I think the jury is still out when it comes to Mastodon.
I was / am not a big Twitter user by any stretch of the imagination and I certainly think the sign up process / onboarding for Mastodon is terrible but I think with it gaining traction in the mainstream media improvements will come quickly.
One thing to like about Mastodon is that it is possible to own your data much more comprehensively (albeit that is only going to apply to a small minority of nerds).
Apps like Ivory greatly simplify Mastodon and make it feel much more like Twitter so it will be interesting to see how things progress when that comes out of beta.
I’m experimenting with it. Picking a server seems to bewilder non-technical people. It’s not a very consequential decision if you’re picking a server that has a fair number of users and has been around a few years (from what I can tell, migrating to a different server is not a push-button operation). From there I set the various configuration options so it’s more twitter-like. For example the default is to continually refresh and in the federated view things keep scrolling out of view. So I set it to refresh upon request only.
I don’t want to enrich the coffers of the Twitter assclown, but then again, I wasn’t that committed to it in the first place. I used Twitter mainly as news aggregator and to follow a few informative accounts such as virologists posting about the pandemic, etc. I am finding acceptable alternative sources (sometimes the same ones) on Mastodon. I have to block a lot more on Mastodon, paradoxically. People posting manga porn, things like that. Somewhere there’s a setting where you can filter for just English posts but some Japanese ones leak through anyway and I block those just to reduce clutter.
As many people, I’m a reader, not a publisher/poster. I go were people are, I read what the mainstream outlets of information publishes. Such place, currently, is not Mastodon.
Find some important tech company or tech news page, scroll to where they show their “social” [follow us] links, and you find icons like:
See? No
“Elephants”.
That’s why I won’t move. Nothing political or personal taste involved.
Mine is @tekcor@mastodon.social. I don’t really use it yet for the same reasons already listed: there just aren’t enough accounts I want to follow. I’m ready to make the switch, but it’s not time.