- Flockingbird is "not a #LinkedIn clone" at all, also because rather than being a service of its own, it piggybacks on the rest of the Fediverse by picking up hashtags.
- Hubzilla was a successor to Friendica, but it's much more than "not a Facebook clone". It's also not a clone of whichever CMS and/or cloud service you use. It can provide you with your own personal organiser including a #CalDAV calendar (next to the public event calendar) and a #CardDAV addressbook, your own #WebDAV cloud space, your own online photo album, your own website, your own blog and/or your own wiki on top of just about everything that Friendica does. It's the third-oldest on the list and still older than Mastodon.
- And there's much more.
Thanks to ActivityPub, these services are federated with Mastodon which means that you can follow their users from your Mastodon account. You don't necessarily need accounts on these services. Okay, you need them to fully make use of them. You can't start discussions on #
Lemmy or upload videos to #
PeerTube without having an account there, but you can follow and comment on PeerTube channels and reply to discussions on Lemmy from your Mastodon account.
Want proof? Well, this post came from a #
Hubzilla channel. You can still read it on Mastodon. And if you reply to it, I can still see it on Hubzilla.
And there went the misconception that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
Stay tuned until next time when I explain to you how "Facebook's #
Metaverse" (it's called #
HorizonWorlds, in case you don't know) is
not and will never be #
TheMetaverse, and that free, open-source, (largely) non-commercial, decentral #
VirtualWorlds exist already now.
Obligatory hashtags: #
Pleroma #
Akkoma #
MissKey #
Pixelfed #
Mobilizon #
Funkwhale #
PeerTube #
Owncast #
Lemmy #
WriteFreely #
Plume #
Flockingbird
