Time to move from Twitter to Mastodon
What made the move easy for me, and why I prefer Mastodon to Twitter
In brief: I’ve had a great experience on Twitter over the years, but all is not well in Twitterland. After some false starts, I’ve started using the “open” version of Twitter: Mastodon. Once I figured out a few things I started having a better experience on Mastodon than Twitter. Part of this could be that Twitter recently shifted to a “freemium” model, with those paying $8/month having priority. Here I share my experience so far on Mastodon, along with tips for how to leverage your Twitter account to easily get started on Mastodon.
I first started using Twitter when I was starting my own cognitive neuroscience lab, and it’s been a great experience – until recently. I was able to use Twitter to connect with other scientists and those interested in science, creating a kind of virtual conference (that was actually better than my experiences with real virtual conferences!). I could learn about relevant work and ideas in my area and beyond, and easily share my lab’s own work with others.
In the short time since Elon took over, Twitter has gone down hill. First, the chaos created by policy whiplash has been disorienting. Second, Elon’s apparent promotion of extremist views and hypocrisy regarding free speech creates a moral dilemma for me personally. Third, it appears that the new (secret) algorithm for deciding what I’ll see on Twitter has become heavily biased toward Elon’s comments and posts (and therefore his personal interests). And fourth and most importantly, Elon’s shift to a “freemium” model (Twitter Blue) – wherein those willing to pay $8/month get priority – is counter to the ethos of open science or perhaps even an open/fair society.
In contrast, after a bit of trouble getting started, my experiences on Mastodon have been engaging, collegial, open, and the algorithms determining what I see transparent (and fair).
To put numbers to it: My experience has been better with only 186 followers (184 following) on Mastodon than with 3016 followers (864 following) on Twitter. This is with equal effort across both platforms, with near-identical posts (not including replies to posts of course).
A good example of my better experience is with posts from this blog. On Twitter I received no replies and minimal engagement generally. In contrast, on Mastodon most of the posts received multiple replies and entire back-and-forth conversations.
This is surprising to me, since I have 16x the number of followers on Twitter. It seems to me that this is likely due to the secret algorithm Twitter uses, since most other factors were controlled for.
Note, however, that I may have had more engagement since my followers likely follow fewer others on Mastodon, such that my posts had less competition. Regardless, somehow I am having a better experience on Mastodon with fewer followers and with me following fewer others. Perhaps you have (or will) experience the same thing on Mastodon.
By the way, it’s interesting to note that one of Twitter’s co-founders has regretted that Twitter became a company rather than an open protocol like email or the web. That’s Mastodon.
My recommendation for getting started on Mastodon (assuming you already use Twitter) is to use this website, Fedifinder:
How it works: You authorize the website to access your Twitter account. It then looks through the list of who you follow to see who’s posted their Mastodon username on Twitter.
It then lists the number of people you follow on each Mastodon server. This can help you choose which Mastodon server to join. (It even indicates which Mastodon servers are open to new users). I used this list to decide which server to join: the server open for new users with the largest number of accounts I already followed on Twitter.
Fedifinder then allows you to export the list of your followers on Mastodon to a .csv file. This file can then be imported into your Mastodon account, so you can easily follow those accounts.
I hope this helps those of you not yet fully set up on Mastodon get started!
My Mastodon account: @TheColeLab@sigmoid.social