What Mastodon means to your work

Just four weeks ago, I posted that I was officially, permanently worn out with social media. But it only took three weeks to change my mind.

And four weeks for me to see that a better version of social media could create better workplaces, too.

Hope looks like an elephant

The mess at Twitter left me resolved to be less of an incorrigible optimist, especially when it comes to my newfound hopes for hybrid work. But my optimism was renewed by the explosive overnight growth of Mastodon, a platform that might just give us a non-toxic version of social media…and one with the potential to address some of the biggest risks of hybrid work.

Mastodon first hit my radar five or six years ago. It’s different from sites like Facebook and Twitter, because Mastodon isn’t one site: it’s a network of servers that all share posts back and forth, within an even larger network known as the Fediverse. Best of all, Mastodon servers are typically non-commercial projects run by dedicated volunteers, non-profits or co-ops (servers that are owned by and accountable to their members). Since there is no big central entity trying to get rich off of Mastodon (yet), and since individual servers can set up their own rules (for example, cutting off ties with servers that allow hate speech), we aren’t yet seeing the same scale of pathology that exists on other social networks.