One year of Mastodon

These days I realised it’s been roughly one year I’ve been on Mastodon with continuity. I tried it in the past, but I did not stick around. This time though, I did.

So I’ve been wondering why I decided to stick around this time, and it’s surely for a few reasons:

• Twitter’s enshittification has intensified and gets worse every day
• Facebook or Istagram are not a good alternative. The use case is different and they are enshittified already with toxic interactions, ads, unhealty behaviours.
• The Mastodon experience is very good and much better than Twitter.
• I found a great local Mastodon instance with like-minded people
• With Mastodon I’m not locked in on a single instance and I can migrate to a different one
• Mastodon has no algorithm and no ads
• Mastodon has moderation

These are all good reasons for switching from Twitter/X to Mastodon, and maybe one of the most interesting and least appreciated aspects is how it manages timelines. Mastodon has a so-called “local” timeline, a “federated” timeline, plus your own “Home” timeline

• The Local timeline is the timeline of your instance. If you choose carefully what instance to sign up to, this means you will usually have something interesting to read and with tie you will get to know your people on the instance
• The Federated timeline, is the global timeline of the Fediverse (all worldwide instances of Mastodon and similar networks)
• The Home timeline, is the timeline with the people you follow.

If you are on the fence, give Mastodon a try and make sure to choose the instance that’s right for you. Do not worry about not picking the perfect one right away, because it’s always possible to migrate to a different one without losing friends and posts.