In January, Hannah Roditi, the executive director of Social Movement Technologies, a non-profit that provides digital tools training for progressive activists, hosted a Mastodon training session. But it’s also disappointing some activists searching for a way to get their message out without feeding Elon Musk’s machine. Mastodon’s diminutive size has turned off digital marketers, who have mostly shunned it and other Twitter alternatives as niche “distractions” that would be a waste of ad dollars. “I think mass media corrupted the internet with its definitions of scale, that you had to be huge because you had to get a big audience to go to advertisers.” “I find the discourse in general to be richer and nicer,” Jarvis says about Mastodon. On Mastodon, ‘there are actual conversations happening instead of people shouting into the ether’, says a user. Jarvis arranged for the school to fund a year’s worth of operating costs for journa.host, a Mastodon server home to a few thousand journalists who have been verified by volunteers.
Brett Elliff, a systems engineer, says he has been “really loving” Mastodon after using it for a few months: “I only see what I want to follow, and there are actual conversations happening instead of people shouting into the ether.” And Tiffany Li, a technology attorney and law professor, says Mastodon’s small user base “means that there are fewer trolls and generally unpleasant people”.Īnother enthusiastic Mastodon adopter is Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York’s Newmark Journalism School. J Logan Carey, an illustrator, has a much smaller following on Mastodon than he did on Twitter, “but people seem to actually see the things I post on there whereas on Twitter I feel like everything gets algorithmically squashed unless you’re a brand or a celebrity”, he says. There’s also a feature to put posts behind content warnings, which users are encouraged to do for sensitive topics. Servers can easily be made private, and admins can block other servers to combat trolls. There’s no global search or global hashtags. Here, things aren’t designed to go viral quickly. Some of Mastodon’s most passionate users – who tend to be more tech-savvy than average – say it’s no problem if the community stays small. Using Mastodon can feel like eating your vegetables.” Is bigger actually better?
“I think a lot of people came and found it a little hard. “It’s definitely the case that it’s slowed down,” says Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado Boulder professor who researches collective ownership models and runs a small Mastodon server called op. But that number has since dropped to just 1.2 million – a sign that Mastodon remains far from the levels of hype that would threaten a behemoth like Twitter. Nearly half a year later, has Mastodon seized the momentum? Data shows that it saw a huge surge of interest late last year: its monthly active users increased more than eightfold to a high of 2.6 million about a month after Musk’s Twitter purchase. Elon Musk banned links to Mastodon on Twitter in December but later reversed course.
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