Mastodon Has One Thing The Others Don't

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So, I didn’t really try to write a click-baity headline for this post. Partially because, usually, when I share what I write, it doesn’t even show a headline. But, you’re probably wondering, “What could Mastodon/the fediverse possibly have that MySpace doesn’t?”

Twitter has fabricated and AI generated misinformation, Threads has influencers in a battle royale to see who can steal the most posts written by normal people, Bluesky has all the bullies from social justice circles who never got anywhere with their quote-tweet dogpiling, and Mastodon has …

Snarky and sarcastic remarks aside, this isn’t really isolated to Mastodon. It’s just that it’s named after Mastodon. But, like all things on the fediverse, it reaches most software connected to it. But that’s not what this post is about. We’re talking about something here that I’ve never really seen outside of Discord channels and chat-rooms.

A community-wide sort of event that happens every Sunday at 9pm eastern standard time.

A cheesy horror or monster movie is chosen, usually from anywhere between the forties, fifties, and sixties (and maybe sometimes the seventies and eighties), and then everyone who wants to, loads up the movie at the aforementioned time, and the fediverse turns into a waterfall of a huge amount of people posting to the #monsterdon hashtag their impressions and witticisms about whatever movie they all happen to be watching in that given week. Jesus, that was a hell of a run-on sentence.

I participated in it once so far, and then every subsequent time its happened since, I forget, and forget, and forget. But I do peek in every once in a while, when it happens, and I’m suddenly reminded that I forgot to participate. And … it’s kind of amazing?

In the past decade, social media has transformed into this thing where people are target searching. They’re looking for someone to dunk, looking for someone to use for engagement and five minutes of fame. Looking for things they hate so that they can react, and reaffirm to their followers that their opinions are the correct and best opinions to have.

In some cases, this is kind of exaggerated and not nearly as bad as it sounds. Taking a stand against injustice is good, even if there are people out there using these things for their own personal gain and fame. But, I’m trying to reinforce that, over all these years, a lot of social media has turned into this negative experience that most of us are heavily addicted to. No matter how bad the car crash, ya just can’t stop looking at it. The mangled metal, the broken glass, it’s like candy for the brain-juice. Uh … or maybe people don’t really look at a car crash like that, but you get what I mean!

And then you stumble into Mastodon, or the fediverse, and every Sunday there’s just people watching a dang movie. They’re not fighting, not spitting bile, just … enjoying something … together! In a fully digital space, where I’m assuming most people don’t even know each other!

It kind of reinforces this idea that the fediverse is the old web, reborn. The social web, resurrected. I definitely would’ve expected to see something like this on MySpace, if that sort of thing would’ve been possible back then. But definitely not on Twitter, or any of those other sites that are less about being social, and more about capital gains. And with all of the definitely bad things happening in the world, it’s just kind of nice to see totally normal and cool things happening. Totally nice things that definitely don’t suck.

I wanted to write this post just to say, keep it up! Let’s do more of this in different ways!