Same here, I've been using Mastodon for the past 3 months, and I find practically everything works better than on Twitter. The site loads much faster, and it's

Same here, I've been using Mastodon for the past 3 months, and I find practically everything works better than on Twitter. The site loads much faster, and it's more responsive because it doesn't load trackers and ads to monetize users. 500 char limit actually facilitates having meaningful interactions with people. The column UI layout lets you see the timeline and notifications without having to jump between tabs. Fundamentally, Mastodon is exactly the way social media should work in my opinion. Anybody can run their own instance and configure it any way they like. Since Mastodon is open source and community driven there aren't any VCs driving it, and it doesn't need to monetize to stick around. As long as people want to use Mastodon, it'll continue to thrive. Any features added to the platform are there for the benefit of the users and on one else. I also think that Mastodon happens to be at the right place and at the right time. Hosting has become very affordable nowadays. You can get a DigitalOcean VPN for 5 bucks a month. Docker makes the installation process a breeze, and Let's Encrypt provides free TLS. You can literally spin up an instance in an hour or so. I wrote a short guide here https://github.com/yogthos/cheatsheets/blob/master/mastodon.social.md https://github.com/yogthos/cheatsheets/blob/master/mastodon.... We took a big detour with walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It's time to go back to the original spirit of the internet where anybody can run a server and people can interact with one another on their own terms.