Well it’s been a couple of months and I must admit that I like Mastodon better than Twitter. That said, for me, it’s not as good. I say that with a great deal of hesitancy because there are many ways in which it is superior. However, it is the sheer size of the user base which separates the two.
Mastodon has a dedicated and committed community and they genuinely believe in the platform. Twitter has more users and as a result there is more for the individual to choose from and that, in the end, makes Twitter the winner.
Mastodon has two major faults. The first is it relies on individuals to establish and run instances (individual servers that are part of the Mastodon whole). Those individuals pay out of pocket to run those instances and invariably ask for donations for support. If that is successful, instances flourish, if it isn’t, well you see the problem.
When I joined Mastodon my goal was to turn it into a news feed. I was generally successful; however, what was really true was that a particular Mastodon user had created a number of “bots” ( accounts which rebroadcast content from other sources) to do that job. So the truth is that many news organizations have not committed to Mastodon and that some of what was available was subject to the largess of a particular person. Again, you see the problem.
I still believe that Mastodon has great promise but for me an open source RSS reader has replaced Mastodon as my news feed.
