This was a good prompt for me to have a think about how GFSC’s Mastodon server is going. Context is we are a small community tech studio with about 5 employees doing mostly publicly funded community sector work with a bit of charity client work on the side, with a sister discord community. We’ve been running a server since November 2022. We specifically use the Hometown fork.
Pros
- If you’re a founder-director, no more wondering if you should be posting as your studio name or your personal one — a personal one on a work server fulfils both needs and it’s really nice having one central place to organise social media accounts related to your thing.
- As someone doing something pretty niche, we actually get engagement here and simply don’t on Twitter any more. I think this is a combo of Twitter’s algorithm and also simply that the discourse there is much more polarised and angry and on Mastodon people reward original content much more. It’s amusing what a novelty it feels like to be rewarded for posting original content nowadays!
- It’s probably the only place you can share some social media content and know it will work for sharing a link with anyone even not on the platform. Twitter now requires login to do basically anything, instagram looks shit not in the app, etc. It’s more like sharing a blog post.
- Mastodon has a very nice early internet vibe I appreciate where it feels much easier to meet people you have things in common with you don’t already know, rather than just making a bit of an address book of people you do know. It’s the best place to “find your people” now, imo.
- Relatedly, people just feel nicer on here, stuff feels kinder, discourse feels more genuine and constructive.
- It is really really nice being on a service with no ads and no influencers and no sponcon etc. It makes it much less cognitively overwhelming to be on. I think it’s easy to underestimate this, actually.
- It’s also really really nice to have a place for our community and staff to share a space, which is now really changing how we feel about what the work is we’re trying to do, how we do it, what is means to be in community with people, etc. It’s a genuinely transformative way of thinking about what we do that has a fuzzy edge to it in a way I really appreciate. We are working on the next iteration of this as we speak… watch this space :)
- On a personal aesthetic level, it just feels really nice to self host your own social media on your own domain name, in the same way it’s nice to have your own website and not have to use Squarespace or Wix. Professional. Clean.
- Just knowing that nothing is going to change due to a new CEO or corporate takeover or other stock market shenanigans is great. The most tiring things about using third party SaaS is just that any changes to them are out of your control. Open source projects like Mastodon don’t change much, and that’s a good thing.
Cons
- Self hosting is expensive. We initially sorted our own hosting and it was a pain. We outsourced it and it’s now our biggest hosting bill just because we need to get support for it externally, and hourly paid hosting is just expensive. Mastodon server requirements are no joke compared to other things we run.
- It takes a whileeee to get going. Unlike corporate social media, it doesn’t know everything about you when you sign up and suggest adding all your friends, it does take a bit to build up some followers and actually have a point in posting on there.
- If you meet people at work conferences for people in the areas we work, the default ways to connect are Linked In and Twitter. Noone is on Mastodon or even really knows what it is. So if you want to network you need to be on those anyway and you miss out on a lot of networking opportunities there.
- No algorithm at all deffo has some downsides. The person posting 100 times a day gets 100 times more screenspace then the person posting once a day. I also don’t get that tiny flow of classic posts get pushed into my feed like I do on Twitter, it’s not really the space for those perfectly crafted sentences that stick in your head forever.
- Viewing replies is a fucking nightmare, you only see some replies to posts and need to open on original server to see all, then if you want to reply you need to go back and search, etc. Why there is not a “load all replies from original server” option is beyond me. This feels like the most unfinished bit of the whole app to me.
- As a tech used by such a tiny percentage of people, it feels like we haven’t seen the potential exploits yet as no-one is truly trying to exploit it. Periodic stories about it being trawled by AI companies or whatever are not at all reassuring and a lot of the network seems to rely on vibes to keep order. This doesn’t feel good or scalable to me and I’m perennially waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Overall, would I recommend other people set one up? I think it’s a pretty huge It Depends. Some questions that might tip the needle:
- Is tech independence an important thing for your org? It’s a pretty big commitment to set up and run. For us, it is absolutely. I would say that for anyone who is routinely shadow banned or gets a hostile reception on other platforms, it’s probably worth it too. If you’re just a brand looking to get your message out, or a third sector group or charity without a specific tech focus it’s probably not. Basically, where is your audience?
- Do you actually want to spend more time posting on social media and making the connections it can bring? For a local neighbourhood project this is probably no, for a mission-driven interest group it might be yes. Think about where you want to spend your efforts as Mastodon ain’t replacing your need to use mainstream channels for a really long time.
- Do you have the capacity to run something pretty experimental without a clear benefit? Again — we are a tech-focussed R&D studio so that’s a yes. If you’re a large institution that’s already expecting their staff to use 5 different ways to promote things and not actually making time for staff to use it, then maybe don’t just throw another thing on the pile for people to use.
Overall I’m really happy we set up a server and thankful to @honor for pushing us to do it. I’ve got loads out of it, alongside Instagram it’s prob our most successful social media channel, and it’s deffo the one we get the most interaction on. But is it for everyone? Heck no.