Trying Mastodon

It’s no secret that Twitter is red hot garbage fire, so I’ve signed up for a Mastodon account to give them a try. Because I’m super vain, I decided to create my own Mastodon instance, with a custom domain.

https://social.pento.net/@gary

Mastodon is kind of weird to sign up for: think of it as being kind of like email. You can sign up for a big provider like Gmail or Outlook, you can run your own server, or you can pay someone to run a server for you. In my case, I’m paying for a personal account on Masto.host, they’ve been super helpful in getting it all configured. If you’re just looking to try it out for free, here’s a tool to help you choose an instance.

Some Initial Impressions

It’s pretty quiet, of course. I’m currently following 13 people on Mastodon, and 500 on Twitter, there’s going to be a difference in volume.

Mastodon Bridge is a useful tool for you to be able to find your Twitter friends when you start out. I highly recommend using it.

None of the apps have the polish that I’m used to with Twitter apps like Twitterific and Fenix, but they’re evolving quickly. I do miss Tweet Marker support. I’ve settled on using Whalebird for my MacOS app, none of the various Android apps have appealed enough for me to start using them.

Search is pretty bad. There’s a confusing limitation (for a reasonable, but not really satisfactory technical reason): You can only search through the Toots that people on the same instance as you have subscribed to. So, because I’m on only person on pento.net, I can only search through the Toots of people I’m immediately subscribed to. If you sign up for a big host, you’ll see many more results, but you still won’t see everything.

I’m going to have to share this post manually, because Jetpack doesn’t know how to share to Mastodon yet. 😉

Will I Keep Using It?

Yep, for now. There’s a lot of potential, I’m interested to see where it goes.