Learning from Twitter’s mistakes: Privacy and abuse-handling tools in Mastodon

I am a Mastodon user (in fact I'm the @nico with that half-formed joke in that screenshot) and what has been created here is by some margin the best social network I've used.

There are moderated servers if you want a safer space for whatever reason but the creators have been careful in their choices to foster a good atmosphere. There's a cartoon smiling dude if you don't set an avatar straight off which just makes new users seem less weird and anonymous, the language of everything (eg. toots) and the way changes are discussed with the community just lead to much more friendliness.

It feels like Twitter did in its early days but better - everyone chats to everyone and people are supportive to each other. I feel that a lot of this is due to choices the Mastodon developers made.

I'd all but given up on Twitter but Mastodon has restored my faith in this sort of thing.