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How to Move From Twitter to Mastodon

There are many similarities between the two—except that Mastodon feels like a nice place to be.
How to Move From Twitter to Mastodon
Credit: Koshiro K - Shutterstock

If you felt iffy about Twitter before, we understand if you’re itching to leave now more than ever. The site’s new owner, Elon Musk, recently tweeted and deleted (without apology) an unfounded theory from a right-wing blog about the attack on Paul Pelosi. That’s the guy who owns the place now. Great atmosphere, huh? Maybe it’s time for a change.

The social media network known as Mastodon is sort of an anti-Twitter: quiet, calm, and refreshingly free of Nazis. People have been flocking to it lately, only to get confused by the way it’s set up—which is a shame, because it’s not that hard to get started. Here’s how.

How do I sign up for Mastodon?

Whereas Twitter is a single huge corporate entity, Mastodon is more like a bunch of local mom-and-pop shops. That means you need to choose an “instance”—a server you’ll call home. It’s like how you can choose to keep your money at your local bank or credit union, but your money is still good everywhere. You can pay somebody, or get paid, in any of a hundred ways and it doesn’t matter what bank they use.

So even though I have a mastodon account at wandering.shop, and my fellow Lifehacker editor Jake Peterson has one at mastodon.social, I can still follow him and he can follow me. Here is a tool to browse all the available instances and figure out which one is most your style. If you don’t know which to choose, sign up at mastodon.cloud. If you like, you can poke around for a few days and then migrate to another instance once you’ve realized it would be more fun somewhere else.

What do I do on Mastodon?

Each instance has a web-based viewer that will show tweetdeck-like columns of your home timeline (the people you follow), your notifications, and a third column that you can use for whatever you want.

Just like Twitter, you can follow people, mention them, and direct message. But your instance also has two special timelines:

  • The local timeline is a stream of everybody tweeting from that instance. So if I click there, I see everything that’s going on on wandering.shop. It’s like listening in on everybody in your neighborhood.

  • The federated timeline is everything on the local timeline, plus everybody who is followed by someone on your instance. So if I follow Nick, his toots (yep, they’re called toots) will show up in wandering.shop’s federated timeline.

A few terms to help ease your transition from Twitter:

  • It’s not a tweet, it’s a toot.

  • It’s not a retweet, it’s a boost. There is no such thing as a quote-tweet, you just either boost or you don’t.

  • Twitter itself is referred to as “the birdsite.” Do not bring birdsite drama onto Mastodon.

What to know when you’re ready to toot

First, this is not Twitter. Each instance has its own administrator and its own code of conduct, so make sure you read up before you toot. For example, mastodon.social has this in its code of conduct:

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:

Racism or advocation of racism

Sexism or advocation of sexism

Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof

Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism

The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in revocation of access to the service:

Sexual depictions of children

Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism

Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism

There is also a content warning feature, which you can turn on with the “CW” button when you compose a toot. You can use it to warn people about triggering or unsavory subjects in your toot, and then they have to click a button to expand the full toot. The code of conduct may require certain things to always be hidden in a CW, such as nudity or gore.

But it’s used in other ways, too: It’s perfect for hiding spoilers, or for the punchline of a joke. People also often use it for things others might not be interested in. If you’re posting something that you feel might be boring or annoying to others, just stick it in a CW (for example, a photo of your breakfast under “food [CW]”) and it’s easy for people to scroll past.

You can adjust the privacy of each toot, by the way: public, which means it will appear on the local and federated timelines; followers-only, which means only your followers will see it; or unlisted, which is like followers-only, but it will also appear on your profile page. Unlisted makes sense if you’re not trying to keep the toot secret, but just don’t want it clogging up timelines or search results. For more on privacy, blocking, and harassment prevention, check out this post from Mastodon’s main developer.

How can I get mastodon on my phone?

There’s not a single mastodon app, but several. The obvious one to go with is Mastodon (iOS, Android) which has the rare distinction of a “data not collected” note under the privacy section of its app store page. But there are plenty of others—just search. I like Tootle for iPhone. Tusky is another popular app, or you can ask your tootfriends what they’re using.

There are other web clients, as well: Halcyon is a pitch-perfect mimic of the Twitter website. Pinafore.social looks a little like Twitter, but importantly, it allows you to log in with multiple accounts, it’s fast, and you can use it on mobile if you haven’t picked a favorite mobile app yet.

How to find your community on Mastodon

You can use a tool like Debirdify. (I also did a Twitter search for “mastodon” and filtered the results to people I follow.) Don’t forget you can preview instances’ local timelines on their websites and check them out. I joined mastodon.social at first, then spent a few days browsing a bunch of different local timelines until I settled on one that felt more like home.

When you’re ready to change instances, it’s sort of possible to migrate your account, but it’s not seamless. Here’s what you do:

  • Go to your settings on the old instance and then Data Export. There, you can download a list of everybody you follow, everybody you’ve blocked, and everybody you’ve muted.

  • Sign up for an account on the new instance.

  • On the new instance, go to your settings and then Import. You can upload those lists.

  • Go back to your old account and edit your profile. At the bottom is a link to migrate your account. This just lets people know your account isn’t working there anymore. You may also want to edit your bio and change your name to something like “Beth has migrated” for anyone who might stumble across your account not realizing you’re gone.

Migrating does not retain your followers. Anybody who follows you will be left following your old dead account. Fortunately, they’ll all get a notification when you follow them again from the new account, and chances are they’ll follow back. (A lot of people on Mastodon follow everyone back, anyway.)

Why go to all this trouble? Well, the vibe on Mastodon—for now, anyway—is similar to old-school Twitter or even (hello, olds) Livejournal or IRC. People get to know each other and are more likely to post about their genuine real-life interests than to share news stories or endlessly discuss politics. (That said, I’m sure there are instances dedicated to activism and politics. If that’s your thing, go forth and sign up.) It just feels like a nice, friendly place to be.

This post was originally published in 2018. It was updated on October 31, 2022 to give context about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, to fix broken links, and to update website and app recommendations.