I joined Mastodon in the early wave when the rumours of Twitter going to be brought by Elon Musk were first touted. I was also one of those people who is disillusioned with the large social media sites. Twitter was originally my home.
I followed small communities where I occasionally interacted with other people but it was mostly a solitary existence doom scrolling and my posts just got lost in the echo chamber as I wasn’t making the effort to stand out and perform like a seal for attention.
I was looking for something different but also somewhere to go when Twitter went bad. I don’t classify myself as a Twitter refugee because I was always on the outside. I was actually on a journey to find my people. If you are reading this then you are my people. I also used Twitter to follow news updates, and follow a few famous people who always had something to promote whether it be a book, movie or TV show.
Like most people, I found Mastodon while searching online for that something new. It was a replacement for Twitter in my mind because that’s all I could relate it to at the time. I discovered Mastodon after reading a post on Reddit. I visited the Mastodon website and wanted to explore more. Like everyone I went through the trials of what server should I pick, you think I don’t want to get this wrong.
I searched through the overwhelming lists of servers called instances. You had to make your choice based on a short bit of blurb describing each server. These blurbs didn’t tell you much it was more based on I think this one sounds closest to where I might fit. I picked the one which interested me most a small German / English instance called Nerd Culture.de despite not speaking German I thought how bad can it be? I signed up and at that moment I had become a Mastronuaght (an explorer of the Fediverse) or into this sophisticated internet fox, you know today.
When I first logged in I had that usual overwhelming experience of learning a new set of terminology.
What is Mastodon?
What is the Fediverse?
What is a Toot?
How do I Toot?
What is a Boost?
So I find myself not an early Mastodon adopter but here earlier than the massive hordes of people that followed after this sophisticated fox. So when I first logged into Mastodon it seemed very quiet. Posts which I later learnt were called Toots appeared sporadically and there was very little movement in the timelines. What I did find in the main federated feed was a lot of artistic porn.
I made my first cringe-worthy Toot: spelling mistakes and all which I had to fix for this post otherwise id drive myself mad.
“Why does the first post on any new social platform always feel like it should be something profound? I’m new to this mastodon thing who would you recommend following?”
So I had just tooted now what?
Nothing happened my first Toot even to this day had no responses. Was I shouting into another empty echo?
I boosted a few Toots. I logged out and didn’t return for a couple of days. I went back to Twitter. I found I had been trained by the Big Social Media sites to seek the dopamine hit from doom scrolling which I wasn’t getting from Mastodon. This doom scrolling wasn’t making me happy if anything it was hurting my mental health. Everything on Twitter was negative or reactionary just to gain attention, what we were seeing was making us angry or stressed or both. It was turning us into monsters. It was the general election in the UK at the time and Twitter was getting particularly spiteful.
I logged back into Mastodon and I found it was a calm place nobody was attacking each other for their beliefs. There was discussion but also a lot of people who were not in the UK so not talking about UK politics. I wasn’t being force-fed content by an algorithm.
I followed a few people and watched as people had conversations and replied to each other’s Toots. This wasn’t a shouting platform to be heard the was a community of people. I posted a few times and still got no responses. So I went out into the timeline and started conversations with other people it was scary at first but now I have a collection of people who I read and reply to in my timelines regularly.
I found that the number of followers doesn’t matter here, it is more about connections with other people, sometimes the connections are fleeting and sometimes they are the beginnings of friendship. I discovered the best way to be on Mastodon is just to be a person/fox, and to show some personality and the rest will come in time.
What I didn’t expect was my mental health improved and now I have discussions and conversations with real people around the world. I no longer just consume content and mindless doom scroll I actively interact and maybe just rejoin the human race.
CyclopsFox 