After Twitter went private, I found that management did a number of things to the corporate culture and to the content of the site such that I no longer wanted to use it. Around December 1^st, I quit Twitter and did the big account delete. Since then, though, I have had the great pleasure to discover Mastodon!

So far it’s great. I’m finding the quality of discourse and the community there to be really special. It’s less commercial and more intellectual. Unfortunately, given the drama and money surrounding Twitter, Mastodon keeps getting compared to it. While Mastodon is while it’s superficially quite similar to Twitter, I’d argue it’s something else, even something better. Namely, it:

1. Reminds me of early-90s USENET before the eternal September: an open, engaging, friendly group of communities full of amateurs and professionals sharing insights about things they love, from the X-Files to 15^thth century lullabies. I’ve joined Latin translators, fans of old Anglo-Saxon languages (Middle-Dutch, Middle-English, Frankish), programmers, instructors, SF tech scene folks, and the creator of one of the Greatest Video Games of All Time
2. There’s also a decentralized, DIY, localized-but-connected aspect to Mastodon that recalls bulletin board systems with forum replication in the pre-WWW era e.g fidonet

In my opinion, these design influences, not shared by Twitter, make Mastodon something better and something worth exploring.

In a subsequent post, I’ll explain my technical setup that makes keeping up on Mastodon a breeze, given you think about it along these two major axes. However, in this post I’d just like to talk about the technology, approach, and culture of Mastodon and what I like about it.

I believe understanding this technical setup is best assisted by understanding how I see the design of the Mastodon network. Those ideas are covered in a previous post

I Don’t Like Mastodon’s River; Introducing Newsraft

Since Mastodon federates micro-blog posts from across the universe of collaborating nodes, I think the ideal interface for subscribed-to Mastodon content is a big “inbox” that’s created when some code pulls your messages from all those nodes to your computer. Then, the code should help you swiftly tear through your unread content: mark important, mark read, mark all read, peek at an image, etc.

I think it should look something like this:

The “infinite scroll” interface of Facebook or Twitter was designed to keep punters suckers users insecure so that they came back often like a cocaine-addicted lab rat tapping a button for another pellet. Despite the cognitive and productivity flaws this design brings about, those sites' ubiquity has coached many to believe “this is what social networking as to feel like,” and Mastodon has emulated it, warts and all.

But this interface fails to show off what can be so glorious about Mastodon: you can get done with “doing social networking” on Mastodon without fear of missing out. Content lands in a bucket and you can peruse it or mark it read or important on your schedule. The software that lets me have such a calm, cool experience is Newsraft.