Twitter Alternative Mastodon Deserves a Closer Look

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Bigger Insights Technology podcast where we’ll help

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you stay ahead of the curve.

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We’re very excited about this episode because we’re going to be talking about Mastodon,

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the notorious Twitter killer.

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But first, this episode is brought to you by Twitter.

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Do you want a proprietary social media service that shadow bans people they don’t like and

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constantly shows you that “something went wrong” error? Then come on down to Twitter and don’t

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forget to buy your blue check mark for $8 a month.

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Alright, just kidding everybody.

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We have no association with Twitter and we have no sponsors as of the time of this recording.

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But in all seriousness, if you spend any significant amount of time online, you’ve probably heard

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about Mastodon by now.

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I’m ashamed to admit that when I first heard about it, I didn’t take it very seriously

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because I thought it was just another Gab, Parler, or truth social.

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That’s not a criticism of this other platforms.

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It’s just an unfortunate reality that any for-profit social media platform that relies

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on advertising is going to have a lot of drawbacks for users because the customers are the advertisers

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and the users are the product.

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The critical detail that I was missing was that Mastodon is not just another ad-driven

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social media platform.

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It’s free and open source software (FOSS).

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If Twitter is Windows, Mastodon is Linux.

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Or if Twitter is the US dollar (USD), Mastodon is Bitcoin (BTC).

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Do you see what I mean?

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Now we’re going to talk about how it works and what it’s about.

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Then we’ll wrap it up with some pros and cons later on.

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Also bear in mind that we do produce video content for each episode as well, which will

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show some screenshots of what we’re talking about.

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You can watch this on our website, BiggerInsights.com or on Spotify.

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But there might be some delay in producing the video because we’re having some issues

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with our editor at the moment.

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However, even if you’re only going to listen to the audio version, the purpose of this

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episode is to get you interested in at least looking into joining Mastodon.

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This isn’t intended to be a how-to guide or anything like that,

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so audio should be sufficient.

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Mastodon is federated, which is a concept that’s a little hard to wrap your head around until

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you’ve worked with software or services that are obviously federated.

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What this means is that anyone can run an instance of Mastodon on their own server and

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still interact with other Mastodon servers.

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This is just like email.

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Email is a federated protocol.

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You can run your own email service, which we don’t advise for most people for security

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reasons.

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You can also get an account with Proton, Tutanota, Gmail, Outlook, and so on.

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What makes this federated is that all of these parties agree to implement the email protocol,

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which is key because this is what allows Gmail users to email Proton users, for example.

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It’s the same thing with Mastodon.

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If we host our own Mastodon instance, you can seamlessly interact with us from your

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own Mastodon host.

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But try not to let this intimidate you.

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We want to make it clear that you don’t need to run your own Mastodon instance, just that

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anyone can.

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And this is important because this is one of the things that gives Mastodon its decentralized

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nature.

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There is no single Mastodon service to attack, fail, or rely on.

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This gives Mastodon a high degree of resilience that other platforms don’t have.

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There’s no one for the state to push around and make them do their bidding.

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And this isn’t just some startup with a questionable business model that can just disappear overnight.

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So if you’re on Mastodon and you’re on an instance or a server that you don’t like for

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whatever reason, perhaps you just don’t like the admin’s policy or maybe they’re shutting

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it down due to some lack of funding or something, you can just migrate your account and data

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to another instance.

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Contrast that with something like Twitter or Fecesbook, where they can just shut

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you down at any moment for any reason and your account and data just go to cyber heaven.

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When you make a Mastodon account, you choose a server where you want your account to be

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hosted.

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There are many servers to choose from, which vary by region, policies, legal structure,

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and so on.

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The administrator can set some policies like content moderation, for example, which you

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can review before you join the server.

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So if we take our server, for example, there’s a policy against harassment, dogpiling, or

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doxing of other users, which is fair.

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But again, if you don’t like the server’s policies, you can just find one that you do

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agree with.

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And if you don’t want to join someone else’s server for whatever reason, you can host your

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own server and have full control over it.

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Some of the businesses that we follow actually do go this route and host their own Mastodon

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server.

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Once you choose a server, the process is pretty much like any other service.

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You’ll set a handle, an email address, a password, you know, the usual stuff.

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Once you create your account, the profile setup is similar to Twitter in that you can

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set an avatar, a header image, and a short bio.

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Mastodon also gives you four profile metadata fields, which you can use to list information

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like your website, contact information, or whatever else you want.

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One of the things that’s interesting about that is Mastodon has a self verification

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process, which is free, and you don’t need Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg’s permission

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to do it.

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The way it works is if you put your website’s URL in your profile, and then you put a specific

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Mastodon URL and attribute in your website, when you save your profile, Mastodon will

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look for that URL and attribute in your website.

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If it finds it and your website is protected with SSL, it will add a green checkmark and

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highlighting to the URL of your website in your Mastodon profile.

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We’ll show some example images of that in the video for this episode.

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It sounds complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple.

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It only took us a couple of minutes to figure out.

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And what this does is it helps users differentiate legitimate accounts from impersonators.

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So if you’re interacting with an account that claims to be Bigger Insights on Mastodon,

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and you don’t see that verification checkmark next to our URL, BiggerInsights.com, it’s

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not us.

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Now, obviously, if you want to do this, you need to have a website, at least for now,

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I think I read a while ago that they may be considering other options, but it’s still

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better than nothing, and it’s free, and it’s permissionless.

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So that’s pretty much it as far as making an account is concerned.

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Once you make an account, we would encourage you to turn on two factor authentication (2FA),

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which you can do under settings.

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I feel like an idiot for this,

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but when I made our Bigger Insights account, I couldn’t find the two-factor authentication

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page at first, it’s under account.

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But what tripped me up was you don’t see it until you click account, which expands some

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options beneath it,

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and one of those is two factor authentication.

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So it’s pretty easy to miss, but it is there.

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As of the time of this recording, I see authenticator apps and security keys as your options, which

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is good because those are good options by themselves, and email and SMS just aren’t very secure.

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You should also generate the recovery codes in the 2FA section, in case you lose your

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2FA options.

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After that, you may want to just poke around in the various settings and preferences pages

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to tweak the experience to your liking.

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You can do things like show or hide sensitive content, show or hide your followers, and

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so on.

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And, you know, one would think that with this being free and open source software (FOSS) that it

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would kind of suck, but I have to say we’re actually quite impressed with how fully-featured

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it actually is.

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Other than the interface and some of Twitter’s newer features, Twitter and Mastodon are actually

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pretty 1:1 as far as core features are concerned.

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And in addition to self-verification, there are other things that you can do on Mastodon

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that you can’t do on Twitter, but we’ll go over that in the next section.

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Let’s switch gears and go over some of the things that we like about Mastodon.

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In short, we like almost everything about it.

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This is the social media tool that we’ve been searching for ever since Fecesbook came

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along, but we just didn’t know it.

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If you really sit down and think about it sometime, virtually all social media platforms

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suffer from the same core issues: Centralization and an ad-driven business model.

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This is a very toxic combination that results in the following issues: 1. Abusive content

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moderation and free speech suppression. 2. Banning and shadow banning people for sketchy

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reasons. 3. Harvesting and monetizing a tremendous amount of user data. 4. Sharing

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private user data with governments and law enforcement and allowing those entities to

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suppress users and content that they don’t like. And 5. Using algorithms to manipulate

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users’ behavior, emotions and hook them on the platform.

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That last point isn’t a joke.

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Social media companies use addictive techniques from casinos, for example, to keep users hooked

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on their platform for as long as possible, to generate as much ad revenue as possible,

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despite the fact that this can be very harmful for users’ relationships, productivity and

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mental health.

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If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably noticed many employees sitting on

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the toilet for 30+ minutes at a time.

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Chances are what they’re doing is scrolling through Fecesbook, Instasham, Snapchat, or

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TikTok.

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Fecesbook actually ran a study to see if they could manipulate users’ emotions by

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making tweaks to their algorithm.

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I’m going to read a few passages from an article on The Guardian about this.

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They said, “It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated

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information posted on 689,000 users’ home pages and found it could make people feel

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more positive or negative through a process of emotional contagion.

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In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered

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users’ newsfeeds, the flow of comments, videos, pictures, and web links posted by other people

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in their social network.

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One test reduced users’ exposure to their friends’ positive emotional content, resulting

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in fewer positive posts of their own.

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Another test reduced exposure to negative emotional content, and the opposite happened.

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The study concluded, “Emotions expressed by friends via online social networks influence

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our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive

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scale emotional contagion via social networks.”

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Lawyers, internet activists, and politicians said this weekend that the mass experiment

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and emotional manipulation was scandalous, spooky, and disturbing.” And we

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agree with that.

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And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being treated like a lab rat, but that’s

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exactly what you are when you use a service like Fecesbook.

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This is the first thing that we like about Mastodon.

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There’s no algorithm manipulating what you see or don’t see, and there’s no group of

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people there to manipulate you in the first place.

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Of course, the admin of the server you’re on could do something that you disagree with.

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But again, you can always move to another server.

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This leads to the second thing we like, Mastodon is decentralized.

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Centralization suffers from internal and external threats.

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Internally, a centralized service is liable to impose its will and morals on users and

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presents the risk of employees doing naughty things like shutting people down for no good

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reason.

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We’ve seen content moderators suppress content just because they disagree with it politically,

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as well as employees being paid to delete users’ accounts.

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Externally, centralized services are problematic because they’re larger targets for criminals,

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governments, and law enforcement.

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Let’s say, for example, that you were a government and you wanted to bury a story, or let’s say

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you’re a hacker and you want to compromise millions of accounts and either hit the company

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up for ransom or the users.

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In either case, it’s a lot more efficient to go after the centralized service because

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there’s a single point of failure.

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In the case of the government, that could be something like one National Security Letter (NSL)

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and a gag order sent to the company.

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Mastodon addresses these problems by allowing users to host their profile on whatever server

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they want.

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The third thing that we like is that Mastodon is permissionless.

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This is a byproduct of its decentralized nature, but it’s very refreshing to be able to run,

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verify, and secure an account without someone else’s permission.

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For example, I once had a Twitter account that got suspended.

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When I asked them about it, they said it violated their policies, but of course, they wouldn’t

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tell me which one.

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I read their policies and didn’t see a single one that I violated.

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The only thing that I can think of was I hadn’t signed into this account for a while, but

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this is the kind of BS that you deal with with a centralized service. And this issue

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is much deeper than most people realize.

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Permission isn’t just about having an account.

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It’s also about visibility.

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After all, having an account is pretty meaningless if no one else sees it.

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One of the dirty tricks that social media companies use to suppress users without telling them

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is called shadow banning.

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I actually had a Twitter account once that was shadow banned, at least to some degree.

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Searching for the account wouldn’t produce results anywhere – not on Google and not in

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Twitter itself.

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As far as I can tell, I didn’t violate any of their policies or say anything remotely

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offensive.

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The only thing I could think of was I didn’t give them a phone number for privacy reasons,

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but they don’t require a phone number.

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So in other words, they “permitted” me to have a Twitter account, but not really

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because they were secretly making sure that it never saw the light of day.

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You don’t have to deal with garbage like that on Mastodon.

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There aren’t secret rules that suppress accounts that some small group of people don’t like

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for whatever reason.

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You see other users, and if you don’t like them, you can block or mute them yourself.

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It’s that simple, and that’s the way that it should be.

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The fourth thing that we like about Mastodon is the lack of advertisements.

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There are no ads per se, although there’s nothing really stopping anyone from posting

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content that promotes a business or, I don’t know, something else that you would consider

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to be an ad.

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It’s hard to even define what an ad even is these days, but you won’t see ads like you

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will see on Fecesbook because Mastodon isn’t an ad-driven business.

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The fifth thing that we like is that we’ve seen virtually no garbage accounts on Mastodon.

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We obviously disagree with some of the posts we’ve seen, but to date, we haven’t seen

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any illegal content, obvious misinformation, scams, doxing, harassment, racism, sexism,

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or other issues.

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Of course, your mileage may vary, but this is what we’ve seen so far.

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And again, if you see anything you don’t like, you can always mute or block somebody.

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The fifth thing that we like about Mastodon is it’s part of the Fediverse via its implementation

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of ActivityPub.

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We may go into more detail about this in a future episode, but the Fediverse is an ecosystem

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of federated servers and services that can communicate with each other.

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What this means is that Mastodon is much bigger than just Mastodon because it integrates with

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other participants in the Fediverse.

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For example, in your Mastodon account, you can follow Pixelfed users.

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Pixelfed is a federated alternative to Instasham in case you’re wondering. And we’re not doing

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this justice, but this is pretty amazing.

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This would be like being able to follow and interact with Instasham users from your Twitter

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account.

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We don’t see things like this very much in the centralized services because they want

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to lock you into their walled garden.

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They don’t want you spending time interacting with other users on other platforms.

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But for FOSS Software like Mastodon and Pixelfed, this kind of behavior is welcome.

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This is a very interesting development which has the potential to be a very, very big deal

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in the future.

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Now let’s go over some of the things that we don’t like about Mastodon.

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The biggest issues we have aren’t really with Mastodon itself.

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The first is a lack of users.

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This is unfortunate for us in particular because we also provide financial services and produce

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the Bigger Insights Finance podcast.

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As a result, we follow a lot of people in finance, but I can’t think of a single one

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that’s on Mastodon.

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They’re all on Twitter.

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However, don’t let that discourage you from joining for a few reasons.

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1. Mastodon is growing, which has accelerated in recent years due to people starting to

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wake up to the reality of how toxic Fecesbook and other platforms are.

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2. Getting in early can be advantageous.

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We may get more visibility from real, engaged users, and there’s a greater chance that your

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desired handle is still available.

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3. Not joining due to a lack of users is a self-fulfilling issue.

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If we want the internet to be a better place, we need to make that happen.

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If we don’t, we have no one to blame but ourselves and shouldn’t complain when we get screwed

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by companies like Fecesbook and Twitter.

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4. Joining is a quick process.

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We’re going to put a link in the description of this episode.

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You don’t have to use that link, but if you do, joining and following us is quick and

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easy.

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And 5. This is the last shoe to drop.

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If we can get more people to join Mastodon, there will be virtually zero reasons left

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to use apps like Twitter.

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That’s really the bulk of what’s holding Mastodon back.

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If you really listen to what people say about Twitter and other apps, it’s not really the

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apps themselves that the people want, it’s the connections.

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The other issue that we have is that Mastodon is relatively politically concentrated.

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We’re not going to go into detail on that because we don’t want anyone to misinterpret

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what we’re saying, but you’ll pick up on that as well if you join.

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However, we don’t really see that as being a major issue for a few reasons.

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1. That’s not a technical limitation of Mastodon,

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so obviously this can change. 2. Seeing other opinions can be helpful, even if you disagree

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with them.

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3. If a user or a server is being particularly problematic to you, you can just mute or block

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them.

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And 4. We should see this as an opportunity to mix things up.

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No one wants an echo chamber.

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So be a part of the solution and join.

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The final issue we should mention is there are service interruptions from time to time.

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We’ve heard others complain about this, but from our experience, Mastodon has actually

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been more reliable than Twitter, if you can believe that. You know, we see that “something

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went wrong” error on Twitter pretty much every other day.

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And we’ve only experienced a Mastodon outage, I believe one time over the past couple of

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months.

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So let’s give credit where credit is due. Before we or anyone else get to nitpicky,

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just bear in mind, this is a free, open-source service that we’re comparing to creepy proprietary

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services worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

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But other than that, we’re very impressed with Mastodon.

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We should mention that we’re still somewhat new to it, and we’ve only used the web app.

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So we don’t claim to be an expert on Mastodon and may not be aware of certain issues.

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If there’s anything major that we missed, please let us know.

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You can contact us on Mastodon, obviously, which we’ll put the link in the description.

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There are several other ways that you can contact us like Signal, Session and Matrix,

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which we detail at BiggerInsights.com/contact.

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So to wrap this up, we really like Mastodon.

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We think it has a tremendous amount of potential and that all of the critical functionality

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is there.

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The only major limitation at this time is the lack of users.

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We strongly encourage everyone to join Mastodon, even if you’re neutral about it, so that

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we can address this problem.

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It takes five minutes, people. Just make an account and share your link with others.

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If it doesn’t end up working out, that’s not a big deal.

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But if it does, we’re confident that the world will be a better place if Mastodon replaces

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centralized apps as the place or the public to connect.

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And just to be clear, we’re not asking anyone to stop using other services like Twitter,

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just to join Mastodon.

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Believe it or not, you don’t have to stick with one thing.

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So if that sounds interesting to you, click our invite link in the description to get

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started.

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We don’t get anything out of that, except I think if you use our link, it’ll have you

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automatically follow us or something like that.

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But you can just go to Mastodon directly if you don’t want to use our link for whatever

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reason.

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All right, that’s everything for this episode.

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We may produce additional Mastodon episodes in the future,

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so let us know if you’re interested in that.

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We are once again asking you to subscribe and share this podcast so we can help as many

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people as we can.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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Go join and follow us on Mastodon and have a great rest of your day.