For me, the experience of Mastodon is worse than Twitter - essentially, either you follow the global firehose feed, or you're limited to the small amount of content your direct followings create or re-toot.
I've had the opposite experience. On Mastodon I get a small, but consistent, amount of engagement with my posts, and I have over 400 followers. Twitter was like shouting into the void.
I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often.
To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.
Have yet to see anything really appealing about mastodon.
Don't think I really liked Twitter either except for the fact that everyone is on it already.
I have the opposite problem. Almost no one I follow on twitter is on mastodon. But I really hate the first party client and all the toxic “trending items” for engagement.
This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at.
Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.)
Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”.
Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.
That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
I've been trying to use Mastodon more, but the fact is it just doesn't have the same kind of traffic that twitter does. It seems to get dominated by earnest, long-form threads... which are nice, but the chaos of twitter was one of its selling points and their absence is loud.
Weird, my experience has been the precise opposite. I've gotten far more interactions on Mastodon than I ever did on Twitter, especially if I make sure to tag my posts appropriately. YMMV, I guess.
Mastodon might not be great, but Twitter is no longer great either. Both experiences for me are "meh" but Mastodon is slowly building momentum for me. It took me 10+ years to curate my Twitter feed, I don't expect my Mastodon feed to be equivalent in a couple of months.
The people I miss most are those that have large audiences on Twitter. They are (logically) hesitant to move over, and so I return to Twitter once a day to see this content.
I guess I never really took much of a liking to twitter either, but Mastodon doesn't do anything for me. I really hate big social media, but the mastodon feels like twitter and quora had an ugly baby that everyone is obligated to pretend is cute.
It's not about the platform, but the people. Mastodon is nice for some of the techy stuff I'm interested in. But it's useless for other things I used to follow on Twitter: hyper-local news and weather, sports banter, and other researchers in my field.
I love the concept of Mastodon, but I feel it inherits many of the problems of Twitter. I only used it for about a month, but I encountered far too much mob mentality and pearl clutching for my health and left. I like free discussion, and I feel the current Mastodon userbase means I'd have to host my own echo chamber to avoid theirs.
I feel the opposite. I don't use twitter but Mastodon is kind of an echo chamber.
1. There's no way to discover content. Sure you can search for tag but that's absurdly inconvenient. The pinable UI is borked and awkward as it allows to subscribe only to one tag. The language filter is laughable at best.
2. There's just so much spam. Just take a look at public or local timeline - if you're not on a small isntance it's just people doing the same pointless messages like "umm spaghetti"
3. Only now proper moderetion tools are introduced - before you'd get suspended with a mysteri 403 error where you can't even log out lol. This was heavily abused by mastodon.social administrator and every github issue closed and purged.
I'm so sad to see Mastodon overtake actually well thought out social networks such as Diaspora*. I'm not even touching how much of a step back the whole Fediverse is to XMPP or Federation protocols.
My issue with Mastodon is that it imitates Twitter a little too well. I keep finding people to block when looking for people to follow. The local and federated feeds are infested with spammers, self-righteous ideologues of all kinds, 4chan rejects, and bots. It just isn't worth the effort.
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