If Mastodon wants to replace Twitter, we'll have to ruin it first

Existing happily on Mastodon — Twitter's latest rival — requires amnesia. It's only enjoyable if you've forgotten the rise or slow, stuttering fall of every other social media platform in the last few decades.

This is how it feels in the early days of a new social media site (save for something directly out of dystopian nightmares like Truth Social). It's fun, in part because it's new, but largely because the stakes are so low. 

We used to sign up for these platforms to "have fun and be ridiculous and post stuff for what you probably understood to be a limited audience," Aimée Morrison, an associate professor in the department of English language and literature at the University of Waterloo, told Mashable in a previous article. Our friends saw our posts, but that was about it. We tweeted about what we ate for lunch, and made photo albums for a single night out on Facebook, and we never got too much attention. 

"The content was abundant, but the audience was not abundant. You imagined that nobody was interested," Morrison said. Social media has gotten a lot more noxious since then. Now you're one Google search away from being fired from your teaching job for posting a picture of yourself drinking alcohol, one post away from forever having to relive what you thought was funny at 13 years old, or even one TikTok away from fame.

That isn't the problem Mastodon has, in part because of its inherent newness. But this isn't to say Mastodon is brand new. It launched in 2016, but didn't boost to its current 1 million users until November 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and started his chaotic reign as CEO. The day Musk took over as "Chief Twit," Mastodon gained 70,000 new users.

On Mastodon, there are so few people on the app in comparison to its competitors, and you can't see just anyone's post. You can only see people you're following — and the accounts they boost — or people who are members of your server. So the chances of going viral and blowing up your life are limited.

"Going viral means validation, usually, and validation for who we are and what we do is a natural human need," Dr. Courtney Tracy, an addiction specialist also known as The Truth Doctor on TikTok and Instagram, told Mashable in a previous article. "Because virality usually lasts for longer than the basic length of a normal 'like' experience on any given day, it’s sort of like a long party in your mind. Instead of one good song and a drink, for example, it’s like an all-night concert with an open bar and great drinks that we can’t get enough of."

The desire for that ego boost can change your behavior, making you want to post what your audience is most likely to like or share — with potentially catastrophic results. "The result is to want to achieve the highest number of likes possible, which sometimes translates into ever more extreme posts or posts that play fast and loose with the truth," Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford professor of clinical psychiatry and the author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality, previously told Mashable. "This has played a role in the radicalizing of the internet and society, as well as the emergence of post-truth culture."

This is what the homepage looks like. Credit: Mastodon

A look at your profile page. Credit: Mastodon

Maybe Mastodon can save itself from the failures that have weighed literally every single other social media network down. Capitalism killed MySpace and Twitter and turned Facebook and Instagram into monsters in which anxiety runs in parallel with posting, and now TikTok has become a destination for misinformation. However, Mastodon has been built to counter those exact pitfalls. 

Mastodon is a nonprofit, open-source project, unlike all other big social media sites. So, ideally, it's made to benefit the public instead of shareholders. The platform can never be sold, which is supposed to give more power to its users — and notably less powers to billionaires. Unlike Twitter, you use a timeline of "toots" instead of tweets, which can be liked, bookmarked, or "boosted" instead of retweeted. 

But that's one of the challenges of Mastodon, too. It's not nearly as easy to use as Twitter. You have to join certain servers, which can be confusing at first. Twitter's interface makes linking out to articles and other content really user friendly, but on Mastodon, everything just shows up as ugly links. Its form is closer to that of Discord, which is not all that fun without community — and your community might already be built on Twitter.

Instead of existing in the same space as everyone else online, Mastodon doesn't live in one communal space. As my colleague Meera Navlakha explained, "Mastodon is decentralized; the platform has a network of servers which are called 'instances.' Users who sign up to the app will be asked to choose a server straightaway, deciding by searching through topics and languages. There are categories like Technology, Music, Gaming, Art and Activism. Servers range from kpop.social, which is self explanatory, and tech.lgbt, a community for tech workers 'who are LGBTQIA+ or allies.'"

All that work makes it less user friendly and significantly less addictive. There's already a community on Twitter — there are, quite literally, millions more daily active users on it — and there's an algorithm that makes you want to scroll. I found myself logging onto Mastodon, chatting with folks, and closing the app. I wasn't called into a doomscrolling spiral. I wasn't eagerly anticipating the engagement. That's lovely; it also means I won't be using it nearly as much as I used Twitter. If Mastodon wants to replace Twitter, we have to ruin it first.