James PoniewozikA lot of Mastodon advice I’m seeing seems to be geared toward “How to replicate your Twitter experience” or “Can Mastodon replicate your Twitter experience?”
But… I don’t WANT to replicate my Twitter experience. 1/more
My Twitter experience was kinda bad for me! It was good for a long time, but it was also bad. I’m not talking about the takeover by Captain 420, or people tweeting mean things at me. I mean the constantly feeling like a exposed nerve. The “let me show you this awesome new thing to be mad about!”
I love, for instance, that Mastodon doesn’t have the equivalent of a QT. There are plenty other platforms to do the “Hey, look at this asshole here” thing. The, “Does this smell bad to you?” thing. /2
And I’m happy with having fewer followers. No offense to my Twitter followers! But if you were around long enough and built enough numbers, you had a lot of followers who really shouldn’t be following you. People who followed you for, like, one snarky tweet you wrote in 2015, and then you spent the next seven years disappointing them by doing something else. /3
I get that people might miss Twitter’s influence. But that obviously had costs too. One of those was convincing so many people that they were every day engaged in a giant tug of war over The Discourse, and that every tweet of theirs—and everyone in their feed—should be aimed at moving that rope three millimeters in the correct direction.
I don’t deny social media’s power to make change. But I’m one culture critic spouting opinions. I am not organizing the friggin Arab Spring over here. /4
Anyway, I don’t know if I’m going to use this site much. I’m trying to unplug more generally. (Also: I’m still on Twitter, just using it less.) Maybe this is just methadone for Twitter. Methadon.
But I would love this to be a smaller, more positive, less brain-poisoning experience. And that may not be possible! Maybe many of the problems I had with Twitter were in fact Me Problems, and I packed them in my luggage with me. Let’s find out! /end
bedbathbegone@poniewozik totally get this. For the first few hours, I found myself trying to seek out my TL on mastodon - but then stopped. Why would I want to recreate the exact same experience? Now moving slowly, trying to feel out where/what I want out here.
@bedbathbegone Yeah, I think about when I started with Twitter in 2009. I spent a couple months just lurking the timelines of people I knew before I even started an account. I'm sure it took months to really fill out my follow list. I don't want some instant replacement that just self-inflates out of the box like a Casper Mattress.
Malin 
@poniewozik I feel the exact same way, it’s actually quite frightening how much my mental health have improved since I moved away from Twitter. I’m liking this smaller space so much more!
Clive ThompsonI'm just stumbling across this thread now, but I agree
For me, the thing I like is that it has far less of the massive-group-flocking-attention thing you see on Twitter
I'd rather just have conversations with interesting randos, to whom I am a hopefully interesting rando
I don't feel the slightest need to know what microzeitgeist is being hallucinated into existence by the sudden joint attention of 100 million people
Marcus@poniewozik @clive Twitter felt like a treadmill to me, but I didn’t realize it until I left.
@clive Yes, that exactly. And I just think it's better for me to spend more of the day without the ambient presence of the entire world in my head!
Heh yes that too
Liz Gumbinner@poniewozik that’s a fantastic way to put it.
(I am being a bit hyperbolic here I realize ...
It's not that I don't have "the slightest interest" -- I'm as intrigued as the next person by what big joint-attention public conversations are going on ...
It's just that Twitter's design led to a constant *waterfall* of 'em ... too much to find pleasant in any way)
Maxi 12x 💉@clive I love the word "microzeitgeist"!
Robert Stribley@poniewozik The methadone for Twitter really resonates for me. Plus if more people wean themselves off Twitter, even partly, that creates more competition among platforms and reduces revenue for Twitter under Elon. This has been my approach for Facebook, which also, I believe, provides valuable space for certain communities though at the same time I don’t want to support it heartily.
TheGentYYC@poniewozik Great thread man
Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾@poniewozik you echo my thoughts!
Flying Yogini 
@poniewozik agree with this! Ditto people you followed.
@flyingyogini Yes! I think a couple of myths of Twitter that I want to avoid applying here is 1) It is always better to have as many followers as possible and 2) It is an insult/attack to unfollow somebody.
@poniewozik agree wholeheartedly. esp b/c so many of those masses of followers were not even real people. Less is more indeed
Chatty Kathy
Anthony M. Abboreno, PhD@Chattykathy @poniewozik Twitter always felt like a rolling anxiety attack to me, for that reason, and I never liked using it. This is better so far. I’m hoping the honeymoon lasts!
@aabboreno @poniewozik
So true...
When musk took over, I knew I would leave...
As long as there are decent people here, I will enoy..
😍
So true...
When musk took over, I knew I would leave...
As long as there are decent people here, I will enoy..
😍
Dave Nemetz@poniewozik Ha! Yes! 1800 followers there, and I regularly interacted with about 25 of them.
JDHeyman@poniewozik We are tired of
platforms that make us feel like we are wearing our skin inside out. Even when it's momentarily good, it's not good for us...
platforms that make us feel like we are wearing our skin inside out. Even when it's momentarily good, it's not good for us...
Alan Sepinwall@poniewozik The lack of QT is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I'm entirely with you that too many of my Twitter follows would use it to put stuff in my timeline just designed to upset me. On the other, I used it a lot to more easily discuss things that are on-topic to what I cover, and what people presumably were following me for.
@sepinwall So far I haven't found it much of a limitation. I can still use links. But it does force me to think about what kinds of posts I want to dfo here. I do think the McLuhan principle applies, if you reproduce the same functionality as Twitter, you'll get Twitter.
Aliakai@sepinwall @poniewozik I read a study recently that when toxic behavior was effectively curbed, users spent 25% less time on platforms, which is HUGE when it comes to the economics of advertising dollars and the like. This explains the seeming contradiction between the hard on paper policies against abuse and the promotion by the algorithm of inflammatory material.
Adrian Morales@poniewozik Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are driven by ads and algorithms. "Hey, look at this! Now look at that!" is how they manage to turn their users into products that they can monetize.
Ben Rosengart@poniewozik @Npars01 This is the platform where I want to say, “hey, look at this neat thing,” or, “I want to go on a tangent from this,” or, “I want to share this and add some context.”
Just because you can’t think of anything more interesting to do with a QT than dunk on someone, doesn’t mean thousands of people don’t use it every day in cool and constructive ways.