TLDR: Mastodon is very white, male, status quo, global north, and designed in a way to limit its potential for use in social movements.

Mastodon feels very different from Twitter, deliberately. It is truly like Live Journal. It is about people who are happy with their social circle and who think of virality and discoverability as a problem. They just want to communicate with the people they know, and limit other things. Ironically, it is more like a private gathering than a public space.

In this episode of #OnTheMedia where a senior Mastodon community member says basically that they limited things that caused virality because they thought that was one of the worst things about Twitter, and then kinda shrugs when he says something like "Of course, that means that Mastodon couldn't have supported social movements like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter." He also concedes that Black Twitter folk have been made to feel unwelcome, but ... eh.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-mastodon-may-take-twitters-weary

Basically he was smug and entirely uninterested in the use of social media for social change, and was happy to jetison it all. He compared Mastodon to his private BB with guitar nerds where anything you wrote was read by 100 people and that was fine.

Mastodon does have a history of being Queer friendly (one app even asked me if I wanted to join an instance which was for Furries) but that gets used as a shield when people point out how unfriendly these spaces are to lots of other people. Heck, I saw parts of Black Twitter return to Twitter and say they would rather deal with the Nazis where they had community than stick around on Mastodon. It also does have decentralized moderation which makes it easier to ban Nazis.

What it lacks is the ability to Quote Tweet, that is to add your own comments to what somebody may have said, which is often used in social mobilizing. It also doesn't have full text search. This was all done intentionally. But as a result, it's much harder to reach out of your networks to other people. I used Twitter to follow multiple social movements, as well as to learn about people in other countries. Mastodon isn't useful for any of that. And it doesn't want to be.

So I'm here. But even though my friends are awesome, I don't have any new ones I've made on Mastodon (unlike Twitter), and it is overall pretty boring and unlike Twitter it makes building a network feel like work. At the same time, it is of much less use for work. I have almost no Africa network, I have little interaction with journalists, and because the network is more closed, I learn less.

Whatever. It's fine but it's not a substitute for Twitter at all.

@naunihal Twitter has a ton of uses and claiming that virality of messages is necessary _and_ useful for social/political activism is a bold claim.
I would argue, that that the central function of social media is forming groups and this can be very useful for activists as well. The discoverability of Mastodon is different, but certainly exists with local timeline, federated timeline and following hashtags.

@naunihal yes, mastodon is predominantly white, European/American, and male. Like every other social network that made it to global scale has been in the beginning.
No, I am not happy about this, but I don't think one should blame mastodon for starting with a similar population like Twitter did.

@naunihal the lack of "quote toots" is such a strange complain to be so frequent. Quotes are just links to toots, and of cause you can link to posts here as well, as for you can in any other social network. How it is displayed is up to your client, but mine already shows it in a similar way to the quoted tweets of the Birdsite.

@mxk I'm on the web browser and it just shows the URL. That seems to be what happens to most people.

@naunihal by design, the web browser can't offer the best UX for mastodon anyways, as it can't hide downsides of the federation.
There are good android (tusky) and iOS (metatext or toot!) clients.
MacOS also has decent desktop clients, which the other platforms are still missing so far.

@mxk I was told a couple of days ago that Tusky hides the whole quoted text. It doesn't even show the link. (I found that weird, but I don't use Tusky, so I can't confirm.)

Also, using a link as a fallback is inherently insecure, since it is public, which circumvents blocks and mutes. It basically acts like visiting the other person's profile on their instance.

@naunihal By the way, I sent you a QT yesterday. Let me know how you received it.

@josemanuel @mxk @naunihal I use Tusky, and could verify if you send a toot with the issue?

@emergentnexus Sent a QT your way. The result should be pretty much like a Twitter QT, by the way. It should have the text of your post, not just the link's title or something like that.

@mxk @naunihal

@josemanuel @mxk @naunihal I indeed don't see any quote. It says (modulo my memory--for some reason I can't copy-paste):

"QT test. Let us know how you received it. Thanks in advance.

cc/ @emergentnexus"

That's all.

@emergentnexus @mxk @naunihal This is what it, more or less, should have looked like:

@josemanuel @mxk @naunihal Ah, you QTed my toot! Nope, didn't see it.

@emergentnexus But did you at least see a link to your post, either in letters or as a small preview, after my cc/ line?

@mxk @naunihal

@josemanuel @mxk @naunihal Nope, nada. Just the timestamp of the QT itself. (I even tried clicking on that, which did nothing, as I expected.)

@emergentnexus Thanks for taking the time to test it.

@josemanuel Just tried again in Megalodon. Same.