Coming to grips with Mastodon

By Keith Devlin https://fediscience.org/@KeithDevlin

I spent last weekend (November 5-6) in Mastodon. One of the first lessons I learned was, I was spelling it wrong; it’s not Mastadon as I instinctively wrote. It turned out I was not alone. In fact, several people I interacted with made the same mistake.

But I digress. Why was I there? Well, seeing the way Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was playing out, I had been thinking I should line up an alternative platform to support my mathematical outreach activities. Others I followed on Twitter were having similar thoughts, and some had already created accounts on two platforms in particular, Tribel and Mastodon.

The former is, like Twitter, a commercial social network product, free to users, that comes out of Australia. Mastodon is an open-source collective of providers (both individuals and organizations) that create a decentralized social network, launched in 2016 by a German software developer called Eugen Rochko.

With the Musk takeover of Twitter demonstrating an obvious weakness of a commercial platform, the open-source Mastodon looked to me like the better bet of the two. Moreover, most of the people I followed on Twitter who were creating alternative, back-up accounts were coming to the same conclusion. So, on the Friday evening (Nov 4), I logged on to Mastodon and created an account. Based on my experience, this short article provides a quick guide of what to expect. (It’s a beginner’s guide, in the somewhat unusual sense that I am a beginner as well!)

Once you get your account set up, your Mastodon page looks something like Fig 1. (Mastodon sites tend to favor black backgrounds, but I prefer white, and a single click in your settings achieves that. Which I did.

Fig 1. My Home page on Mastodon, as on November 7, 2022, 9:41PM PST.

The buttons Home, Local and Federated on the right reflect the system architecture of Mastodon. You don’t actually sign up “on Mastodon”; rather you create an account on one of the many servers that make up the network, also called instances. Both terms are surely legacies of the software engineers who set the system up; nodes would be the more general-user-friendly term I’d have used (being a mathematician).

Picking an instance that best serves your needs is a critical step you should do before signing up. It’s possible to switch instances at any time, and easily done, but if you start on an unsuitable instance your first few hours on Mastodon are likely to be confusing, lonely, frustrating, and miserable. (I speak from experience. On a number of occasions, I went over to Twitter for help and advice, not knowing how to get it on Mastodon.)

For MAA members, the obvious servers to be on are Mathstodon.xyz,  which is for mathematicians, and FediScience.org, for science in general (including mathematics and the social sciences). I am on the latter, since I have interests across the board in science (including social sciences).

FediScience provides a resource page listing the many different servers available that academics and researchers are likely to find most suitable.

Regardless of your choice of instance, since all the instances are connected, once you are on the network, everyone and everything is accessible to you. (I’ll nuance that shortly.) My Tootfeed (Mastodon has toots rather than tweets) has posts about math, science, news, politics, sport, and so on, exactly as my feed on Twitter. Indeed, by the end of my first weekend, my page looked extremely like my Twitter page.

What made the migration so fast is that there is a way to import en masse all your followers from Twitter who are on Mastodon. You go to the online tool Debirdify, which will provide you with a downloadable csv textfile that you can import to your Mastodon account (using an import tool the system provides). Do that and already all your friends are there – at least the ones who have already made the migration. (You can keep going back to Debirdify and updating your list.)

The federated nature of Mastodon has some obvious downsides, which I’ll get to in a moment, but one thing I quickly grew to like is that it’s very much like being at a college or university. If you want to use Mastodon purely for work, you can think of your chosen instance as your department and Mastodon as your university. Or, if you are like me, my instance (FediScience.org) corresponds to my university and Mastodon as a whole to the rest of the world (or at least the parts I want to know about and/or interact with).

The most obvious difference from Twitter is the three timelines, Home, Local, and Federated. I initially saw this as a confusing downside, but now I’m used to it, I think it’s a definite plus for Mastodon.

Your Home timeline feeds you all toots sent by Mastodonians you follow, whatever instance they are on. But no one else. Since you selected that group, “Home” seems an appropriate term. My list of people and organizations I follow (imported from Twitter) already includes many of the ones I had on Twitter, which is why my Home feed by the end of my first weekend looked very much like it did on Twitter – except that none of the stuff on my Twitter timeline that would not interest me shows up on Mastodon!

Your Local timeline feeds you toots from anyone who is on your instance. In my case, being on FediScience, that means my Local timeline is dominated by stuff on science and mathematics, mostly from people I don’t know and/or haven’t heard of. And at a single click I can follow any one of them! I love that.

If I want to step outside my world and see what else is going on, I can click on the Federated button and get everything from Mastodonians that someone on my instance follows or has shown interest in.  Fig 2 illustrates how it works.

Fig 2. Image from https://axbom.com/mastodon-tips

As Fig 2 indicates, what you will never see are toots from Mastodonians who have no connection to you or your instance. If you hear about them some other way, you can try to find them by entering, say, a URL in the Search facility (top left on my dashboard shown in Fig 1) and bring them into your network that way. But that’s it. Of course, as your network expands, so too will your accessible universe within the Federation.

One way to think of the three timelines is to tweak my earlier analogy with department and university. I can think of Home as my family and personal network of friends, Local as my university, and Federated as the rest of the world.

Speaking of the rest of the world, one difference from Twitter I haven’t mentioned is that the former is a US platform originally created for English speakers, whereas Mastodon is international. There is a system setting to specify what languages you want the toots you see to be in (from all instances). You can set English as your only one if you want. I picked about a dozen where I have colleagues and friends around the world, knowing I can use Google Translate if I see a toot that intrigues me, but my minimal language skills (once-fluent, now rusty German, remnants of school French, and bits of Italian) aren’t up to the task.

Moving on, one of the most pleasing aspects of Mastodon to anyone moving over from Twitter is that Mastodon was created to support the creation of social communities that want to interact with one another, for various reasons, in a civil, respectful fashion; not to provide a battleground for people to attack and insult one another. (Not that Twitter was created to be the hellsite it developed into. Time will tell if Mastodon can avoid that fate. Right now, it’s great. See later on this.)

To help keep things civil and respectful, the network has developed a set of socially enforced norms for platform use. Among them are:

• There is a Content Warning button, CW, (See the toot entry box on the left in Fig 1.) This allows you to toot sensitive content in a way so that the reader has to elect to view it. (ASIDE: I just had a Mastodon exchange with another mathematician about if/how we can use it to hide the technical stuff in our toots or threads so that non-experts can follow along without being scared off. This is something I worry about a lot in my math outreach work.)

• When you toot, there is a choice of who will see it in their timeline. The little globe icon in the toot entry box (Fig 1) offers four choices: Public (visible to all), Unlisted (visible to all, but not accessible by discovery features), Followers only, and Mentioned people only. The default is Public. You’ll come to understand how to use these as you get more familiar with the platform.

• When tooting a thread, you set the first toot to Public, all the rest to Unlisted, so readers who want to follow the thread can do so, but the uninterested reader does not have to scroll down though a possible long chain to reach the next person’s toot. [Ignore this norm at your peril; though so far at least, admonishments seem to be very friendly, as everyone knows most of us are newbies.]

There are other norms, but you’ll pick them up quickly enough as you become more familiar with the site. So far (and I really hope it stays that way), everyone is very friendly, civil, and helpful.

To help keep it that way, there is a mechanism for Reporting and Blocking tooters. As there is on Twitter. But this one includes an option for you to block an entire network instance from your feed, if you wish. Also, I gather that the individuals and organizations who manage the instances act very swiftly to block trolls, spammers, or even entire instances from their instance. This is a user-community built-and-maintained network, and they want to keep it civil.

The civility goal is different from a for-profit platform that, regardless of any idealistic aims of the initial creator, eventually makes choices to maximize revenue. (In the United States at least, if a company goes public the law requires them to do that.) The people on Twitter (and their data) are the product! I suspect that I am not alone among the imploding-Twitter emigrés in that my greater comfort with the Mastodon non-profit model was a major factor in deciding to go with them, rather than Tribel.

One obvious downside with a non-profit federation, is that it can exist and function only as long as there are dedicated enthusiasts (often unpaid volunteers or grant-aided non-profit organizations) to set up and maintain the servers and manage the network. If, for some reason, your chosen instance runs into hard times down the road, you might find yourself having to switch to another instance. But at least that won’t be as big a challenge as going from Twitter to Mastodon! The network can survive loss or damage to any of its instances. [To move instances, you create an account on your chosen new-instance and enter the details of your existing account in the appropriate box, then you go back to your old instance, enter the details of your new account, and initiate the migration. When I did that on last weekend’s wild ride, as Twitter suddenly started to bleed a large segment of its “product”, the actual transfer took several hours to complete. But that was purely an overload issue. In any case the transfer process is simple to execute.]

Another downside of a decentralized, non-profit like Mastodon is that, absent a massive gift endowment (Hello, Jeff!) or adoption by an entity like the EU, they will never have the huge staff to develop, maintain, curate, and update the system the way Twitter could, and did. Mastodon is currently struggling mightily to cope with the sudden influx of many new users, with long delays in server responses to registration requests. It was not set up to be a Twitter replacement, at least not one occurring as suddenly and rapidly as is currently the case. But then, the Internet and the Web both had similar problems in their early days.

Anyway, that’s my quick survey. Why don’t you head over there and take a look for yourself. You won’t be asked to enter a credit card number. I’ll leave you with a few last-minute tips:

The way to search for something on Mastodon is by using hashtags. So, use them liberally in your toots.

The star button beneath a toot shows your appreciation to the tooter (the color change is visible only the tooter and you), but there is no algorithm counting clicks. (So, it’s not a “Like” button.)

The “Retweet” button beneath a toot is called a Boost. (A nicer name than “retoot”.)

There is no “Quote” button to retoot with a comment. (I think I understand why they did not include that, given the apparent underlying model, since Quoting could be said to objectify the item quoted. But I would not be surprised if they don’t add it sometime.)

For additional tips, check this resource https://fedi.tips

See you in Mastodon? Look for me there as @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org. [The link in my byline is to my Mastodon Homepage, so it’s formatted differently from my handle.]

ENDNOTE: On a personal level, writing this article gave me a huge sense of dejà vu. In 2008, I was a presenter in an MAA workshop for budding math writers at the Carriage House, where we talked about using the then-new platform Twitter (launched March 2006) to get the word out. MAA was, I think, one of the first academic organizations to promote its use.