Moses Ma‘s The Tao of Innovation blog had a fantastic post that’s worth sharing and discussing about The Psychology of Mastodon: The Great Twitter Migration.
In his post he discusses why people like me left Twitter, what we noticed when we started using Mastodon and how it feels starting over on a decentralized, ad- and algorithm-free social media platform.
In a nutshell, it has been life changing, refreshing and not addictive in any way for me. I’ve not posted much on Mastodon since leaving Twitter because I chose to mostly follow journalists, scientists and other internet OGs.
There’s no drama.
There’s very little political garbage and a simple Unboost removes amplification of it.
My feed is information being shared by trusted sources, akin to a real time RSS feed back to researched and well thought out stories. The fact that it’s moderated and doesn’t have trolls and bots, ads and algorithms that promoted trigger-worthy content is a bonus.
As I’ve said several times throughout my career, no one likes advertising and it really does ruin everything.
The founder of Mastodon recently turned down investment dollars in order to keep it running as a nonprofit. That again is very refreshing given all of the fuckery we’ve experienced first and second hand since the bird app, Facebook and the plethora of other platforms have built themselves to be crack in exchange for ads.
If you want to donate to keep Mastodon decentralized and ad-free, they have a Patreon where you can offer an ongoing donation. If $10 annually keeps it from becoming Twitter consider me bought in.