Why I left Mastodon

​​It’s not click bait: I left Mastodon last month. But it’s also kind of clickbait, because you can still follow me there.

Is that confusing? A friend of mine, also a tech journalist, recently told me it is, so I thought I’d try to explain.

One of the nice things about Mastodon, and social networks like it, is that your followers can still follow you after you switch platforms. So a couple of weeks ago I did just that—I redirected my 6000 or so followers from Mastodon over to my website.

I joined Mastodon in 2018, but didn’t really start using it until 2022. That’s when I abandoned Twitter and wrote a WIRED article that served as an introduction to the then-growing ecosystem. I’m still proud of that piece, which incidentally is probably the main reason I have a healthy following on Mastodon today.

Or, at least, why I used to have a healthy following on Mastodon. A while ago I turned my website into a private social media network, meaning anyone with a Bluesky or Mastodon account can follow this site directly. For a while I was boosting these posts from my Mastodon account, but I got sick of doing that.

So I migrated my followers. It’s been glitchy, but I expected that. I’m guessing there aren’t many people who have attempted to forward thousands of followers from Mastodon over to a self-hosted WordPress site. Around 4000 followers have made the transition, leaving 2000 or so stuck on my old Mastodon account. I intend to try re-starting the migration in a couple weeks—the rest should make it over then.

For the most part, though, I’ve been posting the way I used to. I write longform posts like this one, I link to my articles on other sites, and I make the occasional joke. People using Mastodon can keep interacting the way they always have, but so can people on any other service using the Activitypub protocol.

This is how the entire internet could work, by the way. Imagine if anyone tired of Twitter could move to Bluesky without their followers even noticing a difference; if anyone sick of posting videos on Instagram could move over to YouTube and their followers would still see them all. The only reason the internet doesn’t work this way is companies don’t want to lose control of their platforms and governments aren’t forcing them to compete.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the fact that my website—which I control—is my biggest platform. I’m glad you’re here for the ride.