Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

Honestly, it's a barren wasteland, worse than Google+. As far as I've seen it's mainly used as a replacement for imageboards. Most of the server topics are either a variant of /b/, or a gathering place for SJWs, furries and lolicons.

You are describing a completely different platform from the one I visit and post to every day. For one, it's not barren; it's quite active. One of the distinguishing features of mastodon compared to other decentralized platforms is that people use it. In fact one of the complaints about the federated feed is that it updates so fast it's hard to keep up with.

As for the people there, the people I talk to are interested in games, philosophy, linux, vaporwave, memes, and meta talk about mastodon and decentralized platforms. There are a lot of trans and and furries and people interested in politics. The vast majority have been unfailingly nice. The granular privacy options allow one to mute those who are overbearing.

And the biggest difference between it and /b/ is that conversations tend to be two-way a lot more. People aren't purposely posting to try and anger you. In fact, here's a post I see on my feed right now:

>someone should write a paper on mastodon as a model of a therapeutic community

If what you're saying is you just don't like platforms that have lots of people you disagree with politically, that's one thing. But the behavior and subject matter and culture are significantly different from /b/ and in no way a wasteland.

Same here, I've been using Mastodon for the past 3 months, and I find practically everything works better than on Twitter.

The site loads much faster, and it's more responsive because it doesn't load trackers and ads to monetize users. 500 char limit actually facilitates having meaningful interactions with people. The column UI layout lets you see the timeline and notifications without having to jump between tabs.

Fundamentally, Mastodon is exactly the way social media should work in my opinion. Anybody can run their own instance and configure it any way they like. Since Mastodon is open source and community driven there aren't any VCs driving it, and it doesn't need to monetize to stick around. As long as people want to use Mastodon, it'll continue to thrive. Any features added to the platform are there for the benefit of the users and on one else.

I also think that Mastodon happens to be at the right place and at the right time. Hosting has become very affordable nowadays. You can get a DigitalOcean VPN for 5 bucks a month. Docker makes the installation process a breeze, and Let's Encrypt provides free TLS. You can literally spin up an instance in an hour or so. I wrote a short guide here https://github.com/yogthos/cheatsheets/blob/master/mastodon....

We took a big detour with walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It's time to go back to the original spirit of the internet where anybody can run a server and people can interact with one another on their own terms.

I think not being able to search for is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone. I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals. Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else, more of a forum for actually taking to people. Whether it can work as/if the userbase grows remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

I find that 500 chars limit is enough space to express ideas, and facilitates meaningful discussions around them.