Though it is cloudy
the way before us is clear;
to act we must choose
From Algot

Many people have written about the freer, decentralised, harassment-free alternative to Twitter. So why am I writing this post? Well, I felt I needed to write down my own personal point of view after many people asked me why I disappeared from Twitter.

Here are my top five reasons for loving Mastodon (after using it for a few months):

  • Mastodon is decentralised, which means there is no one server or company who owns all your data. True, you have to pay attention to whom you give your data to, but I would say anything is better that some big American corporations who sell your data for money.
  • The 500 characters length of Mastodon toots is just enough to argue what you want to say, give a little insight, without becoming too long or difficult to read. Well done to whoever thought about it! I no longer need silly abbreviations or long, unreadable series of 1/5, 2/5… tweets.
  • The people I’ve found so far on Mastodon are simply amazing. This is definitely true for Twitter too, but on Twitter the useless chattering and background noise is way too much — partly due to its size, of course. It’s very easy to miss interesting tweets and conversations on Twitter, where millions of brands and businesses try to get to your timeline to advertise their products. Which brings me to the next point…
  • No ads! Mastodon is and will remain a community-run social networking tool, there aren’t and probably never be those who try to profit from it. It is a tool, from the community to the community, that people develop and maintain not for a personal gain, but because they believe in the value of free, open source software available to all.
  • And free software means you can take it, modify it, customise it… and if you can’t because like me you are not a programmer, you can always have your say and ask the developers to include a certain function, or change something, report a bug or help with testing. The debate is always open and there is no one deciding without your consent to change privacy terms or to use algorithms to show advertising on your timeline based on your activity.

I think I will eventually delete my Twitter account (or any other social media account for that matter) to switch to Mastodon definitively. By the way, you can find me on a teacher-oriented instance.