MASTODON: Part 1. What Is It, And Should You Use It?

You've likely heard of Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. You're intrigued and curious, but you may leave Twitter for it or use both, or even use Meta's Threads phone app that recently launched.

So, What Is Mastodon?

You've likely heard of Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. You're intrigued and curious, but you may leave Twitter for it or use both, or even use Meta's Threads phone app that recently launched.

A deciding factor for you may be that Mastodon collects absolutely no data from its users in terms of anything not absolutely required to use it. Meta's Threads is from Instagram, and like Twitter, collects, retains, and sells anything it can gather to advertisers. Having said that, Threads seems to be the Twitter replacement since a certain billionaire is now taking it in a wildly different direction. Threads is where many of the same users are, and that's compelling.

Currently, Threads has 100M users, while Mastodon has 13M.

Perhaps you went to sign up at JoinMastodon.com and were confused or overwhelmed. There are so many servers. What does “federated” even mean? So let's address these things.

First, I'm not here to convince you to switch to Mastodon. I want to go over what I like about it, what it offers, why I prefer it to Twitter, and why I think you will.