My One-Month Anniversary on Mastodon

Related Post:

I’m Joining the #TwitterMigration to #Mastodon

As of December 1, 2022, I am no longer using Twitter. Instead, I’ll be promoting blog posts—other bloggers’ and my own—on Mastodon. You can find me there under this name:

@NotesintheMargin@toot.community

You cannot search for people by their real names on Mastodon. To find someone, you must go to Mastodon and search for the user name. I think you have to have your own account with Mastodon to do this.

Yesterday was my one-month anniversary on Mastodon. Because I had a terrible time crunch for most of November, I didn’t do as much exploring there as I had wanted to do. However, I’m starting to feel more at home there now.

And I like it. Here are some reasons why:

There are no ads.
There are no algorithms that fill up your timeline with content you’re not interested in.
Your home feed contains only posts from people you’re following.
Use of hashtags is robust, and you can follow hashtags (topics) you’re interested.
Use of filters is also robust, and you can create filters to avoid seeing posts from particular users or about topics you don’t want to see.
New users are encouraged to interact personally with fellow Mastodonians.

I’m beginning to see more and more book bloggers and others from the bookish community showing up on Mastodon.

I’ve therefore stopped using Twitter. The only drawback to that decision is that I used to use Buffer to schedule future tweets. I could, for example, set up about 4 or 5 days’ worth of tweets about a weekly or monthly meme. But Buffer doesn’t support Mastodon, so I have to post about other bloggers’ posts one at a time, which is a more time-consuming process that I usually forget to return to periodically. Eventually I hope to develop a system for myself to streamline the process.

In the meantime, as the sun slowly sets on Twitter, feel free to ask me questions if you’re interested in making the same transition. I’m certainly no expert, but I can probably help with the basics.