On the Net 2: Introduction to Mastodon and the best Mastodon mobile clients

I have been using the newish social network Mastodon (not to be confused with the band, which gets more Google search results) for about a year now, and I gotta say, it's a nice place. Mastodon was created as an alternative to Twitter, and it does things that Twitter can't or won't, like enforce codes of conduct, ban Nazis and other harassers, and let users hide sensitive or stress-inducing posts behind content warnings.

It's designed around small, close-knit communities that each have their own rules and administrators and can decide which other communities to interact with. It's aggressively open-source and anti-corporate. And it's meant to be, and to remain, the kind of place where you can find people you fit in with--that feeling I got when I joined Tumblr in college, or that the Geek felt about Twitter when it was brand-new, the way older members remember IRCs and BBSes. By and large, it's the nice parts of the Internet.

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Note for people who want to join Mastodon: You have to choose a community to make your first account in, and there are a lot of communities. joinmastodon.org and instances.noct.zone are good places to start filtering through them, but if you want recommendations on top of that, leave a comment here and I can ask around. (Note that witches.town, which shows up frequently on these lists, is closing at the end of April.)
Once you have an account, feel free to follow me at dialmformara@wandering.shop and say hi.

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Since Mastodon is open source, it has a lot of mobile clients. Fortunately, it's easier to pick one of these. Let's start with one not to use: Tootdon was a popular client on both iOS and Android until very recently, when users discovered that the app was saving a copy of every post it saw to its own servers without permission from the authors of the posts. This is not cool, and especially not coming as it did on the heels of all of us learning that Facebook was selling much more personal information than anyone had previously thought. So users of Tootdon (including me, because I used it on my iPad) are looking for a replacement. Here are my recommendations.

Android

I never actually used Tootdon on Android, because I found two apps I liked better early on for my phone. Mastalab was my go-to for a while, because it's most similar to using Mastodon in a browser, but it doesn't let me share posts from Tumblr, and it has a bug that occasionally makes it crash in the middle of posting replies. When that happened, I used Subway Tooter as a backup. It's much more stable, but I can't quite customize it to look more like Mastodon than Twitter. It never really felt like Mastodon.

For me, Tusky solves both the functional problems with Mastalab and the look-and-feel problems with Subway Tooter. It is, however, missing a couple of features that I like but aren't strictly necessary. It doesn't make autofill suggestions for hashtags, and it doesn't use push notifications. The second one is an upside for some people: push notifications are annoying when you don't want them, and they often use APIs like Google's that are designed to monetize data. I can live with that, but I would much prefer to get notifications for conversations I'm part of in a timely fashion.

iOS

Tootdon was the highest-rated iOS client that was optimized for iPad. There's one called Amaroq that's supposed to be very good, but it's optimized for iPhone, which means I can't turn it sideways to use my tablet keyboard. I did, however, go through the App Store's list of iPad Mastodon clients the other day and test several of them.

• Oyakodon and Pawoo both crashed repeatedly when I tried to log in.
• Tootle seemed fine, except for an annoying encoding bug that displayed apostrophes as the number nine. I9m thinking it9d be more trouble than it9s worth.
• GON let me log in with one account, but crashed repeatedly when I tried to add a second one. It was also not fully localized into English.
• Mustor is the one I liked best. It looks and feels like browser Mastodon, it has display language and font size settings, it let me add my alternate accounts, and it carries over content warnings to replies. This last one is a standard feature of Mastodon and its mobile clients that Tootdon did not have for some reason, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about it anymore. The one thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't show custom emoji.

Conclusion

No Mastodon app is going to fully replicate the browser experience, but Tusky (Android) and Mustor (iOS) come closest for my purposes, so those are the apps I recommend as replacements for Tootdon.