Drew Wilson talks about his experience so far on Mastodon compared to X/Twitter. It’s night and day.
When I launched Freezenet clear back in 2013, there was a number of things I knew I had to do. I had to implement some initial content to give people a reason to find me randomly on search engines, give the site a custom look as soon as possible, implement an indexing system for help organize the vast amounts of content, and get myself on social media websites.
One of those websites I joined early on was Twitter. It was among the top priority platforms that I knew I had to be on to help move the website forward at the time. It really was a no brainer platform to join at the time. Any news organization that wants to build an audience was on Twitter.
Initially, I was building a following. 5 followers became 25. 25 followers eventually became 100. The growth was slow as that took years to do, but I felt like I was on the right track. Getting traction felt like a process of repeatedly pushing out quality content and hoping to eventually get the odd persons interest here or there. The problem was that when I hit 100, it felt like I largely hit a wall. I posted custom content specifically for Twitter, tagging people, using hash tags to strategically get more visibility, but no matter what I did, it seemed like the follower count was constantly stuck at around 100. If I remember correctly, this peaked at around 120 followers.
Ever since, it felt like I was largely spinning my tires on the platform. All that time and effort was getting me largely nowhere. Sometimes, I would get an influx of likes and retweets, but that was exceedingly rare. What’s more, when that burst of interactivity finally hit my account, nothing I did was able to really capitalize on it. As a result, Twitter left me rather frustrated for the longest time. I really wondered if I was better off focusing in on Facebook instead – even though my content was regularly getting posted on the platform with no interactivity.
Of course, as you know, Elon Musk took over Twitter and the platform predictably went to shit. Rage farming was boosted, obvious disinformation ran rampant, scams dominated the platform, and bots largely took over a vast majority of all interactivity on the platform. This while people started leaving the platform in droves, leaving only the worst society has to offer or worse.
It was during the second exodus wave that I had finally had enough and joined Mastodon. It was a risk that I uprooted my main social media presence and hopped on to a growing platform, but I did it because I really couldn’t stand Twitter any more.
Thanks to the open source nature of Mastodon, I was able to set up automated sharing of my content. The ability to share posts by making tags hash tags on the platform was absolutely huge for me. Was joining the platform me simply acting on a whim? Perhaps. I really could have focused more on Facebook, but it felt like I was joining in on a major revolution. It marked one of the few times I was ahead of the curve on the social media landscape and I could capitalize on this opportunity.
As I explored further into the world of Mastodon, the word I would use to describe transitioning from Twitter to Mastodon is “relief”. For one, the 24/7 rage farming was no longer a thing. For another, the scams and bots went away very quickly. I had joined the most common reaction of using Mastodon after making the jump from Twitter in noting how much better it was to use the platform for my own mental health. I wasn’t constantly getting irritated by professional paid bullshit artists and bullies that dominate the Twitter platform. While I haven’t really fully utilized the full potential of Mastodon, it was honestly a real treat to use.
Another thing I noticed real quick is the fact that interactivity on Mastodon was so much better on Mastodon than on Twitter. I’ve had multiple moments where my contributions went viral on Mastodon. Were those moments the most viral on the whole platform? No, but people were reacting positively to my positive contributions to the platform. What’s more, they were real people. This as opposed to Twitter where I open up my notifications only to see that the half a dozen likes were all from porn bots.
As time went on, I found myself using Twitter less and less. There’s really only two feeds I check on the platform for users that stubbornly refuse to leave. Once those feeds are checked, I close the window and have little reason to return. Cool things I find lying around on the internet get shared on Mastodon at this point.
What’s more, my Mastodon profile kept growing in popularity as well. As of now, my Mastodon account is currently sitting at 202. That is nearly triple the follow count of X/Twitter which is currently sitting at a comparably small 68 followers. I attribute the loss of users on X/Twitter of people closing their accounts more than anything else.
So, overall, Mastodon has been a much better experience on all angles. The user experience is just way better, the interactivity is of higher quality, and I feel a heck of a lot better just interacting with the platform more.
I know some people out there are going to be asking why I’m not really on Bluesky. The simple reason is that there is no easy way to share articles. Every link would have to be manually re-entered. Right now, I’ve got a long to-do list and adding to it is not going to be good. If there is a way to automatically share posts from a Mastodon account or directly from a WordPress account, I’d probably be using the platform more as well. So, until there is an easy way of sharing my news articles on the platform, I’ll just hang out on Mastodon at this point. Believe me, I would like to also be more active on Bluesky, but the amount of work required to be regularly up to date with what’s going on on my site is just not going to fit on my schedule.
Anyway, my experience on Mastodon has been a very positive one. If you’re on Twitter getting a bad experience, I recommend switching to Mastodon. I don’t regret it and, as far as I’m concerned, you’d be doing yourself a favour as well.
