let's demistify mastodon (and the fediverse) for a second

Y'all may or may not known I'm on Mastodon and have been using it regularly for over a year. I jumped ship from Twitter early, in that very first April when Mush (no I'm not fixing this typo) started... you know. Stuff. And I never went back.

(I also have an older account on another instance (what is an instance? don't worry about it. It doesn't matter.) that I do not remember creating, LOL.

Anyway, when people talk about Mastodon and the fediverse and try to get others into it, I think there's a kind of dissonance that can be a bit off-putting for folks that don't know anything about either. So let's try, for a second, to make it a bit simpler.

First of all, Mastodon isn't that amazing in and of itself; it's not the first creation of the fediverse (what is the fediverse? Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter.) and it won't be the last. It's really just another version of Twitter; you have a limited number of characters when you make a post.

That's it. That's all you need to know.

What that limit is can depend on factors, but unless you care about how high the character-limit is, you don't need to worry about that. (For example, I have a 5k character-limit on my account instead of the default 500 characters.)

You can reblog (ie boost) another persons post. You can lock your own post to follows-only. You can DM people. You can do all the things you can do on Twitter, with the added benefit of blocking entire subcommunities. Which is basically just what an 'instance' is. It's a subcommunity, just like a community on DW but you can block everyone in it all at once. Nice. It will 100% come in handy, because it's absolutely not all sunshine and daises.

When a person sets up a Mastodon instance (which is just a site running the Mastodon source code, like that's all an instance is, let's stop talking about it like it's special or something), they make choices. The only choice that matters for you is what other instances they instance-block. Meaning no interaction between instances.

It's like when one dude is on one side of the road and one dude is on the other side, and one of the dudes decides he dislikes the other dude and cuts the telephone line connecting them. Oops. No more bullshit. How sad.

People who like Mastodon and want others to join in (myself included), get very excited about all the cool stuff you can do on Mastodon and what this means for communities and... nobody cares, let's stop talking that. Mastodon isn't special. You can do that on any other fediverse service, too.

When explaining how the fediverse works, talk about emails get thrown around a lot. Sometimes somebody brings up discord servers, and it's mildly more approachable to some people.

None of that matters. Let's stop pretending it does.

All that this talk about emails and discords and other analogies do, is Other-ify Mastodon and the fediverse by extension. It makes it sound more difficult than it is, sound more complicated, sound more distinct. It's not. It's just a micro-blogging software you can self-host on your computer if you want. And that's very cool and all, but most people looking for alternatives to Twitter and Reddit and whatnot probably don't care about that.

The fediverse is not Mastodon. Mastodon is not the fediverse. That's all you need to know about either.

If Mastodon's design doesn't do it for you, that's cool. There are a gazillion alternative front-ends available as both apps and the web. You don't need to know about them if you don't care about that. Don't like how Mastodon functions at all? There are forks of Mastodon with added functionalities. And you don't need to know jack-shit about them if you don't want to.

Don't like Mastodon at all, but still want to 'connect' (i.e. simply talk to) the fediverse? Hook up with Firefish, Misskey or Akkoma. What are those things? It's micro-blogging software that can talk to other software. Most of the time, that other software is also a blogging software. That's all they are.

Mastodon is just a micro-blogging software.

If you want to give Mastodon or the fediverse at large a try, find a good starter village by asking somebody you know for an instance recommendation, hit up that place, and give it a try. It doesn't need to be complicated. (And bypass mastodon.online and mastodon.social entirely, because they're big (meaning loud and lots of stuff happening at once) and famously poorly moderated.)

(I do actually have recommendations for Cool Instances™.)

Hopefully I've at least somewhat succeeded in making Mastodon seem less special, LOL. (Because when people talk/recommend Mastodon, there is a tendency to talkt about it like it is special and Greater Than All Other Things™ and that's kind of alienating, actually. Like, it's just one of many, and you don't need to worry about any of it unless you want to.)