Marshall McLuhan famously said “The medium is the message,” noting that the nature of the medium used to communicate is itself an essential part of what is being communicated.
I didn’t think about it in those terms a year ago when I pretty much cold turkey switched from Twitter over to Mastodon. But it was, and remains, true. The social media tool I use is a reflection of my priorities, the way I want to communicate, and, ultimately, me and my message.
(Note: I created my Mastodon presence on 2 November 2022; I gave up Twitter for good on 13 December, according to — hey! — my blog entry about the same.)
Why I left
I don’t recall what particular shenanigan Elon Musk pulled to make me make the switch. I’d been watching with alternating waves of mild humor and appalled horror at the whole “Is he buying Twitter or isn’t he?” fiasco of the preceding year. Having actually closed the deal, he started acting like the Joker at an art exhibit.
Not just destructive to Twitter as a company, mind you — crazy layoffs, damaging cuts in support, weird work demands — but destructive to Twitter as a social medium.
Let’s not get too sentimental. Twitter had long had a lot of problems. An open forum of its type could hardly avoid it. But, for all the less-than-good bits of it, there was a lot of great discussion, news, statusing, and commentary going on, and the management seemed to realize that they needed to act responsibly (or at least make motions like they were) for both moral and good business reasons.
Musk did away with all of that. His attitude toward social media seemed to be a Hobbesian war of “all against all,” with the most brutal (and view-garnering) voices “winning.” That the bullies and nihilists usually find it easier to out-shout people who really don’t want to shout in the first place wasn’t, for him, a bug: it was a feature.
So maybe it was making it easier on anti-semites, or some new offense against LGBTQ folk on the platform, or even getting rid of blocks on content and users spewing COVID fantasies and Election Denial.
Whatever it was, I had enough. It wasn’t a place I wanted to be. So, in remarkably short order, I wasn’t.
I do still occasionally peer over there, most often by inadvertently clicking on a link to an image pointing there. When possible I try to avoid it.
Because the medium is the message. And, for me, actively participating on Twitter is adding head count and click count and tacit support for Musk and his cronies and the Joker Gang wandering around the place and pissing in the corners.
I find it disheartening that so many Twitter members — news organizations, local and national government agencies, individual contributors I respect — are still on “X” (which rebrand exemplifies so much of what is wrong with Elon Musk and his private soap box). Not only is its technical reliability an increasing concern, but Musk’s abusive behavior against anyone who he takes a disliking to means its business reliability is dodgy as well.
“But, Dave,” you might say, “Twitter still has a huge following! We have thousands and millions of followers who would never, ever dream of moving over onto another platform! We’d lose a lot of money, a lot of influence, a lot of visibility.”
True. Those are all priorities. I suspect that any number of people who have, in history, chosen not to flee a country that was becoming increasingly unstable, hostile to them and theirs, oppressive, etc., used the same excuses. “I have a business here! I have a home! I have friends — fewer, maybe, than before, but I have a place in the community. I am sure it will all blow over soon …”
Those stories sometimes don’t end well.
But enough about Twitter
I’ve been on a lot of social media over the years. I started a blog a couple of decades ago — too late for the birth of my kid, but just in time for 9/11. It saw a lot of use in the following years … but I also early adopted some lighter-weight content gathering. Google Reader in the day. Some early Twitter stuff. Then (insert angelic choir sound here) Google Reader, then, after that, back to Twitter, as life and attention span and stuff made shorter-form stuff a lot easier to do.
And then all the Twitter stuff above, and …
… off to Mastodon.
On the surface, the two platforms are similar — short-form individual messages, threads, etc.
But as so many have commented, the environment on Mastodon is a lot more … quiet. Not in terms of content sharing — I get more messages in than I can keep up with — but in terms of it all being less shouty, less click-baiting, less outrage-to-drive-eyeballs. There’s tough, incisive posting about things, as well as a lot of silliness. There are people dedicated to a given topic, and others who (like me) wander about, making noises about politics, comic books, or silly jokes.
I’m not quite sure it yet feels like home, but it is feeling increasingly comfortable.
One thing I want to work on is sharing my contact from there to here. One reason I like having a blog is that it’s mine — dependent only on my paying quarterly hosting bills, not on the business plan of anyone else. That said, one of the things I like about Mastodon is its decentralization, so that if one instance is mismanaged or lets the deplorables run roughshod, it’s easy to isolate the damage and/or move to another host if needed.
Anyway, cross-posting on an automatic basis from There to Here — to act as a repository and a place I can more easily pull past info from — is high on my list of things to do (which is still very long).
Mastodon isn’t perfect. That decentralization makes for a few sharp corners when trying to find people or share stuff. It’s actually improved there over the last year, but it’s a slightly steeper hill to climb than simply hopping onto Twitter or Facebook, etc.
I think Mastodon, as a “kindler, gentler” environment, sometimes gets contentious over whether people are being properly kinder and gentler. This pops up in debates about the platform and what should be the soft rules and the hard rules. Content Warnings (a clever tool) can be a touch-point, though I’m generally unaware of the extent of their use (as I simply have the window open to everything automatically, and don’t generally post stuff I think will be triggering to people).
Mastodon’s native inability (at the moment) to QTs is hotly debated whenever the proposal comes up — some groups find the feature too prone to abuse, others find it essential for how their sub-communities operate. I tend to favor them, but I’m able to work around that usually.
But so it goes. Any human community is going to have some sensitive points of friction, and the ones I tend to see on Masto are orders of magnitude less problematic than, say, Twitter debates about Were the Jews were behind COVID or if it was actually the trans people (so maybe we should do something to deal with both groups, just to be safe) …
At least that’s how I feel about it at the moment. The Masto I see and interact with is very open and accepting, especially to anyone who approaches conversation in a way that doesn’t easily translate into “Here’s my rationale for wanting you gotten rid of.”
The bottom line
This is probably far more info than I needed to share, esp. for something so trivial as my 1st Mastodon Anniversary. But there’s a reason I’m there (and why I’m not at my old there), and it’s probably worth writing down before everything changes again.
Net-net, I not only feel comfortable on Mastodon, I feel the general values and nature of the community there is something I’m willing to be associated with. If the medium is the message, the message Mastodon is currently sending is part of mine.
If you need help or advice getting yourself onto Mastodon, give me a holler.
If you’re looking for me over there, here’s where I am: https://mstdn.social/@three_star_dave
