Captured 03302023-145551
It's been three months since the MacStories team moved from Twitter to Mastodon. Overall, the experience has been great, but it's required some adjustments, so I wanted to share some of my longer-term impressions.
I'd argue that this was true on Twitter before I left, too, even when it didn't always seem that way. The difference is that the negativity of Twitter drowned out or silenced many of the good people there. The overall effect was that even before many people moved to Mastodon, 'Tech Twitter' was a pretty quiet place.
In contrast, the vibe on Mastodon is better overall. I hear from far more readers than I ever did on Twitter. That's great because I love to hear from the MacStories community.
Still, the positive vibe of Mastodon is sometimes oversold. The absolute amount of negativity I see each week in my mentions is roughly the same as it was on Twitter. However, it's a much smaller percentage of a much larger amount of feedback. So, yes, the vibe is better, but it's also still a social network, which seems to come with a certain amount of baggage, no matter how it's structured or run.
I had a bad typo habit with my tweets. That hasn't changed with the move to Mastodon. I know why too. It's because when I finally publish a story I've been working on, I want to move on to the next thing immediately. As a result, my mind has already moved on by the time I post about a story, and I make mistakes. I used to have to delete tweets and start over. Now, I can simply edit posts, which is vastly better.
By setting up our own Mastodon server, we now control the content that the MacStories team posts. Currently, that isn't a meaningful difference from the way Twitter works because it only leads people to the site if they click a link. However, it opens up options for the future that we didn't have before because Mastodon is built on top of ActivityPub. My hope is that we can integrate ActivityPub into our ongoing redesign of MacStories in a way that expands the ways people discover the site.
Ivory, the Mona beta, and Wooly.
Twitter fueled an army of weird and wonderful clients in the early days of the App Store, but it didn't last. Third-party apps were an important part of the Twitter experience, but long before the company was sold to Elon Musk, third-party developers' access to Twitter's APIs was limited, which put a damper on app development.
Mastodon has been a breath of fresh air with its open APIs. I've tried well over a dozen Mastodon clients at this point, and there are always new clients showing up. This will inevitably slow down, but with everyone having access to the same API endpoints, the competition for users is based on providing the best experience, which is where it should be. That's a great result for users, who have a wide variety of options and business models from which to choose.
This has been a tough one for me to adjust to, but not something that I expect matters to most people. Search is simply not good on Mastodon. Twitter's advanced search tool made it easy to dig into conversations surrounding a topic providing valuable details and context.
With Mastodon, it can be hard to find users on other instances, let alone search for a specific topic. One way to handle this is to follow a lot of people and read every post, bookmarking interesting posts as you go. That's too much for me, though. Instead, I've relied on a combination of RSS, following specific app-related Mastodon servers, and simply hoping that if I miss something, I'll see it elsewhere, which isn't really a strategy at all, but it's the best I've got for now.
For someone like me who's used to writing link posts, not being able to quote someone's post and add a bit of commentary is still frustrating after three months on Mastodon. Boosts help posts spread but often feel like clutter because they don't add anything new to the post. Fortunately, app developers have begun to address the clutter problem by de-duplicating posts, but I'd still like to see a quote-posting system implemented.
I understand the policy behind the design decision, but I'm also glad that that position is being reconsidered. Hopefully, a solution can be implemented that works and also addresses concerns that quote-posting will be abused.
My corner of 'Tech Twitter' moved to Mastodon almost all at once, replicating many of the best aspects of that community. But I also used Twitter to follow the videogame world, which is still mostly on Twitter. The same would be true if Twitter were your source for sports news or current events. That's a shame because it means that my Mastodon experience has been much more one-dimensional than Twitter ever was.
For me, the answer has been to move some of those Twitter accounts to RSS. I follow videogame publications and companies, along with writers in Reeder now, which isn't ideal because RSS apps aren't designed for quickly scrolling a feed of short posts. That's led me to limit the number of Twitter accounts I follow with RSS, which is probably for the best, anyway.
Unfortunately, my RSS solution probably won't last long. Within hours of writing the first draft of this section, Twitter announced its new API pricing, which I expect will make it cost-prohibitive for most RSS clients to integrate with the service.
On balance, I'm super happy with our move to Mastodon. The situation with Twitter has only continued to get worse, and it's hard to imagine it ending in a good place for anyone still using it. Like any service, I have things I wish Mastodon did differently, but after living with it for a few months, it's good to be somewhere that feels as though it has a long future ahead of it that's being driven by people who care about the experience of all of its users. I don't think the nature of social networks is such that they can ever be perfect places, but Mastodon is doing much better than anything else.