I know talking about one social media site on another is a little tired, but I think Mastodon is an important development in online social networks and I'd like to take a few tweets to discuss why
It's easy to notice the features that Mastodon brings back from twitter-of-old - no ads, chronological timeline, functional web interface - and yes, it's nice to have those back. But Mastodon has some more important features that Twitter never had
Every post can be given a "Content Warning", which hides the post behind a "show more" button labeling its contents. (Similar to LJ-cut from livejournal). This is a simple thing that makes for a *much* friendlier timeline
CWs help posters be friendlier to each other - to help each other avoid trauma triggers, to tag spoilers for TV shows, to give readers control over things that make them angry or sad. CW'd posts allow for sensitive conversation with less collateral damage
Similarly, Mastodon encourages users to write descriptions for images and shows those descriptions to all users as hover text. This is a huge accessibility gain for blind and low-vision people and a convenience for everyone browsing thumbnails 
Both Content Warnings and Image Descriptions are examples of how Accessibility Is For Everyone - designing with accessibility in mind doesn't just help people with disabilities, it makes our environment more pleasant and usable by everybody
blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-desig…
blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-desig…
One thing about Mastodon I've glossed over so far is that it's designed for "federation". The details get hairy, but in its basics it's just like a federated system most of use every day: Email
Many people have Email accounts at GMail or Yahoo, some with their employer, some with their ISP, some nerds pay for Email hosting or run their own mail servers. And yet they can all talk to each other! Just by knowing each other's email address!
It's the same with Mastodon - I'm at mspsocial.net, but you can read my posts and interact from many other "instances". This seems overly geeky, but there's beauty in it. Communities can form around many axes and self-govern without cutting themselves off
I like MSPSocial because the "local" timeline includes lots of folks who live near me and share interests. The rules and norms of etiquette are easy to discover and match what I want in a social network.
This is huge for communities that face persecution or harassment, but any community benefits by coming to an agreement on what their goals are, and by extension who is or is-not welcome in a particular space.
And make no mistake, there's no such thing as a social network "for everyone". Every social space makes (explicit or implicit) decisions on who is welcome and who is not: Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Twitter has naively insisted that they don't discriminate against any political views, but this is self-defeating: White supremacy is a political view. So is transphobia, holocaust denialism, etc. A space cannot be welcoming to (e.g.) both Nazis and Jews.
Mastodon starts from a much more realist point of view: Instances can set their own rules and norms, users can choose an instance with rules and norms they find agreeable. That is a powerful foundation, I think, for a better online world
As of right now, the entire universe of connected Mastodon instances is teensy tiny compared to Twitter. But all the same, I've found many interesting voices that I may have missed on Twitter due to rampant harassment and overall noise.
All of this is to say that I find myself choosing to devote more attention to MSPSocial/Mastodon and less to commercial social networks. It's an experiment in progress, but for now I'm putting my best stuff there. mspsocial.net/@firewally
If I've piqued your interest here, I ask that you sign up for a Mastodon account and give it a whirl. See if you like it, save it as an escape hatch for when Twitter gets just a little bit more shitty and stressful. mspsocial.net/invite/HwMAR2Th
