Last year I quit X and joined Mastodon; this year I’m quitting Instagram and joined Pixelfed. The times, they are a-changing.
Last year, on 1 January, I quit Twitter. It’s only been a year since I’ve been off the platform, but it feels like longer. Not sure why. It’s not because I miss it; I’m far happier with Mastodon.
I left because of its new owner, Elon Musk. I didn’t have any problems with Musk before he bought Twitter and renamed it X; he simply struck me as just another tech billionaire who bought companies, then claimed he was the brains behind them. Bought PayPal, then claimed he started PayPal; bought Tesla, then claimed he started Tesla. Okay he did start SpaceX, and a few other companies. But once he bought Twitter, he quickly became its chief troll.
Which is the one thing I don’t abide in social media: Trolls. I block ’em.
I didn’t always. Back in the ’90s, when instead of social media we had bulletin boards, and I was interacting with people on America Online and Bethany Online, I naïvely tried to debate the trolls, of all things. Somehow it didn’t occur to me they were being dicks for the evil fun of it all. So I tried reason. Got me nowhere. Eventually I gave up, told the moderators on them, and got them banned. Whereupon they created new accounts and harrassed me again… till I got ’em banned again. And again.
When I got into social media, the one thing I appreciated most was moderators. I wanted somebody to police the trolls. And they did! They were great. They also had a huge job on their hands; there are an awful lot of awful people out there. It’s no surprise that bots wind up doing most of the moderating. But of course bots aren’t intelligent, and can’t tell the difference between “I was killing it in the stock market today!” and “I’m going to kill you and your family; I know where you live.” (Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if this very blog post gets automatically blocked, just for me writing that.) Bots have one job, and they suck at it. That’s why I appreciate human moderators so very much—and not just because they’re helpful at correcting bot overkill.
Musk not only canned a bunch of moderators; he’s a troll. And you’re not allowed to block him. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.
So I moved to Mastodon. Turned out to be a great choice.
Not that I knew this at the time; I was just looking for a platform that was Twitter-like, and not full of trolls. Telegram was out, Parler was out, Truth Social was definitely out. All those platforms revel in their largely unregulated content… as proven by the gobs of pornography on those sites. Christian right-wingers keep forgetting that libertarian right-wingers absolutely love porn, and just because you vote for the same guys doesn’t mean you hold the same values. At all.
Mastodon is decentralized, by design. Anybody can host a Mastodon website, which they call “instances.” Just get yourself a server or webhost, download the open-source Mastodon software, and you’re in business! Your instance is connected to all the other instances through the federated network; every other Mastodon user can see and interact with your users. As can anybody else connected to the network, like Threads users. And unlike X and Facebook, you don’t have to subscribe to see anyone’s posts. (Or “toots,” as Mastodon likes to call them. I just call ’em posts.)
Of course if you run an instance, you have to actually run the instance. You gotta moderate it. Yourself, if you have the time; or you can find volunteers. Or, of course, you can not moderate it at all. You can let it become a free-for-all, just like the right-wing platforms. But if you do so, what’ll usually happen is other Mastodon instances which do practice content moderation, will block your instance as unsafe.
Now because every instance moderates itself, policies aren’t gonna be consistent across Mastodon. One instance might be very strict, and another might be run by, and therefore filled with, trolls. I’ve heard the complaints from Mastodon users who felt their administrators were a little too vigorous with the banhammer. Of course there’s nothing stopping those folks from rejoining Mastodon through a different instance, and if they get banned from that instance as well, betcha it ain’t the administrators who are the problem.
I decided to join my local instance, and at the time that was the San Francisco Bay Area instance, SFBA.social. Then I decided to create another account for my Christ Almighty! blog, so I joined religion.masto.host, but that’s shutting down in April, so I switched to deacon.social.
Two other things I love about Mastodon: No algorithms, and no ads.
Algorithms suck. The claim is they exist to help us see the stuff we’d want to see. The reality is they downplay the people I actually wanna follow and chose to follow, in favor of strangers—whom the algorithm is sure I might wanna follow, but in my experience, no I don’t.
And no ads. It might blow your mind, but it’s true: I never have to look at “sponsored content” on Mastodon. Granted, that may change at some point, once somebody figures out how to tweak the open-source software to slip some ads in there. Not everybody who operates an instance is gonna want to self-finance, or perpetually beg for donations like Wikipedia and Internet Archive! But for now, I don’t have to be annoyed by every other post which is really an ad. You know, like Facebook and Instagram.
Speaking of Instagram: I’m leaving that site as of 1 February. I don’t post a lot of photos anyway, have very few followers, and same as Facebook, every other post is an ad. So I’m out.
What’ll I do with the few photos I do wanna post? Stick ’em on Pixelfed, which is another social media platform I joined. They specialize in photos like Instagram, and would let me upload whole albums at a time if I felt like it. But again, without the algorithms and ads. Like Mastodon, it’s decentralized; I’m on the pics.80px.com instance. And like Mastodon, it’s connected to the federated network; I can follow it through Mastodon if I wanna.
Yeah, I’ve heard from people who wanna know why I’m not migrating to Bluesky, like them. Two reasons. First, it was created by Jack Dorsey, who started Twitter, who’s planning for it to be just like Twitter. That includes algorithms and ads. I don’t want algorithms and ads.
Second, I kinda like the idea of the whole decentralized, federated-network, open model. I like that anyone can create a Mastodon or Pixelfed instance, and run it, and anybody on the network can follow its users. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could follow your favorite X users, Bluesky users, even Truth Social users, from Facebook?—but you can’t, because all those platforms are private and proprietary, and want you to join them so they can show you ads. Threads is the only exception, because it’s on the federated network… for now. It might not be for long, if being able to follow Mastodon and Pixelfed users gets ’em to think about ditching Threads and Meta. We’ll see.
But now that Meta is planning to ditch their moderators… well I suspect my days on Facebook might be numbered.