I’ve been on Mastodon for a couple weeks now, and it doesn’t take long to learn the culture between Mastodon and Twitter is different. You learn that pretty much as soon as you choose your instance and sign up.

There are loads of posts telling you that Mastodon is not Twitter. The biggest difference I’ve found is the cultivation of accessibility. Accessibility on Mastodon is just good etiquette.

Content Warnings aren’t something people look down on. It’s considered polite and good etiquette to use them for anything that may be triggering and that includes for politics. Some use it to give people the choice to opt out interacting with anything they don’t want to interact with like self-promotion.

Self-promotion, while completely fine, is not the point of Mastodon.  Engagement is. In that regard I find Mastodon refreshing. How much of your feed was filled up with promotions for books whether from the actual author or in retweets? How much of it was scheduled and you could tell because it was the same post from the other day, but not a retweet?

I hated that. I had zero problems with going, ‘hey! This awesome person has a new book. Check it out!’ but the ones that had zero human input except for when it was initially written MONTHS ago? Yeah, those bugged me.

I love that engagement is the focus of Mastodon. I’ve had some genuine conversations with people, and it’s exciting? I think the increased character limit does aid in that, but also, I am curious how much of that engagement is down to how new and shiny the platform is for people.

Alt text on photos is expected to make the site accessible to those with vision problems. That’s fucking brilliant! I struggle writing the alt text, but I think that’s just because I’m not sure how much detail to go into. I imagine with time and practice I’ll get better at it.

Making hashtags friendly for screen readers. How do you do that? If there are multiple words in the hashtag, capitalise the first letter of each word. #AmWriting or #WhatTheFuckMusk is easier for the technology to parse out the different words.

Everything just feels different. On Twitter, content warnings and alt text were seen as problems for other people to deal with, and not just good manners. It also felt like people were looking for a reason to be angry, or seeking outposts to create chaos or harm on, but it doesn’t feel like that on Mastodon.

I’ll genuinely feel sad if that changes, but at the same time when people want another Twitter they will try to recreate what they enjoyed about it in the nearest adjacent. But I hope, I desperately hope that those voices won’t be held up and Mastodon can be its own thing.

Further to this, there is no quote retweet. There are ways around that, but there’s some who think doing that takes away from the initial post in that it’s drawing attention away from it and centring it upon your thoughts and ideas.

There is no algorithm. What does this mean? You see things as they’re posted. What’s popular will be what the people you follow boost. You can see things outside your instance, and you can now follow hashtags.

And one of the most important things to note?

DMs are not private. Not even a little bit.

The other important thing to note is that the servers are owned by individuals. If you like your server, and you can help, consider donating to the running and upkeep of the servers.

Oh, and don’t worry if you’re still spelling Mastodon wrongly. I am too.

If you’re new to Mastodon, too, what is it about the platform you like the most?

(and maybe consider giving me a follow?)