Twitter and the Mastodon in the room

This is not about the ethics of Twitter (well maybe a little).
This is not about convincing anyone to try Mastodon (well maybe a little).
This is not about federated social media and its perils or merits (definitely not).

This is about me and the impact of social media has on me. Your mileage may vary.

I joined Twitter in 2008. Back then, Twitter was for fun, no one was using it for work. The handle that I picked at the time was @surprisedp which was a reference to my silly web site at the time www.surprisedpoultry.com (only available in the wayback machine now).

I spent time following people, exchanging twitter handles at conferences. Lots of live tweeting at events. Twitter was engaging for me because text is my medium. The microblogging format was perfect for me.

Because I was very careful about following, content that I got on Twitter was typically relevant for me. And on the flip side, when I wrote something, I usually got some engagement because other people were like me with the follows and would only follow me if they thought I was interesting or if they knew me. I was engaged.

Without realizing, slowly over time, like the boiling frog, Twitter became the attention market that it is now. Everyone's feed became fine-tuned to keep them engaged. People with carefully curated small networks (that's me) were more and more faced with content picked by Twitter. Even worse, I had to constantly tug at the refresh interface because the content that I actually cared for would slip unnoticed in the stream of promoted tweets. None of the things I would write would find an audience. I was disengaged, I became conditionned.

But I didn't realize that until I tried to move over to Mastodon.

When the troubles began at Twitter in November 2022, I was quite disgusted by the events that unfolded, and I decided to not grant any of my attention (i.e. generate any revenue) for the new owners of Twitter.

I went and looked-up my old Mastodon account (I had tried before but it was a ghost town). I found that there was a lot more content available, I could find other twitter refugees there. I found myself engaging with social media again. I found myself writing. I found myself trying to make the place alive for other people that decided to move. And now, when I wrote, I got responses. I got into discussions. I was engaged again.

As the week progressed (yes, all of this happened in a week or so) I found more and more people. I stood firm as the Mastodon servers struggled with the new people joining. I tried to use my skills to figure-out a way to get people over the initial hump of joining the network.

When it all started, I kept checking Twitter for stories and to keep track of the various dumpster fires that were burning. Over the week, I realized that I was checking less and less. Even Schadenfreude stopped being a motivation to check. Today, I uninstalled Twitter from my phone. I lost my conditionning. It felt liberating.

I am not naive; running a social media platform is very difficult and amazingly expensive. Distributing the load over multiple servers doesn't change that. Even acknowledging that, I wan't to believe that we can take a solid shot at creating a useful, engaging platform that doesn't rely on advertising and doesn't mine its user's attention.

Twitter didn't give anyone the option to test that hypothesis. Mastodon does.

So, I'm going all in. I chose to put my trust in the folks that run mstdn.ca. It is an instance that is hosted in Canada and was started by a NAIT alumni living in Edmonton. After a rough week of ramping up the service (100 -> 1.2K users in the week) the server is stable, and the community has started chipping-in to fund the hosting. The plan is to form a proper non-profit with a board to guide the growth of the community.

I have posted more to Mastodon in the past week than I have posted on Twitter for more than 2 years. I have my voice back.

This is engagement.