Social media platform review: Mastodon and its instances

It occurred to me that I'm on four different platforms since Nipplegate and interpersonal drama led me to cut back on Tumblr use, six if you count different Mastodon instances as different platforms (and I think they do in some senses, for reasons that I'll explain). I've seen people discussing platform fatigue post-Tumblr and confusion about which platform to use for what purposes, so I thought it might be useful to discuss my usage of and experiences with these platforms. I'm not providing definitive answers for anyone else, obviously. I'm not even giving definitive answers for me because my usage patterns will no doubt change in the future, but it may serve as a reference point and snapshot.

Current and future posts in this series are:

• Mastodon and its instances
• Tumblr trouble
• Living the Dreamwidth
• Snoozing on Pillowfort

The first post is about Mastodon, the open-source Twitter analogue.

Summary of platform: Open-source and decentralized microblogging codebase

Platform usage: Short updates and impressions; discussions and conversations with people I'm connected to

Instance directories: Scroll to the bottom of the official site, or try this instance finder (updated 1/29/2019, thanks enchantedsleeper for the question)

( How I use it, how I feel about it )