I keep seeing all these Hot Takes on Mastodon, and I want one too!
Here’s mine: I love Mastodon. But the key difference, the most important thing you need to know to have a safe and enjoyable experience on Mastodon, is to realize that you are responsible for your own safety and well being.
It gives you more tools than almost any other platform to do this, but you still gotta pay attention and use them.
The first thing you need to do is understand the server you’re thinking of joining. Each Mastodon instance, or server, is a full, standalone copy of Mastodon. It’s a whole social paltform of its own. It’s just that it can talk to other Mastodons. So see what you can find out about:
- The server owner. Who are they? Are they responsible? Are they experienced at running servers? This person has access to the potentially sensitive information that the server’s members throw around, both in public and in private. Do you trust them with it? Do you kinda trust them but maybe want to be thoughtful about what you write in DMs? (For the record: on every website, always, be thoughtful about what you put in DMs. They are NEVER fully private, and furthermore hacking is a thing that can happen anywhere.)
- The server’s financial situation. Is it stable? Are the hardware costs and time required to maintain the server reasonably accounted for? Does the admin at least have a plan? Basically: check on whether there’s a risk of the place going broke and vanishing. If they do go broke and the admin needs to shut down, do you at least trust them enough to let you know you need to migrate all your content to a different instance?
- The server’s rules and guidelines. If you go to the server homepage (the server name is also a webpage URL–e.g. mastodon.social or fandom.ink) then you will find information on the server’s rules and expectations, what the server focuses on (which isn’t the only thing you can talk about there, for sure, but it will give you an idea of who your closest neighbors will be), and often the ID of the admin, so you can maybe go look them up and learn a bit more.
- The size of the server–also available on the server’s homepage. It’s up to you whether you want a small or large server, and of course user counts can go up, but it’s good information to have. If a server starts getting really honking big, it can be a warning sign. Mastodon.social has over 170,000 users at the time of writing this, which is freaking ginormous for a Mastodon instance and could represent a possible issue. Since most servers are run by individuals or small groups, trying to maintain order and stability for that many users can be a real tough job. (This is why people keep urging each other to join any server except that one.) If you join a real big one like that, then you want to know that it also has the resources to support that size of user base.
After you have researched, chosen and joined your server, be aware that while the admin of your server will (presumably–Mastodon admins run the gamut of humanity, so some are great and some suck) do their best to ensure the server’s rules are followed by its membership, they are not responsible for and cannot control what the members of other servers do.
You are the one responsible for the content you follow. Mastodon has infinitely more tools to exert control over your own user experience than Twitter has ever had or wanted, but you have to use them. You also have to be willing to enforce your own boundaries via unfollowing, blocking, muting and blacklisting. You also need to be respectful of the boundaries of others, and not try to force your way through when they enforce theirs.
This was always true on any platform, but never moreso than Mastodon.
There is no overlord on Mastodon. There’s no government-regulated privacy or ethics team. The highest authority is the local server admin, and they can only control what the members of your server do (and cut off the neighboring server if they go completely batshit, but that’s kind of a nuclear option).
And like. Remember that there is no website anywhere ever that you should assume your DMs are fully protected. It’s ‘private,’ not Actually Private. This is not the place where you put your credit card information, or your deepest darkest secret that would destroy you utterly if it ever got out, or for that matter your plans for government overthrow.
That’s what IRC is for.
Speaking of which.
DID YOU KNOW that Mastodon is only one member in the Fediverse? If you hate how it works, then there are Fediverse versions of Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube and more. There are even Fediverse versions of Goodreads, SoundCloud and Dropbox. Hell, you can even make your WordPress blog into a Fediverse member!
From any of these sites, you can follow each other and interact fully. You can hang out on your Fedi-Tumblr and talk to your friend on Mastodon without either of you even leaving your respective online sofas.