Part 2 – What Mastodon Means for Your Organisation

I’m going to assume that the term “fediverse” isn’t totally unfamiliar, that a mastodon isn’t just an extinct mammal to you and that you know your Pixelfeds from your Peertubes. If that’s the case, and you want to find out what Mastodon could mean for you as an arts, heritage or cultural organisation, read on. If not, you might want to read Part 1 of this blog first.

How is Mastodon different? 

There are three massive differences between Twitter and Mastodon:

• 3 timelines for the price of one
• Keyword search doesn’t work
• The platform is funded differently

The Timelines

On Mastodon, you have 3 timelines rather than one (although, it does depend on the app you use to connect up – for example, on Android, the “official” Mastodon app only shows Home and Local, whereas Tusky shows all three).

Your Home feed is pretty straightforward.

It’s the toots of the people you follow, from oldest to youngest. Simple. No sponsored ads, no “order of relevance”, no “things you might like”. Just the content you asked for, from the people you’re interested in.

Your Local feed is also fairly straightforward.

This is toots from other people on your instance. This is where picking the instance you join is significant – there are general instances (such as mastodon.social or mstdn.social), geographic instances, interest group instances (such as infosec etc) and even corporate instances, where a company runs their own instance for their staff. You can, of course, have more than one account – but each account only has one home instance. And although you can move accounts between instances, you take the people you follow but leave your followers behind.

The confusing one is your Federated feed.

The simple version is, your federated feed is toots from people you might be interested in, based on people around you.

The longer version is, your federated feed is people on your instance, and people on instances people on your instance follow people from.

Eh?!

Well, if I am the only person on mstdn.rob, and I follow Emma on mstdn.emma, I’ll see everyone on mstdn.rob and mstdn.emma. If Gaby joins mstdn.rob, and follows Jonathan on mstdn.jonathan, I’ll see everyone on mstdn.rob, mstdn.emma and mstdn.jonathan.

If that’s still confusing, let’s go back to my earlier definition. People you might be interested in, based on people around you. If you follow lots of people or have joined a big instance, you’ll have a faster feed – if you follow less people and have joined a smaller instance, you’ll have a slower feed.

These multiple timelines mean that there’s less scope to influence who sees your content, other than making it interesting to them! You will also want to boost this “reach” by making sure people are aware of your Mastodon ID

Search

Keyword search doesn’t work on Mastodon, and that’s deliberate.

A lot of the design choices are driven by the perceived drawbacks of Twitter and Facebook, so removing keyword search is a conscious design choice.

You can search for people directly, or search for hashtags. This means you only find toots the community wants you to find – if I want people searching for #heritagerail to find my tweet, I use a hashtag – if I want to discuss heritage rail amongst my followers, I omit the hashtag.

The intention of this is to avoid Twitter-style pile-ons, where someone expresses a controversial opinion and their detractors seek them out. However, it does make promoting your content a much more conscious decision rather than something which happens organically.

Platform Funding

Each instance is funded independently, either privately or through contributions from the community. This means that Mastodon’s relationship with companies and organisations is very different.

On Twitter and Facebook, as an organisation, you’re either an advertiser or a potential advertiser. So these platforms seek to make themselves attractive to you. On Mastodon, the platform is less interested, because it doesn’t stand to benefit from you financially – it will benefit if you’re an effective part of the community, and not if you’re not. For example, see this discussion from 2019. https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/business-accounts/1670/15

This means that unless you’re a major NGO, the platform probably isn’t interested in your corporate profile and advertising-copywriter toots – personal accounts of members of your organisation are much more highly valued.

This necessitates a totally different way of thinking – rather than the Marketing Department crafting a compelling Twitter feed which ties in with other campaigns, the Marketing team will be more effective facilitating, encouraging and curating the activity of a broader group of people in your organisation, contributing to your marketing goals with authentic tone of voice, content and style.

If you want more of a corporate identity, you can run your own Mastodon instance, meaning your users will be @joebloggs@myartsorg.com. But don’t forget, your reach depends on the people you interact with – so in order for your message to reach people on Mastodon, you need to both interact with (and attract the interest of) people on other instances. Unless you have a particularly large team, you may find it more beneficial for your users to be active on other relevant instances rather than running your own instance.

One Huge Caveat

Direct messages… There’s a couple of massive “gotchas” hiding in direct messages.

1. Your instance mods and admins can read your DMs. And so can the recipient’s instance mods and admins. Most will have a privacy policy expressing the responsible way they’ll exercise that power – for example, to investigate harassment or abuse – but if you’re sending something really sensitive, you might want to steer clear of Mastodon DMs
2. If you @mention someone in a DM, they’re invited into the conversation. So, if you want to slag your boss off to your mate, either don’t mention their @handle, or better still do it by text. Otherwise, the water cooler tomorrow will be veeeery uncomfortable

So let’s bring that all together…

If Mastodon continues to grow, how do you make Mastodon a success for your organisation?

My tips are:

• Think about your instance carefully – do you want to host your own, for a large, recognisable staff team? Or should you join one of local or sector relevance?
• If you’re looking for an instance to join, we at PatronBase have launched arts.social – we’re targeting this instance particularly towards those in or interested in arts, culture or heritage
• Promote your Mastodon ID through other channels, to grow your reach
• Use #hashtags to promote any content you want people to search for – if it’s not a #hashtag, it can’t be searched
• Follow trends in hashtags – if noone’s searching, no one will find you
• Make the shift from crafting your corporate feed, to facilitating, encouraging and curating your wider team
• Out of abundance of caution, only say in DMs what you wouldn’t mind saying in public

Above all – enjoy. When we started out on social media, it was all intended to be, well, social. Somewhere along the way, we lost the social and it turned into an angry advertising hell. Mastodon is an opportunity to have a go at doing it differently, so get stuck in!