Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which I’m here to say not only offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives, but also that the alternatives are fatally flawed. By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly (but not all) running the Mastodon software, that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol. Now I’ll try to convince you to start using one of them. [I posted an earlier version of this essay called Time To Migrate last year, but enough things have changed that it’s worthwhile revising and reposting.] Start at joinmastodon.org The simplest argument Have you noticed that social-media products, in the long term, seem inevitably to enshittify? I have. But there’s a major exception, a tool that’s been serving billions of us for decades, and works about as well as it…