Right now, the great #TwitterMigration to Mastodon is in full flood. The initial trickle of migrants when Elon Musk first indicated he was going to acquire Twitter surged when he finally followed through, sacked a large proportion of staff and contract workers, turned off various microservices including SMS two-factor authentication (accidentally or otherwise), and announced that Twitter might go bankrupt. Growing numbers of archaeologists opened accounts on Mastodon, and even a specific archaeology-focussed instance (server) was created at archaeo.social by Joe Roe.
Something most Twitter migrants experienced on first encounter with Mastodon was that it worked in a manner that was just different enough from Twitter to be somewhat disconcerting. This was nothing to do with tweets being called ‘toots’ (recently changed to posts following the influx of new users), or retweets being called ‘boosts’, or the absence of a direct equivalent to quote tweets. It had a lot to do with the federated model with its host of different instances serving different communities which meant that the first decision for any new user was which server to sign up with, and many struggled with this after the centralised models of Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram etc.) though older hands welcomed it as a reminder of how the internet used to be. It also had a lot to do with the feeds (be they Home, Local, or Federated) no longer being determined by algorithms that automatically promoted tweets but simply presenting posts in reverse chronological order. And it had to do with anti-harassment features that meant you could only find people on Mastodon if you knew their username and server, and the inability to search text other than hashtags. These were deliberately built into Mastodon, together with other, perhaps more obviously, useful features like Content Warnings on text and Sensitive Content on images, and simple alt-text handling for images.
