5 key lessons after a week on Mastodon

Twitter has been in constant turmoil recently, but Mastodon seems much calmer. Of course, the premise is that you have overcome the challenge of learning how to use this social network that might have been unheard of a month ago.

We have also joined the ranks of new Mastodon users over the past week, struggling to understand the "decentralized timeline" and which server to choose to register. Seven days after pouring all kinds of ideas onto this platform, we have summarized some experiences that may help you decide whether this decentralized network is right for you, no matter what the future of Twitter is.

The steep learning curve is real

Twitter is popular (once?) partly because of its ease of use. Log in, post, reply, like, forward, and repeat. Everyone can see your public tweets, and private messages will remain private. Simple and clear.

But as you may have read elsewhere, this is not how Mastodon works, and you can never really be sure who has read your post. Mastodon is a decentralized social network, which means there are many different spaces (called servers or instances) that operate independently but are also slightly connected to each other. Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko likens this system to email—you can have a Gmail account, your friends can have a Yahoo Mail account, and you can still send emails to each other even if the two platforms are different. This means that even if you and your friends have accounts on different instances (such as mastodon.social and universal.com), you can still follow each other and send messages.

[Related: Former Twitter employee warns that the platform is about to collapse]

This explains this somewhat, but is not entirely accurate. Your posts cannot reach every Mastodon server unless someone on each server follows you or reposts your post. The platform is designed to form like-minded communities, rather than a huge public square like Twitter, where everyone is working to make everyone hear their voices. Thanks to this design, it's hard to reach every Mastodon user, and you probably don't want to do that either - they won't be all interested in things like you. Some useful charts and guides on using the site helped us understand this better.

The frustrating conclusion is that yes, Mastodon is more complex than Twitter, so you need to adapt. You will gradually master it, but you will definitely need to put in some effort. If you are reluctant to do this, maybe it's better to stay away from it.

Mastodon's functions are similar to Twitter, but not exactly the same

Mastodon looks very much like Twitter, which may lead you to the mistaken idea that once you understand the concept of multiple servers, the rest is basically the same. Yes, that's not the case.

The biggest similarity is the HomeTimeline, which contains posts from people you follow, but there are two other timelines: Local and United. The former is the post stream for people in your instance, so if you sign up for Mastodon.social (the largest and most diverse instance), you will see posts from every other member of the community there. On the other hand, a federated timeline is a stream of information that contains posts from people outside your server, but not all Mastodon users. To get a post there, someone in your instance must follow that user or repost their content. The joint timeline is a great place to know what is going on outside of your interests and find new followers, so if you want to expand your followers, this is a great place to start.

On Twitter, you have 280 characters to express yourself, and on Mastodon, you have 500 characters. You can still post votes, photos, GIFs, and videos, but the platform does not support a wide variety of files as Twitter. The number and size of files you can upload is also more limited. You will notice that you can easily reply and repost (repost) content from accounts you follow or those appearing on your joint timeline, but you can't quote them in new posts. Rochko designed this purpose on purpose to avoid increasing negative emotions. The idea is to interact directly with the author of the post, rather than talking to your audience about other people.

Lastly, direct messages are not as private as they are on Twitter. On Twitter, you can always choose to send a message to someone privately, in a space that seems to be separate from your main timeline. But on Mastodon, you can choose who can see each of your posts, while private messages are just posts with a highly restricted audience range that can only be seen by the users mentioned in it. These posts are not end-to-end encrypted, and Mastodon reminds you this every time you click on the Earth icon in the compose window and set your audience to only people mentioned . Just a reminder - Twitter's private messages are not end-to-end encrypted, so even if they exist in private messages, people on Twitter or those with permission to access the Twitter server may see their content. That's why some people talked about deleting private messages when Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Yes, everyone is much more friendly, but that's not necessarily a good thing

Mastodon's friendly atmosphere has always been a huge selling point to attract people who are tired of Twitter's fast-paced, often full of negative emotions. Here's the fact: Mastodon is indeed a happier, more friendly place, and people don't wait for others to post something they think is stupid in order to point it out to their followers. Mastodon seems to be more focused on a collaborative and supportive environment, which is especially important for new users who are still struggling to figure things out. Ask questions and no one will call you an idiot because you don’t understand immediately – people will actually help you and guide you to convenient resources that make your life easier. Shocking.

The problem is that some users (as Vice's Sarah Jeoung first pointed out in 2017) actually like some of the negative emotions of Twitter. No, they are not masochists – it’s because it’s fun to witness even the most ridiculous points of any debate and can provide new points you haven’t even considered.

From a rude, outspoken environment like Twitter, you might be surprised to find that people on your server don't seem to like political arguments. For example, on mastodon.social, users will politely thank you when you post political content after warning. This may change with the influx of Twitter users and eventually creating dedicated servers for such controversial debates. But as of this writing, mastodon.social and most other servers on the platform are still depoliticized places, and they seem to keep that way.

Tags are crucial if you want to get exposure

Surprisingly - Mastodon has no content algorithm. This means that no matter how many posts you have about your favorite band, or how many accounts you follow to follow the movie, your timeline won’t show more of the same content. It's just a chronological stream of posts, and that's it.

No platform keeps recommending the same type of accounts and content, meaning you won't be further isolated into a smaller like-minded crowd. You are already in a semi-independent community of users with similar interests, so why further segmentation? However, the lack of algorithms also makes it difficult to know who to follow and how to expand your followers if you want to reach a wider audience.

This is where the label comes in. They are the main way you categorize posts on Mastodon and make it easier for others to find them. In fact, search engines within the platform only use tags and do not search in the rest of the post like Twitter does. Obviously, this is also by design, which can prevent users from easily finding people they can harass.

Search for people is very counterintuitive

Another result of the lack of algorithms is that finding other users with similar interests is a bit tricky. A quick search for your friend will show that knowing another user's handle is not enough - you need to know which server they are on. Again, this is like email, if you don't know if your friends have @yahoo or @gmail accounts, then you can't find and send them a message. So unless you know the full address of your friends, you may have a hard time finding them.

Even focusing on people from other instances (whose content is right in front of you) can be difficult. When you click or click on the following icon next to their name (people with plus sign at the top), you will see a pop-up alert with two options. You can log in to the instance of that person to follow them there (Mastodon allows you to join as many servers as possible), or you can copy the full Mastodon address of that person to manually paste it into the search bar of your profile, Find them and follow them there.

[Related: Here are 3 Twitter alternatives if you are looking for]

Yes, this is not a lot of work, but it is absolutely tedious and will be even more annoying for new users who have to repeat the process over and over to build their timeline. If you find yourself following a lot of people from a specific instance (rather than your own), you can transfer your profile to that instance. It's an easy process, but, like many things on Mastodon, you have to know how to do it.

First, create a profile on the server you want to migrate to. Remember that some servers have special requirements or do not allow new members at all. Once your new account is set up, open Mastodon in your web browser, go to

Preferences , Account , and scroll down to Migrate from a different account. There, click Create an account alias and follow the steps. From your old server, go to Account , scroll down to to migrate to a different account and click to configure here. Follow the prompts and you will be successful.

More Twitter alternatives may appear in the coming months. Whether Mastodon will become the new “faucet” in the world remains to be seen, but if you need a place to talk about your ideas, this platform may be as good as any other platform – at least for the moment.

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