Today I pinned a tweet to my Twitter timeline that announced I’ve reduced my account to promotional information. In other words, I’ve left Twitter in favor of Mastodon and Counter.Social (@paul_e_cooley)
In truth, I left Twitter a long time ago, long before I left Facebook and all the other Meta subsidiaries. Twitter stopped being interesting when all the fiction folk deserted it, when the readers I so often interacted with moved on to greener pastures, before everything became angry, political, and insane.
As more and more of the online friends and readers I’d cultivated since 2009 disappeared from the platform, it became less and less useful, ultimately becoming a sad, ridiculously polarized cesspool that made finding meaningful content all but impossible. Not to be a snob, but the average user that joined after 2014 more or less ruined the place. Hasn’t been the same since.
I’d planned on leaving Twitter this year even before the recent purchase and etc. I just didn’t know where else to go apart from Mastodon, and that place made no sense and was a barren ghost town.
Once Twitter and Musk announced the legal wrangling was over, I went ahead and got back into Mastodon and tried to learn how the damned thing worked. Turns out, it works so much better than either Meta’s monsters or Twitter.
Facebook, Twitter, and even Google’s offerings like YouTube, were useful tools to connect with folks that shared your interests. It worked for a long time until…MONEY. The advertising mechanisms that Twitter, Google, Amazon, Meta, and etc use are not monitored for bad actors. They are not fact checked, they are not questioned, they just are. Sold to the highest bidder without issue until someone complains or the SEC, FTC, FDA steps in. By then? Far too late.
But that’s just one problem. Another problem is that in order to make money, these social media constructs have to drive you to content. And what content is better than that which enrages you? Or misinforms you? Or straight up lies to you? Goebbels would be so proud and probably is.
As we’ve seen the past couple of years, selling advertising is a diminishing return. The only way you can entice more advertising money is through user growth, content growth, and metrics convincing companies to spend on the platform. The problem with that model is that it is brutally finite. The moment you begin hemorrhaging users, it all falls apart. If you couple that with a change in user mindset, you’ll either find a new economic model or go bankrupt.
I am one of the former consumers of so-called advertising driven content. But no more. The algorithms are dead to me and I couldn’t be happier about that.
Mastodon, and its petulant, lovable offspring known as counter.social or CoSo, do not have algorithms. The user is responsible for finding the accounts they want to follow, to search for tagged content, media that contains actual descriptions, and folks to speak with. If I type in the hashtag #writingCommunity on mastodon or CoSo, I get a ton of folks talking about writing. They’re not all hawking their works, but actually having conversations. Unlike twitter, trolls are not welcome.
The Mastodon/CoSo ecosystems are quite different from Twitter. Without an algorithm to drive traffic to me, and without disinformation and rabid insanity fouling up my timeline, it’s easier to find the content I want. Someone posts something I consistently don’t want to see? Like nothing but RTs from Twitter? Mute ’em. Never see their shit again. Yes, twitter can do that, too, but how many people actually did it?
The community admins police the fediverse. Whatever server you join in the Mastodon Fediverse (a decentralized web of Mastodon servers that communicate with one another), an admin can read your posts. Period. Unless you’re running your own instance, there are no false assurances your data is private because it’s NOT. That changes things quite a bit, doesn’t it?
The expectation that you ever owned your data in any capacity was the largest delusion big tech ever convinced the public of. Any “free” service has gotchas that inevitably make it cost more than you think. Mastodon and counter.social are, in many ways, the cure for this.
It’s free, so how does it keep functioning? The community funds it. Mastodon has a patreon, many server instances out there have tip jars, subscriptions, and the like. CoSo does that as well, giving you premium features for $4.99 a month. Interesting concept. You pay the server admins to do their jobs rather than rely upon shadowy, digital backroom advertising deals for revenue.
But is it social media?
Absolutely. Remove the algorithm, the ridiculous inconsistencies of account blocks and locks, and you get an ecosystem that is social media before it became a toxic cesspool. Don’t get me wrong—it’s no panacea. There will still be bad actors, still be fights among folks that just can’t agree to not to talk to one another, and there are always scammers trying to sell you shit. But that’s true of walking into a damned bar, let alone a digital public square.
When you compare Mastodon to its CoSo offspring, it becomes clear that Mastodon is the free-for-fall-ish of the alternative ecosystems. Counter.Social, on the other hand, blocks all IP addresses from certain countries accused of bot-ing and misinformation. This includes North Korea, Russia, and several others. The result is that Counter.social is an island somewhat detached from the Mastodon network that has very different rules.
In both cases, advertising is absent, there’s no algorithm at work, and it’s much more sane. Thus far, I’m quite impressed with both. That said, remember it’s early days yet.
So that’s where I am and where I’ve ended up. If you want to give Mastodon or Counter.Social a try, please please please do not expect it to work like Meta products (Facebook, instagram, etc) or Twitter. Read the docs. Read the tips. Get to know your server before you render judgement on anything. Give it a chance and you might be quite pleasantly surprised. I know I have been.