Mastodon Makes It Easier for Beginners to Get Started

Twitter refugees should have an easier time getting started at Mastodon and will find fewer missing Twitter features on the distributed microblogging service, thanks to changes announced(Opens in a new window) Monday by the German nonprofit that develops Mastodon’s open-source code. 

“We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing,” founder and CEO Eugen Rochko says. “This is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same.”

So instead of presenting a long list of servers(Opens in a new window) and telling newcomers to pick one out of thousands(Opens in a new window) in Mastodon’s federated archipelago before creating an account, the joinmastodon.org site will steer new users to the mastodon.social server(Opens in a new window) run by the same company.

Rochko’s Monday post describes this new default as “now” available, but as of Tuesday afternoon, the site still showed the usual list of servers.

Adding ‘Most Requested Features’

In that post, he also says Mastodon will oblige requests for equivalents to Twitter’s quote-tweet and search features. Those tools remain officially unsupported (back in 2018, Rochko posted(Opens in a new window) that a quoting feature “inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviors”), although some third-party Mastodon apps support quote-posting. 

“We’re always listening to the community and we’re excited to bring you some of the most requested features, such as quote posts, improved content and profile search, and groups,” he writes. “We’re also continuously working on improving content and profile discovery, onboarding, and of course our extensive set of moderation tools, as well as removing friction from decentralized features.”

Those feature additions come weeks after the limited opening of another decentralized Twitter alternative called Bluesky(Opens in a new window), developed by a company spun out of Twitter after being launched in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. 

Bluesky is built on an open, federated protocol like Mastodon, but it looks and feels much more like Twitter, including support for quoting posts and full-text search. Some of Twitter’s most high-profile users, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) have shown up on Bluesky.

Mastodon, however, remains far larger than the still invite-only Bluesky. Rochko’s post notes that Mastodon “just surpassed a billion posts per month,” while automated third-party counts of Mastodon accounts now show this network has more than 11.5 million users(Opens in a new window). 

Twitter, meanwhile, reported 237.8 million “daily monetizable users” in mid-2022 in its last filing (Opens in a new window)as a publicly traded company. After Elon Musk took over Twitter on Oct. 28, he tweeted(Opens in a new window) that his new property had reached 259.4 million “daily active users,” but does not seem to have shared new numbers since. 

It’s unclear what Musk’s chaotic stewardship of Twitter has done to user engagement since, but Musk’s efforts to extract revenue from previously free features have clearly been driving away many commercial users. 

One of the biggest yet announced its exit on Saturday. Automattic, the developer of the WordPress content-management system used on an estimated 43% of websites worldwide(Opens in a new window), said it would drop support for automatic sharing of new posts on Twitter effective Monday. (I publish my own blog(Opens in a new window) on Automattic’s WordPress.com but did not have Twitter auto-sharing enabled.)

The San Francisco firm cited the same reason that led New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency to stop providing real-time service alerts on Twitter: a steep increase in the cost to use its API. “The cost increase is prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don’t see that as an option,” Automattic says(Opens in a new window).

WordPress users will have additional sharing options in the near future, the post continues: “we’re adding Instagram and Mastodon very soon.”